Marriage Problems

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. It is very often assumed that life should be without trials and difficulties. Our blessed Lord did not predict it so. He said in this world you shall have tribulation. Even when one enters into a realm of love, such as marriage, there are trials and difficulties, and it is those that we would consider in this particular lesson. This is what might be called a what-to-do kit when there are difficulties in marriage. We shall consider two. First, when marriage dulls. Second, when the other partner becomes what is sometimes said impossible. First, when marriage dulls. Now this it does, simply because everything in life dulls after a time. Love does not continue to be one abiding ecstasy. Simply because flesh is the medium of married love, it suffers the penalty of the flesh. It becomes used to affection. As life goes on, a greater stimulus is required to produce an equal reaction to sensation. The eye can soon become used to beauty. The fingers used to the touch of a friend. The intimacy which first was so desirable could become at times a burden. There is such a thing as I want to be alone feeling, or I think that I will go home to mother feeling. As we strip the eye of rose-colored glasses, bills begin to come into the kitchen and love is in danger of walking out of the parlor. The very habit of love becomes boring because it is a habit and not an adventure. It is conceivable that there might be even a yearning for a new partner. And there comes with children multiplied accidents and diseases and all this tends to bring down the vision from the clouds to very realistic visitations to the nursery. And sooner or later, the affective emotional life is brought face to face with this question. Is love a snare, a delusion? Does it promise what it cannot give? I thought this would be complete happiness and yet it has settled down to a routine. Now at this point, those who think that love is an evolution from the beast, not a gift of God, falsely believe that if they had another partner, that other partner could supply what is presently lacking. No, that is a fallacy because it forgets that the emptiness does not come from the other partner, but from the very nature of life itself. Now here's the reason for that feeling. The heart was made for the infinite. Only the infinite can satisfy it. God's first ecstasy of love that was given to a couple was to remind them that love was a gift. It came from heaven. And that only by working toward heaven would they ever really discover it to be infinite. Remember when our Lord gave bread at Capernaum and then later on he spoke to those who received the bread about the Eucharist, the bread of everlasting life, his very self? He was using the bread that he gave to their stomachs as a kind of bait to make them become interested in the bread of life, the Eucharist. And so too the human love that God gives us is a bait. It is a kind of a divine come-on in order that we might seek the flame which is God. When married life becomes dull, one has not hit the bottom of life. One has only hit the bottom of one's ankle. There's a world of difference between the two. One has not hit the bottom of his soul, but only the bottom of his instinct, not the bottom of his mind, but only the bottom of his emotional life. The aforementioned trials are merely so many contacts with reality which God sends into every life. If life went on as a dream without any shock of disillusionment, who would ever attain perfect happiness? Who would ever want God? The majority of men would rest in mediocrity. There were not this push on for the perfect love. Acorns are not content to be saplings. Children have to grow up and our love has to grow up. Therefore God keeps something back, namely himself in eternity. If he did not, we would never push forward. Therefore he makes us every now and then run up against a brick wall. In such a crisis, we begin to feel our nonentity. We've got an overwhelming sense of nothingness, loneliness, and then if we look at it rightly we see that, well, this life is only a bridge to eternity. The crisis of nothingness is caused by the meeting of a fancied ideal and reality, of love as the ego thinks it, and of love as it really is. No, love is not a snare. God is not mocking us. And it must not be thought either that this sense of nothingness that comes over marriage and dullness is peculiar to marriage itself. It happens in the spiritual life too. We were dedicated to God as priests and others, brothers and nuns and contemplatives, they all reach this crisis, prayers become dry and formal, there's danger that we may become used to touching the bread of life. There is not the same emotional thrill in reading Mass when one is ordained forty years as there is at the first Mass. There may not be that same ecstasy in visiting the sick when one is ordained fifty years as there was a thrill on the first sick call. The nun who's teaching children for thirty or forty years has to bring herself with extra prayer to realize that all those youngsters there have been put before her as charges by Almighty God. It becomes difficult for all of us to meditate. Thanksgivings are apt to become shorter after Mass. So we have our problem too. It's a problem of love. How can I love better? How can I pray better? How can I establish greater union with God? The answer is by sacrifices. And as much as we are not here concerned with the development of the spiritual life, but only with the development of love life in marriage, we return again to marriage and we say that just as there is such a thing in the spiritual life as the dark night of the soul, so too in marriage there is such a thing as the dark night of the body. And just as the dark night of the soul in the spiritual life needs considerable purification through self-denial in order to reach deeper insights of love, so too in marriage. Whenever there is discontent, God is stirring the waters of the soul. Maybe he's reminding us that the perfect love for which we crave is not here. We are on the road to it. Just as, for example, a mother eagle will throw its young out of the nest in order that they may learn to fly, and so too God in these moments of trial gives wings to our clay feet. And this dryness, either in the spiritual life or married life, can be either for salvation or damnation, depending upon how it is used. There are two kinds of dryness. This dryness in either the spiritual or the married life can be used either for salvation or damnation. It all depends upon how it is used. There are two kinds of dryness. There is the one which rots, which is the dryness of love without God, and there is the dryness which ripens, and that is one when one goes through the fire and the heat of sacrifice. In therefore these moments of dullness, in this crisis of nothingness, the idea of eternity has to be reintroduced. But there is this difference. In the days of romance, the eternal emphasis was on the ego's durability in love. In the ego's durability in love. In the crisis of nothingness and dullness, the eternal element is God, not the ego. God now says, I will love you always, for you are lovable through eternity for God's sake. You see that love which began with pleasure and self-satisfaction changes into love for God's sake? The other person becomes less the necessary condition of passion, more the partner of the soul. The Blessed Lord said that unless the seed fall to the ground and die, it will not spring forth into life. Nothing is reborn to a higher life without a death to a lower one. The heart has its cycles as well as the planets, and the movement of the heart is an upward spiral and not a circle which turns in upon itself. The crisis of nothingness which follows a dream come true needs its purification and its cross, and the cross is not a roadblock on the way to happiness, it is a ladder up which one climbs to the very heaven of love itself. Therefore there's no need of running off to someone to analyze your mental state simply because you find life dull. Try your love of God. Begin to look upon the other partner as a gift of God, and then love will not be dull. Then we will see every human creature bathed in that beauty of God's love. That brings us to this other problem of marriage and trial, namely when marriage becomes a cross, and when, as some say, it is impossible. Well in marriage there is for better or for worse. Sometimes it turns out worse, and that is the problem that we are discussing now. Sometimes the husband or the wife becomes a chronic invalid or develops antisocial characteristics, becomes a drunkard, cruel, unfaithful, tyrant, bossy. What are we to do? Well we said we have to regard always the other person as a gift of God. Now sometimes God's gifts are sweet, and sometimes God's gifts are bitter. But whether the other person be sweet or bitter, sick or well, young or old, that other person is still a gift of God. If we're selfish, we have to get rid of the other partner. Why? Because the other partner is a burden. If we are Christian, then we take on the burden as something coming from the hand of God himself. Saint Paul said, bear the burden of one another's failings, then you will be fulfilling the law of Christ. Now if you object and say, well God never intended that anyone should live under such difficulties, the answer is flatly, oh yes he does. Did not our blessed Lord say, if any man has a mind to come my way, let him renounce himself, take up his cross and follow me. The man who tries to save his life shall lose it. It is the man who loses his life for my sake that will secure it. We would all like to have tailor-made crosses. In other words, we are very willing to take on some mortification and self-denial if we can choose it. But when God chooses it, like a bad husband or a bad wife, then we say, oh no, I cannot take that cross. Why cannot we realize that what sickness is to an individual, an unhappy marriage may be to a couple, a trial set by God in order to perfect them spiritually. After all, without certain bitter gifts of God, many of our spiritual capacities would be undeveloped. Now such a marriage may indeed be a martyrdom, but at any rate, he is not robbing his own life of honor, nor robbing his soul of peace. The acceptance of such trials of marriage is not a sentence to death, as some believe. The soldier is not sentenced to death because he takes the oath to his country, but he admits that he is ready to face death rather than lose honor. An unhappy marriage is not a condemnation to unhappiness. It is a noble tragedy in which one bears the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune rather than deny a vow that was made to the living God. If it be noble to be wounded for the country we love, then is it not nobler still to be wounded for God? Then here is this verse of Scripture which very few people think about and which is so important. It is in St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the believing husband. In other words, the merits, the prayers, the suffering, the patience, the meekness of one passes into the other. If for example the other partner who was an alcoholic, if that partner was sick, would you not take care of him? Suppose he had tuberculosis or a heart attack, would you leave him? Now if he has a moral heart attack, is he to be abandoned? And by a moral heart attack I mean guilty of any one of the sins that make marriage so very difficult? If there is such a thing as the transfusion of blood from a healthy member of society to a weak member of society, why can there not be, and why is there not the transfer of sanctification? A wife can redeem her husband and a husband can redeem the wife. There is a spiritual communication that does not have indeed much romantic satisfaction in it, but its returns are eternal. And many a husband and wife, after infidelities and excesses, will find themselves saved on judgment day as the faithful partner never ceased to pour out prayers for his or her salvation. Let me tell you this story to indicate how the merits of one will pass into the merits of another. At the turn of this century there was married in Paris just an ordinarily good Catholic girl and an unbelieving medical doctor by the name of Le Seur. He promised to respect the faith of his marriage but immediately after marriage tried to break it down. In addition to practicing medicine he became the editor of an anti-clerical atheistic newspaper in Paris. His wife reacted and decided that she would study her faith, so she built a library of apologetics and he built up an atheistic library in the same house. In May 1905 as she was dying she said to her husband Felix, when I am dead you will become a Catholic and a Dominican priest. He said, Elizabeth, you know my sentiments. I have sworn hatred of the church and sworn hatred of God and I shall live in that hatred and I shall die in it. She repeated her words and passed away. Fumbling amidst her papers he discovered her will and the will stated that in 1905 she asked Almighty God to send her sufficient sufferings to purchase his soul. Then she added, on the day that I die I shall have paid the price. You will have been bought and paid for. Greater love than this no woman have that she should lay down her life for her husband. He dismissed this as the fancies of a pious woman, though he loved his wife in order to forget his grief. He took a trip in the southern part of France. He stopped in front of a church into which his wife during their honeymoon had gone for a visit. She seemed to be speaking to him saying go to Lord. He went to Lord, but he went there as a rank unbeliever. He had written a book against Lord, proving that miracles were a fraud and a superstition. But as he was standing before the grotto of Our Lady he received a gift of faith so complete, so total, that he never had to go through that process of juxtaposition and say well now that I believe how will I answer this difficulty or how will I answer that difficulty. He saw all that he had believed in as utter error and stupidity. Well the conversion of Dr. Le Seur was about as exciting as the news of the bombardment of Reims. Then time passed. In 1924 I made my retreat in a Dominican monastery in Belgium and there four times a day and 45 minutes each day I made my retreat under and received the spiritual direction of Father Le Seur, Dominican, Catholic and priest who told me this story. I tell you it is not often that you can make a retreat under a priest who every now and then will say as my dear wife Elizabeth said, but the moral of the story is love is the not here completely and totally, it is in God and by loving God here we save the other partner whether it be a bad wife or a bad husband for once married they are two in one flesh. God love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S. call 818-331-3549 and please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio. Thank you for watching. www.livingwitharchbishopfultonsheen.com