I was speaking with a newly married couple the other day who were talking about the differences between their experience of entering into marriage and how many of their friends have experienced it. This couple had not lived together before being married and had sought marriage within the Church—two things most of their friends weren’t so keen about.
The married couple I was speaking to frequently heard two things from their other married friends: (1) that there was no real difference between life before marriage and life after marriage; (2) because of this, the wedding itself was kind of a let down when looking back. But this couple found the opposite to be the case: their lives were totally changed by their marriage. On one level, since they went from living on their own to living with their best friend, their wedding was anything but a simple continuation of pre-married life to post-married life. Because of this very happy change in their lives, which they knew would last the rest of their lives, the memories their wedding created were anything but a disappointment.
This young couple went on to speak about the graces that flowed from their marriage and were working in their lives. They knew that they are only able to live this calling because of the graces that they had received from the sacrament of matrimony and because of the continuous graces they receive through the prayers of their family and friends. Since Dominicans have often been called preachers of grace, this was music to my ears.
A sacrament, after all, is an efficacious sign of grace, instituted by Christ, and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us. The grace given to us in baptism gives us a totally new kind of life. For grace doesn’t just allow us or strengthen us to do the same thing better but empowers us to do something new. The divine life infused in us at our baptism radically changes us even if we do not seem to notice it.
The life of grace is not something that is simply added on to our natural lives, just as marriage is not something that you do to add something to your relationship to make it more permanent. The grace from marriage is something that completely changes your life and enters into every aspect of the lives of two people so that theirs is now truly one life. Grace is something that permeates, elevates, and perfects us so that we are a new creation and can do something totally new, something that we were unable to do before: to live the divine life with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The young couple recognized this radical change in their life and that their old lives were dead and gone, replaced by something new and completely different. They were the same people but were living a new and completely different life, and they recognized that this new life would not be possible to live without the graces that flow from the sacrament of marriage and the rest of the sacraments that they will continue to receive throughout their lives.
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Image: by Josh Applegate (free to use under Unsplash License)
