Beyond I do

I WAS invited the other day to say Mass for a group of couples who were having a seminar on marriage and family life. I was pleased to know that such group exists and is doing its best to spread their message with a missionary zeal. I encouraged them to go on with the good work, wished them luck and promised to pray for them.

They call themselves “Beyond I Do,” and offer couples hands-on help to make their marriage work and hew it to how it should be. There are now confusing ideologies that deform the true nature of marriage, and these have to have handled competently.

The group of the ¨Beyond I do¨ monitor developments that have any effect, good or bad, on marriage. They provide a ground-level view of the state of marriage at any given time.
Certainly, there’s need to keep marriage and family life vibrant years after the couples exchanged “I do’s” and committed themselves to live in love and fidelity up to their death. This is crucial. Society needs it. Everyone needs it.

If we are not careful, there are things in life that tend to deaden our sense of commitment and harden our ability to adapt to new trends and challenges. We have to learn to renew this commitment often, giving fresh impulses of life and love to it. We have to understand though that in the end, this renewal can only come from God.

But, of course, this concern, as we all know, is not anymore simple. We now contend with many complicated factors that come from all directions. It’s not anymore as easy as it was during the time of our parents and grandparents, and in the province. The old-time kind of simplicity and serenity seems impossible to have these days.

Someone told me he gets the sensation that his married and family life looks like a road almost choked with heavy traffic. Because of this, he has to be patient, flexible and quick with the reflexes, capable of ignoring many irritating details that come along the way, and ready to get stranded at any point.

The main idea is to survive and arrive at the proper destination, not only for oneself, nor for the couple alone, but also for the children and in fact for all the others. We are in the same earthly pilgrimage and we need to help one another.

And yet no matter how daunting the challenges are, as long as there are deliberate efforts to study and find ways of how to make marriage tackle these daily pressures, one can see that peace and joy can always be found not only amid these problems, but also through these problems.

It’s a matter of having the right attitude and understanding of things, based mainly on faith that should be made to integrate all the empirical data involved. Of course, the necessary skills to grapple with the challenges should also be learned.

Marriage, like anything else in our life, just cannot be developed within the confines of our human system. That’s bound to fail, sooner or later. It has to find its true bearings in God’s life. But this is easier said than done. We need to outgrow the bias of considering marriage solely as a human affair.

God is and should be in the middle of it. Everyone has to learn how to relate our human and earthly affairs touching marriage and family life to God, and vice-versa. We need to hurdle the usual problems of awkwardness and incompetence in this regard.

That’s why, initiatives like Beyond I do offer a lot of hope since they help couples to ground their marriage and family life on God, while going through the tedious details of their daily life. They don´t offer short-cut solutions. They journey with the couples.

What is important also in married and family life is that everyone is always developing human virtues. I know that talks like this are not popular. Ok, we can repackage them, but we cannot escape from the fact that all of us need to develop virtues.

In fact, I think we need to talk a lot about human virtues, since they make our human foundation ripe for the grace of God to work wonders. Foremost would be sincerity, then loyalty, fortitude, hard work, a certain kind of detachment and poverty, optimism, order, etc.
In the end, one has to realize that he needs an on-going formation for his marriage and family life!