Marriage the teacher. . .

When the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner” (Genesis 2:18), He was not speaking of someone to make a man happy or to make the woman happy.   He was addressing the need of man (and woman).  Without marriage there is an inherent loneliness and solitude that makes a person vulnerable as well as empty.  Adam's state before the creation of Eve was of an unfulfilled and empty man but this man was not someone Adam recognized until God sent him out to name all that God had made.  Only then was it apparent that Adam was unlike them in one profound sense.  He was alone.  To answer this loneliness and emptiness, God gives him Eve to be his wife. From this loneliness, Adam exclaimed "Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh."  But there was more to this that both Adam and Eve would learn and marriage would be the teacher.

It is still loneliness that calls a man out of himself and it is still emptiness that begs to be filled.  Without marriage, life is tempted too greatly to selfishness, without someone to instruct the soul and bring them out of the prison of self, the person struggles to know self and purpose and place.  The unmarried have no one who depends upon them, no one who needs them, and no one with whom they must find compromise and accommodation.  The unmarried have no one to teach them that the highest love is sacrifice.  Of course, one learns this as a child for whom the parents have sacrificed but the person does not know what it means to surrender self for the sake of another and to delight in this privileged duty of love.  

As true as this is for women, it is particularly true of men.  As the student complains about the teacher who demands a great deal from the student, so do we find ourselves complaining about this duty.  Freedom seems to be so great and love robs us of that freedom.  Solitude often seems to be such bliss in our hectic world of schedules and duty but the duty of love for the man is to yield not to desire but to his wife when that is the least convenient.  The limitations marriage imposes upon a man, especially, are the lessons that teach boys to be men.  While sin has robbed us of the perfect life in which every man finds a wife and every wife a husband and they live together until death parts them, the choice not to be married is dangerous indeed.  The loneliness and emptiness is consuming.

The world teaches us to be selfish and to be ruled by desires, to have the freedom to abandon whatever we find too constraining, and to choose taking more than giving.  Only the Church can teach us the opposite.  So the man is told to be like Christ, who for us and for our salvation grasped nothing of what was rightfully His and emptied Himself into our death to give us life none of us deserved.  Absent marriage, the Scriptures rightfully commend to us a life of service and selflessness directed to another bride, to the Church.  But there is no other choice -- no opportunity to surrender to desire, to the pursuit of self alone, to the freedom from duty and responsibility, and to the choice to be alone when you seek it.  When there is no one to give up your life for, the temptation is to squander it.  Family not only brings balance but the essential domain in which love is given so that it may be received.  Sadly, it seems that more and more the world misses this and the Church is reluctant to say it.