THREE VOCATIONS

– Vocation to marriage

“God created man in his own image: he created him male and female…Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother to join his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Gn 1.27; 2.24).

One of the three states of life for serving in the Church as a baptized person is the vocation to marriage.

121- Marriage is a precious sign, because “when a man and a woman celebrate the sacrament of marriage, God, so to speak, is ‘reflected’ in them, he imprints on them his traits and the indelible character of his love. Marriage is the icon of God’s love for us. In fact, God too is communion: the three persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have always and forever lived in perfect unity. And this is precisely the mystery of marriage: God makes the two spouses one single existence”. This has daily and very concrete consequences, because the spouses “by virtue of the sacrament, are invested with a true mission, so that they can make visible, from simple, ordinary things, the love with which Christ loves his Church, continuing to lay down his life for her”.

123 – After the love that unites us to God, conjugal love is “the greatest of friendships”. It is a union that has all the characteristics of a good friendship: the search for the good of the other, intimacy, tenderness, stability, and a resemblance between friends that is built with shared life. But marriage adds to all this an indissoluble exclusivity – which is expressed in the stable project of sharing and building together the whole of existence. Let us be sincere and recognize the signs of reality: the one who loves does not envisage that this relationship can last only a time; the one who intensely lives the joy of getting married does not think of anything passing; those who attend the celebration of a union full of love, although fragile, hope that it can last in time; children not only want their parents to love each other, but also to be faithful and always stay together. These signs, and others, show that in the very nature of married love there is openness to the definitive. The union that crystallizes in the marriage promise forever is more than a social formality or a tradition, because it is rooted in the spontaneous inclinations of the human person. And for believers, it is a covenant before God which demands fidelity: “The Lord is witness between you and the wife of your youth whom you betrayed, although she was your companion and the wife of your covenant […] . The wife of your youth, do not betray her! for I hate repudiation” (Ml 2, 14.15-16).