God joins together

The holy oil of priestly ordination was still fresh on the palms of my hands when I felt the Lord focusing my attention on family through a couple of influences. One was the active cooperation of lay people committed to imbuing temporal realities with Christian values and the other was the example of then family apostle, Fr. Daniel Lord, S.J. who promoted family by staunchly defending the sanctity of the marriage bond. With the idealism of a young priest on the sea of life, I set my sails towards promoting family, committing myself first thing to proclaim the unity and indissolubility of marriage. At the time, divorce was already a legally accepted solution to the problems besetting couples in the United States.

It has been more than a quarter of a century of almost four decades and I am still in the family apostolate. In fact, several other apostolates sprung from getting families to join works for the Kingdom of God; one of such apostolates is my work with the blind in Ephpheta. My experience with families is quite revealing of family values then and now. I wouldn’t say that the institution called the family is doomed towards extinction. It is not as if modern ways of thinking and doing are going against the grain of family unity and that love, courtship and marriage are passé.’ There have been polarities in the way relationships between the male and female partners carry on now-a-days.

In the early days of my family apostolate, problems were quite simple, as I used to work with Filipino groups in the Christian Family Movement. Later on, I was introduced into the Marriage Encounter Weekend. Those were days when I could boil down into just one central solution to warming up love between husband and wife who feel the stark realities of married life have sort of made love towards each other cold. It was easy to bring them back to those old days making them live that all over again.

However, today, there seems to be a devilish wave of modern thought and practices gotten (not from the family, mind you) but from multi-media-influences – tele-nobelas, pornographic films, print media with blind items which whet the appetite of audiences for more immoral tsismis, the internet, the torrid night lives going on. I said it does not come from the family, because we have examples of very good families who still have errant daughters and sons. The main culprit, I guess, is the misconception about love the media resents. "Yes, I am attracted to guy, head over heels, and no matter what he will do to me. I love him." Love or Infatuation? We mark the distinction. Get that Gospel of love as the apostle Paul would have it: "Love is patient, kind, not jealous, not pompous, does not seek its own interest. . ." (I Cor. 13), and from the marriage admonition (rites of the sacrament)."Sacrifice is difficult and irksome, only love can make it easy and perfect love can make it a joy."

How achieve this? First, your marriage must be made in heaven where God joins together. Trouble is the joining together did not proceed from God. Sometimes they are the parents who choose the spouses for their children for reasons like protecting wealth; or partners simply joint together and live in as they feel like; or couples want the pleasure of sexual union even without marriage, and when pregnancy sets in, usually the first move of parents, is, they have to marry not necessarily through the sacrament of matrimony but by the judge – civil marriage that is, just to make it legal. God does not join together. Men do. Then we can forsee what is going to happen to a marriage that is not made in heaven, that is not joined by God.

Separations, divorces are destroying our children and society. One can only see this. We cannot deny it. The preparation before marriage – prayer, discernment in the choice of partners, the discovery processes of family apostolates somehow can bring the fulfillment of what our Lord enjoins in the Gospel of today: "Therefoer, what God has joined, let no man separate" (Mk 10:2-12).

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Mark 10:2-12.