We Have Made Marriage in Our Own Image

Don't even start with me about how same-sex marriage has suddenly proven this.

While marriage in our own image may be more apparent with the national legalization of same-sex marriage, let's just start with divorce, cohabitation, and pre-nups.

"We have made marriage in our own image!" exploded a priest my family knows and loves, a priest who is a canon lawyer, and served on our diocesan marriage tribunal for a number of years. He's right on the mark in this statement, and it has stuck to the core of my soul, "We have made marriage in our own image."

In Genesis 1:27, "God created man in his own image; in the image of God He created them; male and female he created them." And do you know what God does next? "God blessed them" and then God made a command, not just an option, a choice, a hobby; this is a command: "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it."

So when my priest says, "We have made marriage in our own image," I instantly recall this verse, and I begin to fill in all the many ways in which the false securities of our culture make this statement so very true.

In a prenuptial agreement, a marrying couple says, "I want to get out of marriage what I want, and if not, then I'm going to take back my own."

In a cohabitation, a dating couple says, "I want to see if I'm going to get out of marriage what I want."

And in divorce (excepting annulment in which a marriage never actually existed), a married couple says, "I did not get out of marriage what I wanted."

We have made marriage in our own image.

So as a result, when we make marriage in our own image, we get from it what we want: we use contraception to make sure we have children only when we want them, we use genetic manipulation to get the child we want out of our marriage, and we use IVF or surrogacy, or other unnatural infertility methods to get a child for our marriage. Then we get a hot mess like this, and I have no words for a world that has a judge in it that chastises a woman for breastfeeding her child.

Honestly, besides exasperating, "We have made marriage in our own image," the media and pressures in our culture have effectively silenced me and my Faith, lest I be seen as "hateful," "bigoted," "discriminatory."

I want to give hope and inspiration, but honestly, I am praying a lot, practicing the words I want to write, and thinking about what I want to say. Honestly, I'm being very vulnerable in saying, I haven't quite figured that out yet because my beliefs have been so successfully silenced. I have been silenced. I will find my voice. I will speak with love. I will speak life. And somehow with the Holy Spirit's guidance, I will speak truth to a broken world.