I’ve never been a super girly girl by any means (well, except for my sometimes over dramatic emotional reactions). Growing up I played with action figures, attempted to ride a skateboard and played on multiple sports teams. My sister and I owned Barbie dolls, but I preferred to rip their heads off rather than play dress up with them. I will admit to having a slight obsession with boy bands (meaning Insync, Backstreet Boys and 98 Degrees), although I’m fairly sure that was brought on in an attempt to fit in with my friends rather than a predilection of my own choosing. Don’t get me wrong, I was, and am, a woman at heart, I just chose to buck the system a little. Take it as the beginning of my stubbornness and refusal to be stereotyped.
Until college, I had never heard of such a thing as writing a journal to your future husband or blessing your ring finger with holy water as a prayer for him every time you blessed yourself. Being pursued (or the desire to be pursued), having a beloved, making a list of traits I might want in a future spouse…seriously? What kind of strange person would do such a thing?!?!
In college, I started spending a lot of time with girls who fell into the girly category and did the actions I described above. My interaction with them helped to temper my tomboy attitude and soften my heart to the true meaning of being a woman. The fact that my best friends did such things as keeping a journal to their future husband, thinking up names for their children and writing little love notes to their boyfriend began to open my eyes to a strange new world.
My whole life, people had been asking me if I was going to be a nun. (And just in case you are wondering, you can actually be a good Catholic girl who goes to daily Mass, volunteers to help with the elderly, respects her parents and says her prayers, and you are not automatically going to become a nun. I am living proof. Ok, bitter rant is over.) The word vocation meant religious life. Sure I had a semester of religion class devoted to vocations, but everybody knew that vocation=nun. Unless you’re a guy, of course, then vocation=seminary. Just to be clear.
Seeing and interacting with women who were discerning a calling (vocation) to marriage and who prayed/thought about their future earthly spouse started to change my views quite a bit. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, there is more to this vocation stuff than I first thought.
In case you don’t already know, my vocation story ends (or rather, begins) with marriage. My husband, Nate, and I have been married for just over a year now and we have been blessed with a beautiful baby boy, Joseph Anthony, who was born two weeks before our one year anniversary. My own vocation story is a long, complicated ordeal, but whose isn’t, right? That’s for another time. All the rambling above is meant to bring us to one very important topic: above all, our vocation is holiness aka, heaven. Anything that doesn’t make us holy or doesn’t bring us peace, is not from God. Anything that takes our eyes off of loving Him, is not from God. Anything that takes His place as the most important part of our life is certainly not from God and is, in the end, an idol.
I recently read a blog post which talked about our spouses NOT being our soul mates.(You can read the original post, “My husband is not my soul mate, by clicking HERE.) I agree with her assessment of the failure of the idea of soul mates, but I also found the article lacking in the area of the sacramentality of marriage (and the role God does indeed play in our discernment process and our ever day lives). So, here we go…
Nate is not my soul mate. He is not the one person I was destined to meet and fall in love with. The author of the post took issue with the idea of soul mates because God doesn’t make just one person for you (or as my husband just said, you don’t fit together like male and female parts of a hose). Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about different ideas of love. One of these ideas was that we are all half a person (so to speak) and there is another person out there with whom we perfectly fit together. In the end, he rejected this idea as being an inferior definition of love. This is much like what people mean when they say soul mates- the person who completes you, the one without whom you would not be yourself. If you are not a complete person before you meet your spouse, they are not going to fill in the gaps.
We make marriage about us. We put an immense amount of pressure on every action we take and every decision we make. God wants us to be happy.
Your spouse is meant to be your ordinary means to holiness. Nate’s “job” is to help me get to Heaven and mine is to help him get to Heaven. Could it really be that there is only one other person in the entire world (or the entire history of the world) with whom I can connect and grow and blossom? I think not. I think if we adopt that mentality, then we limit God. We make marriage about us. We put an immense amount of pressure on every action we take and every decision we make. God wants us to be happy. I don’t know about you, but pressure to avoid failure and make the perfect decision at every moment doesn’t make me happy- it makes me afraid, very afraid. (I may indeed be speaking from experience at this point.)
Even as I write these paragraphs agreeing with the rejection of the idea of soul mates, I find a part of me is desperate to hang on to that romantic notion. The idea that God was specifically preparing my heart for Nate from the beginning of time makes my (now girly) heart feel faint. Even though I was a tom boy growing up (and I still feel slightly repulsed by some shades of pink), I’m still a woman and all of this romantic talk gets to me too. But, hey folks, we’re Catholic here and you know what that means, we can have a BOTH/AND situation. God was preparing my heart for Nate not because Nate is the only person who can complete me, but because God knew I would make the choices which led me to Nate. (Note: I am not saying that I was destined to marry Nate, but rather that God, who has given us free will, knows the choices I will make using that free will. He is not in any way or at any time forcing me to make any choice.) Personally, I like this option a lot better than being destined for one person. We both had choices to make and we both have to choose to love one another every day.
The Grace of the Sacrament is all important. God’s grace builds on my choice to spend my life with Nate. Grace builds on nature. God cannot force me love Nate, but I also cannot love Nate as I should without God.
Here’s the point where I found that post to be lacking. The author was correct in saying we must make the choice to love another person, but what she neglected to point out is the Sacrament of Marriage is not fruitful solely because the husband and wife make the choice to love one another. As my grandmother always tells me, in my marriage, there is Nate, myself and God.(By the way, my grandparents have been married for over 60 years.) Without God, everything would fall apart. True love is a choice. I don’t accidentally love Nate and I don’t love him because I am destined to love him. But, I also must admit that without Grace, I would never be able to make the choice to love him every day. The Grace of the Sacrament is all important. God’s grace builds on my choice to spend my life with Nate. Grace builds on nature. God cannot force me love Nate, but I also cannot love Nate as I should without God. This is why St. John said, “We love because He first loved us.” Without God’s grace, God’s love, our marriage would fall apart. Even though Nate and I were not destined to love each other, we also need help in carrying out the decision we have made.
With regards to marriage, Christ tells us, “What God has brought together, let no man put asunder.” Yes, God brings the spouses together. And yes, He knows and prepares us for that person. But, we don’t have to live in fear of making the wrong choices and we don’t have to carry the burden of loving the other person perfectly on our shoulders. A husband and wife are a sacrament (a visible sign of an invisible reality) of the love between Christ and the Church. This is so much more than star crossed lovers, destined to meet and spend their lives together. We have a greater purpose than to merely “complete” another person. The Grace of the Sacrament of Marriage is abundant and powerful. We need only to submit ourselves to the Will of God, putting aside all other desires. The gift we have been given in this Sacrament is incredible and overwhelming. Let’s not water it down by using terms like soul mate to refer to our current or future spouse. Let’s not only pray for our own vocation (whether it is to marry a man or to marry Jesus). Let’s not let the world define marriage.
If you would like to join with me in praying for the sanctity of marriage and for families, leave a comment below with your prayer, “like” this post on FB by clicking on the button to the left and share it with your friends who you think might benefit from hearing this message.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Most Holy Family, pray for us!
May God be praised!
