further thoughts on marriage

The Sacrament of Marriage (detail)
Rogier van der Weyden
1448
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The "Refusal to Grasp": grace-full

from my new friend (and wise young woman, she is) amy, who wrote this after her Sacramentality of Marriage class:

"Padre also talked today about how the Holy Spirit is not just present at the ceremony. We have to see how from the very beginning of the spouses relationship with one another; how they met, how their friendship developed, how they fell in love etc., is all saturated with the Spirit. Human preference, he said, is more than just the attraction and interest in the other, it is God calling us to himself through the other person...from day one.

I couldn't help but smile to myself when he said this. Many many memories came flooding back to me at that moment. I'm not sure why God has given me the grace to see this but from the very beginning I've known that God was calling me to a deeper relationship with Him through hubby to be, even when we were just friends. He is the first man that I really allowed myself to see, in a sense. He was the first man I saw pray with fear and total love in his eyes and then he called me to do the same. He had no idea what he was doing. As our friendship grew, I felt closer and closer to God and as a result I wanted to be closer and closer to HTB. Even in the years when I had such strong feelings for him and, as padre said 'there was no echo on the other side' he never ceased to draw me closer to God in subtle yet persistant ways. Our story is flooded with signs of the Spirit and it's totally obvious, yet I still manage to impede grace everyday. Lord, help me to be open."

amy, i pray we are all open. nicely put.