To Put First Things First Be Prepared to Work
Marianne, my wife of forty-five-plus years, has a book, French Cooking in Ten Minutes. The title proves you can sell anything if your pitch is exaggerated or absurd enough. Achieving success as a husband, wife, or parent will not come from some quick fix, even reading this booklet with full attention. In marriage, as in everything else, you get what you pay, i.e., work, for.
On Yourself If I have done my work well, this book will challenge you to choose the path to a wonderful marriage, and suggest choices to help bring healing to your relationship. I will propose little that might help you find the right mate. The presumption is that you already have the right mate. Rather, the focus from beginning to end will be on your becoming the right mate. That becoming, we shall insist, is an inside job. You must learn to love, honor and appreciate yourself first, if you are to do the work of becoming a more honest, open and responsible husband or wife. Before you can love, or share without conditions what you have, you must take care of yourself, or develop your own potential.
An erstwhile lover must first recognize, accept and develop his own truths before he can share them with the one he loves. Those who counsel others in such matters, and then write about it, agree it is only by learning to be content with who we are, alone, that we can develop the capability to be happy with a spouse.
Our greatest gift to our spouses, after the gift of complete acceptance of them as they are, is sharing our own happiness.
The fine books1 providing helpful insights for those seeking a successful committed relationship share one constant principle, or one theme: we cannot attain and maintain a loving relationship unless we love, accept and respect who and what we are.
A corollary of the truth just stated: we are capable of loving, valuing, reverencing and cherishing another, only to the depth and extent that we know, love, value, reverence and cherish ourselves.
Another First Thing
Our Faith is the Foundation of Our Worthiness To Be Loved
The Judeo-Christian Tradition provides us ample justification for loving ourselves and our neighbors. Each of us is uniquely precious to a loving and powerful Being, who has every hair on our head numbered, and who planned our unending existence from all eternity. Jesus Christ claimed to be God, the Alpha and the Omegathe first and the last, without beginning or end.2 During the three years of His public ministry, Jesus lavished unconditional love on even the most unattractive, deformed, disabled, despised, or poor.
A well-known American comedian3 finishes one of his cynical diatribes against all things religious by characterizing [the supposed-God] as the One who condemns sinners to everlasting torment because he loves them. [His emphasis.] Despite his Catholic roots, the performer must have missed the lesson that it is part of the Christian faith to believe that God does not choose to punish anyone. Rather each person is free to embrace his Creator and the rules of society, or to rebel.
After the release of the movie, The Passion of the Christ, a recurring theme in subsequent commentaries on the drama was a refusal to accept a God who would allow, even require, that His Son suffer horrible torture in atonement for the offenses of every human being who would ever live. However, as Christians, we believe that is precisely what God did. God so loved the world (that means us), He sacrificed His only and Beloved Son. Repeatedly predicting His death, the Son proclaimed, There is no greater love than this: to lay down ones life for a friend.
Because Jesus death satisfied the requirements of Divine Justice, the Risen Christ, Divine Mercy Personified, can turn aside the punishment due for every sin man has already committed, or will commit. The Savior can spare us, who He created in His image and likenesstherefore free to love or rebelfrom the sanctions we deserve for breaking or defying Divine Laws and Orders. He has revealed that we only have to knock, seek, or ask.
God cannot force us to love anyone, as coercion and love are opposites. If we are not free to rebel, then we are not free to love. If we are mere slaves to a tyrant, any question of justice becomes mute.
Love of God and neighbor depends on a society that protects free choice, allowing men to make loving decisions. With that same freedom, men can choose to hate, to become violent. Of violence, we will say much in the text and in the Notes.
Even God cannot separate love from justiceboth are predicated upon freedom. Just laws, with their corresponding sanctions, or punishments, are necessary to preserve freedom. Thomas Jefferson and the signatories of our Declaration of Independence acknowledged that God gives men the right to life, free choice, and the pursuit of happiness.4 Citizens establish governments to secure and preserve these rights, and to promote the general welfare. Yet, these governments of the people, by the people, and for the people can sentence to death or life imprisonment those found guilty of serious crimes. Without the sanction of punishment, a free society would soon crumble into anarchy and chaos. If a personal God, ruling the world with justice, does not exist, power becomes the only norm for good and evil. If there is no God, atheists are right to mock as foolish the Faith of the Muslims, Jews and Christians. Without Divine Order, might determines our rights.
The undeniable scandal of history, which persists to this day in many parts of the world, is that so many leadersthose entrusted with authorityhave lived as though they did not believe in God.
|