Divine Divas

For those of you waiting patiently for thoughts on the feminine divine - thanks for your patience. I'm still thinking about it and I will get to it, but in the mean time, here is an interesting discussion from this website.

How many people ever contemplate the meaning of marriage?

Marriage as an economic contract, for example, has been around for ages, and it has nothing to do with love or romance. It simply guarantees the closed transmission of wealth, status, and power. Even the concept of “family” is irrelevant to this kind of marriage, except in so far as children serve as necessary and vital agents of hereditary transmission.

But Holy Matrimony is another matter entirely: it’s based on the religious concept of a man and a woman giving themselves to each other for life in order to bring new life into the world: to have children and to create a family in which the children are raised to honor such values as faith, hope, and charity—not to fear love. The conjugal act between the man and the woman guarantees this generation of life. Marriage, therefore, is a religious act of service, not a psychological way to soothe your fear of emptiness through a “relationship” with another person.

When most people think of marriage, however, they think of love. They talk about committed relationships, but if the commitment is not between a man and a woman to raising a family in divine service, then to what is the “commitment”? Free sex? Financial security? Self-indulgence? What sort of commitments are these? And so here is precisely where the psychological problems begin.

The great philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas said that “To love is to will the good of another.” [1] So if you think about it, all the moral decisions about marriage and family actually derive psychologically from love—real love, not the “love” of popular fantasy. Infidelity, contraception, abortion, divorce, and even stem-cell research, all defile love through a focus on personal pleasure and convenience, at the expense of the dignity—and even the life—of another human being.

Unfortunately, contemporary culture tends to think of “love” as a way to find personal fulfillment in life. That is, each person in a “relationship” expects the other to fill up the existential void in his or her life. Ultimately, this is impossible, and so when there are problems, the conflicts are usually about one partner complaining of not getting what he or she wants. In this situation, only one psychological solution can be possible: Take responsibility for your own life satisfaction. True love is about giving, not receiving. If you’re mainly concerned about getting pleasure or security, you’re being selfish, not loving.

This means that you have to look carefully at your own life and stop blaming others. If you are not satisfied with your life, it’s probably because you are not living up to your inner potential or are in one way or another betraying your life values. This can be a hard lesson to learn, but be honest—an adulterous sexual affair that defiles your marriage commitment, for example, is just a perverted attempt to avoid the real problem: yourself.

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 6/11/2004 03:43:00 PM