For the Good of His Church: How Marriage Blesses the Body of Christ

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CORINNE GANNOTTI

 

For the past few weeks, I've found myself meditating on how I fit, within the context of married life, into the Body of Christ. Into the living mission of Jesus on earth. 

Day to day, I spend most of my time and energy at the service of those who have been given directly to me in this vocation- my spouse and our children. Loving and serving my family is where I first answer God’s call. But in a real way, the whole Church and even the world is the family of God. I also have a role to play in that family, one with meaning and value.

When we understand marriage as a vocation, we are proclaiming that it is a way we can live out God's calling for us to love and serve Him. And in a particular way, the Catechism reminds us that this means seeking the Kingdom of God by living in such a way that we direct the temporal things of our life according to God's will. Through this, marriage draws us up into the greater mission of Jesus - of bringing everyone into the fold of His family, His Kingdom. How am I living for that mission?

Is my life, shaped and fed through my relationship with my husband, at the service of the God’s will in this way?

This past Sunday during mass, part of the Eucharistic prayer struck me in a way it hadn't before and seemed to respond to these questions of my heart. It was the moment when we respond to the priest's offering of the consecrated gifts, praying that God would accept the sacrifice: "for our good and the good of all His holy Church." Those words spoke to me both about the mass I was praying and the whole of my married life. 

The Eucharist, the most intimate of the Sacraments – is given for my personal good but also the good of all the Church, and ultimately the whole world. My marriage, the most intimate of my relationships – is given to me for my personal good but also for the good of all the Church and the whole world. Beginning to consider marriage with this Eucharistic view has helped me to see more clearly what God’s vision for it may be in the life of His Body.

I mean, consider this: receiving the Eucharist is deeply personal. We receive the host, consume it, and our body literally digests it. You can't get much more personal than that. But it also goes beyond us. We are sacramentally fed by God and His presence within us affects us, making us more capable of receiving others in love as we have received Him. 

Marriage seems to have a similar pattern. Our need for love and deep, personal belonging is fed by our relationship with our spouse. But the love we first cultivate within our marriage should not only flourish for us to enjoy, separated from others. It is not only meant for us. It is not only meant for our children. It is meant to bear fruit for the world, a collaboration in the greater mission of Jesus.

It is rightly ordered to focus first and most deeply on loving and providing for those in our immediate family – responding to the needs of our spouse, our children if we have them – but there’s also a real temptation to do solely that. We can’t allow our lives to become so insulated that we focus always and only our own good with no concern beyond that. 

If we truly believe that marriage is a vocation through which we work to accomplish God’s will in the world, we need to be convicted as a couple to resist the urge to make our lives only about us. 

This isn’t to dismiss the primary importance of walking with our spouse on the road of sanctification, or the good of making our homes havens of peace and comfort. But if we get too comfortable to ever leave our own four walls, it could tragically cause us to forget about the bigger family we belong to. Mother Teresa might tell us that in so doing we have in fact “drawn the circle of our family too small.”

The fruit of our marriage should be the ability to love and bless those we encounter more fully and more freely because we have first received that kind of love from God manifest through our spouse. 

Our spouse helps us answer the question "am I loveable?" with confidence, and so we can help answer this question for others - for our children, for our friends, but also for the poor, the marginalized, those in our community whom we have a real capacity to assist and invite into our lives. 

They are also our brothers and sisters. Our marital love should move us towards a lived devotion to the works of mercy.

It’s a great mystery how God gives himself to us through the sacrament of the Eucharist. It's likewise a mystery how He gives himself to us through the life and love of our spouse. And what beauty and conviction there is in meditating on the reality that both of these encounters with God are meant to feed us so that we may bear fruit for the life of the world. So that we may serve others. 

Our marriages are eucharistic, "for our good and the good of all His holy Church." And that really shapes everything.

About the Author: Corinne studied Theology and Catechetics at Franciscan University where she met her husband, Sam. They were married in 2016 and now live in Pennsylvania with their two children, Michael and Vera, and where she continues to work in the ministry field. She especially enjoys reading stories with her 3 year old, running, and crossing things off her to-do list. She desires to live a life marked by joy, and is grateful to have a family who makes that effort much easier by helping her take herself less seriously.

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