IIC 59: Mystery, Covenant, Vocation, and Being “Submissive” in the Marriage Bed

Join Dr. Peter as he describes the how Covenant, Mystery, and Vocation are to undergird our sexual lives as Catholics, and how these three are strands in one continuity of Catholic marriage. We also take on St. Paul’s admonitions, “Wives, be subject to your husbands” and “Husbands, love your wives” and begin to look at what those mean for sexuality in Catholic marriage.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information, essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life. This podcast helps you focus inward on your own interior integration to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony in the natural realm. In this podcast, we confront the tough internal questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives. We confront head-on the struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and Our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way, living out our vocations, including our vocation to Catholic marriage, which brings in all kinds of things around sex and sexuality. And we’re dealing with sexuality and Catholicism, sexuality and spirituality, in these recent podcast episodes for three primary reasons: one, to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our brother, the Holy Spirit, and our Mother Mary more and more over time. Second, to love your neighbor as yourself. And if you’re married, your first neighbor is your spouse. And third, to love yourself, right? If I’m supposed to love my neighbor as myself, I better be able to love myself. And that’s far more tricky in this day and age than many people realize. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski. I am here with you to be your host and guide.

[00:01:49] This podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, is a part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God, our neighbor. We have so many great things at soulsandhearts.com. Come check that out. This is episode 59. It’s released on March 15th, 2021. It’s the 11th episode in our series on sexuality. It’s the third in our subseries on Catholic marriages. We’re zeroing in on sexuality within Catholic marriages, and we are focusing today on the underlying spiritual aspects of this. So this episode is titled Mystery, Covenant, Vocation, and Being Submissive in the Marriage Bed. All right. So we take on the controversial issues. We’re going to look at Ephesians 5. We’re going to take a hard look at what Saint Paul is telling us there. How has the Church interpreted that? So I’m going to invite you to get ready, prepare yourselves for the light bulbs to switch on. We’re going to explore new and clear ways about thinking about sexual life in Catholic marriages. And it’s all going to be grounded in what the Church has always taught, right? That’s really, really important. Now, what the Church has always taught has not always been well understood. So we’re going to be looking at this, and we’re going to bring in all kinds of sources to help us understand it better.

[00:03:19] I want you to have ways out of the sexual traps that so many Catholic married couples find themselves in, and single people too. But we’re really focusing on marriage here today. We’re going to take on these negative cycles, the problematic repeating patterns that just cause so much conflict, that harm people, that seem to go on and on, even when we’re trying to do the right thing. And even if you’re not trapped, even if your marriage is sound, even if things are going relatively well, this kind of information can help it go even better. So this podcast, as you know, is oriented towards Catholics who are serious about living out the faith. But we’re imperfect, right? We forget who we are. We forget that we are beloved children of God, when we get blended with parts of us that are overcome with the intensity of emotions, when we are overcome by our passions. And marriage is a huge, huge challenge. I just love this quote from Catholic Scripture scholar Peter Williamson. This is in the Catholic Commentary on the Sacred Scriptures series. This is his commentary on Ephesians on page 154 where he says, “Probably no element of human life arouses more longing and hope for happiness, yet yields as much pain and disappointment as marriage.” Boom. Right there. I just love that quote because I think he’s dead on. I think he’s right on to things. He’s married. He’s been married for a long time.

[00:04:51] He understands something about the ins and outs of marriage from personal experience. “Probably no element of human life arouses more longing and hope for happiness, yet yields as much pain and disappointment as marriage.” Why? Because of all our conscious and unconscious assumptions. There’s so many things that go on with marriage that can get easily derailed because of the disorder that entered into the natural realm because of sin and its effects. What have we got going on here? Well, all kinds of conscious and unconscious assumptions that we hold on a spiritual level. Sex is dirty. God doesn’t want us to have sex. That’s not something that the more intellectual or theologically oriented parts of us would say. But there are parts of us often that believe that sex is dirty, that God really doesn’t want us to have sex, but that maybe sex is also necessary because I’m married, right? Because of procreation. Be fruitful and multiplying. All this is wrapped up in a lot of shame around sexuality. Shame is often at the center of our issues, and that includes issues around sexuality. Because sexuality is so personal, it’s so intimate, it can be easily bound up with shame. And sexuality is often not talked about. It’s often not discussed. Sexuality brings in our bodies. It’s all about our bodies in so many ways, because we’re embodied beings. We often judge ourselves harshly around sexual matters, including just things like spontaneous desires, spontaneous images, memories, things like that.

[00:06:25] So we often have this condemnation where we’re coming down on ourselves, and it all makes sense because, you know, all of us, or almost all of us Catholics, have probably committed some sexual sins. The other thing, though, is that there’s so many unmet needs, so many coded messages that get expressed through our sexuality. It can seem like an absolute minefield. And because of how complicated and involved all of this can be, it often leads to us avoiding God, right? There’s this model of suppression, of condemnation, of compartmentalization, where we want to take things that are sexual and just kind of put them in their own little category behind their own little door, so that we don’t have to bring that into our spirituality at all. And that kind of thing can happen and it can be really problematic. There’s oftentimes this special zone in our lives where the sexuality happens, and God’s really not connected with it that much, often because of shame. I’m going to switch gears just a little bit here and let you know that all practices of psychology are grounded in a worldview. They’re all grounded in what we call an anthropology. So whenever you go to see a psychologist or whenever you listen to a psychologist and they’re talking about psychology, they’re also bringing in other things that support that psychology. All practices of psychology, all ways of thinking about psychology, are grounded in an anthropology, in a worldview.

[00:07:56] And there are basically five elements that go into that anthropology. It’s the philosophy of the psychologist, the theology of the psychologist, the epistemology of the psychologist, the metaphysics of the psychologist, and whether the psychologist uses logic appropriately or not. Let me give you an example of this. There are a number of psychologists out there who identify themselves as feminist psychologists. And when you look at the way that they think about psychology, the way that they talk about psychology, and the way that they practice psychology, they are grounding it in a feminist worldview. So they think about mental health, they think about people’s well-being in terms of patriarchy, in terms of social and cultural factors, things like that, that are very much informed by their feminist philosophies, by the way they look at the world. And in this episode, I want to tell you more about the spiritual foundation that I am looking at for practicing psychology, specifically when I’m working with sacramentally married Catholic couples. So I’m going to be a lot more spiritual than I typically am in this episode because I want you to understand where I’m coming from. So in my opinion, the first thing that we really need to grip on to is Romans 8:28. “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” That’s absolutely essential. Going back to Peter Williamson’s quote about how much pain and disappointment can happen in marriage.

[00:09:31] We’re at a high stakes table when we’re dealing with married life. There are so many ways in which our unmet needs can lead to conflict in our marriages. That’s what episode 57 was all about, The One Primary Reason Why Catholic Sacramental Marriages Fail, was all about unmet needs and specifically how people react to having those unmet needs and how they try to meet them in their marriages. So these are attachment needs. These are needs to be seen, heard, known, and understood, needs for safety and security, needs to be comforted, soothed, reassured, needs to be cherished, needs to be rejoiced in, needs that we have to be delighted in, those kinds of needs. And when those needs are not met, we go to self-absorption. We become preoccupied with ourselves or our own affairs sometimes to the point of excluding the outside world. It’s really natural in our fallen human conditions to do that. It takes significant acts of the will to look outside of ourselves, to get those needs met. And sometimes we look outside of ourselves to our spouses, in the hope that our spouse is going to meet those deep unmet needs, often for God, right? That’s where a lot of pressure comes into marriages. And we talked a lot about that in episode 57. Parts of us that are angry, disappointed, disillusioned, parts of us that are in need, that need love, care, affection, can come out in ways that cause difficulties in our marriages.

[00:11:08] So in the last episode, I brought up this imagery of a Catholic marriage bed, a canopied marriage bed as an image, a metaphor, to represent the shared sexual life in a sacramental Catholic marriage. And so I’m not going to review all the parts of the bed in this episode, because we’re really going to start with the floor. The bed rests on a floor. It’s supported by this floor, and we’re going to start from that floor. And that rock solid floor, the rock solid floor in the bedroom is that foundation, which is a deep and abiding faith and confidence in God’s Providence. That’s really what I’m focusing on today. So this is, again, going to be the most spiritually-focused episode in this series, because none of the psychological stuff that I’m going to bring up in future episodes is going to make sense, unless you see how it’s rooted in this idea of God’s Providence taught to us by the Catholic Church throughout all of time. So let’s really understand that Catholic sacramental marriage context, the relational context between husband, wife, and God, in which married sexual love is expressed. So let’s really work on understanding that spiritual foundation. Three words, three words. Covenant, mystery, and vocation. And I’m drawing from some of Catholic theologian Ina Siviglia’s work in her 2019 commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This was published by Archbishop Rino Fisichella in 2019, and I thought it was an excellent sort of brief but excellent understanding of how we bring these three things together, covenant, mystery and vocation.

[00:13:06] You know, marriage is a theme that runs through the entirety of Scripture, comes up first in Genesis, and it’s brought up right at the end of Scripture in Revelation 2, in Revelations 19, about the marriage supper of the Lamb. There’s this ongoing reference to marriage in so many different ways. And Ina Siviglia says, “There’s nothing more expressive, nothing more joyful, nothing more gratifying in human experience than passionate love between a man and a woman.” God uses this imagery, the most powerful experiential imagery in the natural realm, the love between a husband and a wife, to help us understand something about his relationships with us. So marriage as a covenant. We’re going to go to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1601, “The matrimonial covenant by which a man and woman established between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring. This covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.” So I want to go back to this matrimonial covenant that a man and woman established between themselves in a partnership of the whole of life. Look how encompassing that is, the partnership of the whole of life. This is not just a social contract or a civic contract.

[00:14:38] It’s not a legal document. It’s a partnership of the whole of life of both the spouses, not just some of life, not just most of life, not almost all of life, but the whole of life. So there’s this idea of the faith journey of two people united by the sacrament, by the covenant. It’s more of a beginning than it is an achievement, right? It’s about this unconditional offer of myself, this giving of the whole of my life. You look back at those marriage vows, right? So for me, it would be, “I, Peter, take you, Pamela, to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. And I will love and honor you all the days of my life.” You know, there’s no requirement here of reciprocity or mutuality, right? If my wife had fallen down the stairs on the day after our wedding and had suffered a head injury and was in a coma for 30 years, there may not be a lot of reciprocity there. But I’m still to love her. I’m still to give her the whole of myself. Sometimes we forget the magnitude of the gift of self in marriage. And so that’s one thing that I really want to bring to mind in this matrimonial covenant. Marriage as a covenant evokes the mutual covenant between God and the people of Israel. This use of the word covenant brings us back to Abraham, brings us back to, “You will be my people, and I will be your God.”

[00:16:18] That’s the covenant between our Lord and Abraham. And Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, in the Ignatius Study Bible, describe how marriage is an earthly image of the heavenly union between Christ and the Church. All right. So I want to get into what does this actually look like, this covenant actually look like? And I thought, since we confront the difficult issues in this podcast, I wanted to dive into Ephesians 5, because this often creates a lot of conflict in Catholic marriages. I’m going to just read you verses 21 to 33. This is from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water for the Word, that he might present the Church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. 

[00:17:42] He who loves his wife loves himself, for no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it as Christ does the Church, because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” Okay, so there’s quite a bit there. We’re going to unpack it. So in reviewing this topic, I’m going to rely heavily on Dr. Peter Williamson, his Catholic commentary on the Sacred Scriptures, his commentary on Ephesians. And let’s start with verse 21. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” So let’s go back to the Greek. Hupotassō, be subject. And that means, according to Williamson, to place or arrange under, or to submit oneself to, or to defer to. And this is really an important point. That subordination is free and voluntary. It’s not under compulsion. Charity can never be under compulsion. And furthermore, this subordination is not passive, but it’s actively willed. It’s a giving of oneself. That goes back to the idea of giving the whole of our lives, right, back to 1601 from the Catholic Catechism. And so each Christian is to subordinate himself or herself to other Christians.

[00:19:21] Everybody is called to serve each other, to give of the self to each other. This goes back to Galatians 5:13, where Saint Paul tells us to serve one another with love. So this whole idea of subordinating is not about domination. It’s not about repression. It’s not about lording it over each other. It is a deferring to others with humility and love. It’s serving one another with humility and love. It’s not seeking one’s own self-interest or one’s own pleasure. And when it comes to sexuality, this is really an important frame to keep in mind. Because when Catholic couples come to the Catholic marriage bed, oftentimes there are all kinds of motives that come into their sexual sharing with each other. It can be a place where attempts to meet unmet needs become very, very prominent, even if the couple doesn’t realize it, even if that’s not what they consciously desire. These attempts to get needs met, this self-absorption can insinuate itself into the marriage. That’s why we need to have this focus on what this verse 21 says, to be subject to one another, to be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Why do we do it? We do it out of reverence for Christ, out of love for our Lord. So when we get to the next verse, where we’re talking about wives being submissive to husbands or subordinate to husbands, as the Church is subject to Christ.

[00:21:20] So let wives be subject in everything to their husbands. What Williamson says here, “in everything,” is understood as a statement of principle. It’s not some universal absolute norm that allows no exceptions when husbands are asking for something that violates faith or morals or the dignity of the wife. The wife is not supposed to become this servile automaton that just does whatever the husband says. Not at all. We are to understand this in the context that Paul gives it to us, of each of us submitting ourselves to the other person, each of us deferring to each other, each of us coming to each other with humility and love, and offering who we are. So this becomes clear in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical on human marriage, came out in 1930, where he discusses this subjection of the wife to the husband. So this is a quote from paragraph 27. “This subjection, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman, both in view of her dignity as a human person and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion. Nor does it bid her to obey her husband’s every request, if not in harmony with right reason, or with the dignity due the wife. Nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow the free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment, or of their ignorance of human affairs.”

[00:23:03] What Pope Pius XI is telling us in 1930 is that we need to be thinking about this in terms of the dignity of women. We need to be thinking about, in terms of their noble offices as wives and mothers and companions, not just as some license for husbands to lord it over their wives. And so I want to really bring these nuances in, because sometimes there can be a misreading of the Scripture, a very limited interpretation of Scripture, that says wives are just supposed to submit to their husbands, do whatever they tell them to do. That’s not what the Scripture teaches. It’s not how the Church understands and interprets the Scripture for us. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her. So how did Christ give himself up for the Church? Well, through his passion and death, through crucifixion. This is the great love, the agape. This is a willed love. It’s not a love that demands that the other person be worthy of the love. It’s not a love that requires that that love be reciprocated or that it be returned or that it be mutual. No. It’s, I’ll love you no matter what. I’ll love you regardless of your response. That’s the kind of love that husbands are supposed to have for their wives.

[00:24:28] It doesn’t require that, you know, I love you if you’ll love me and all of that. That’s not in the vows, right? This is what we’re talking about when we’re thinking about Christian marriage. It also demands that I give myself entirely to my wife, not just loving her with the dryness of the will alone, disconnected from the rest of me. No, it requires all of me, right? That includes my emotions. And so Peter Williamson’s paraphrase of this, as he summarized it all in his commentary, was essentially Saint Paul is saying this. “Husbands, set your hearts on your wives, prize them, cherish them, care for them, be affectionate toward them, and seek their good.” I just love that summary of this. It has nothing about being authoritarian over your wives. It has nothing to do with bossing them around or demanding that they perform sexually in some way. When we get into the sexual aspects of this, lots of things can get twisted. We’re going to spend a lot of time on this, when we get to the fitted sheet or the bottom sheet of our canopied marriage bed. Because this is where we get into all of the physical aspects, the physicality of sexuality within Christian marriages. And we’re going to get into a lot more details about the kinds of things that actually happen sexually between Catholic husbands and wives, the problems that can come in with sexual expression.

[00:26:01] What I want to do here, what we’re focusing on here is, again, the floor. It’s about this, what is the Catholic married life based on? And it’s based on revelation. It’s based on what our Lord teaches us through the Scripture, through the Magisterium of the Church, and through tradition. So Christ, out of love, out of agape, voluntarily surrendered himself to die on the cross. That’s the kind of sacrifice that husbands, that Catholic husbands, are to make for their wives. To seek the good of your wife. A lot of times we don’t know what’s good for us. That’s why we have a religion that’s divinely revealed. We wouldn’t find it on our own. This is not something that would come to us by unaided human reason. We need the light of divine revelation to reveal this to us, because it’s beyond our capacity to just get to by our own lights. And so one of the things here is that if something is really good for the wife, it’s also really good for the husband. So if you, as a husband, know that something is really good for your wife, is the best thing for your wife, it also is going to be the best thing for you, even if there is a sacrifice. And conversely, wives, if you know something is really good for your husband, then it’s also really good for you. Now, where this gets tricky though, is when we are talking not about what’s good, but what’s gratifying.

[00:27:32] Oftentimes because of our passions and because we get taken over by parts that, again, have these needs that are trying to be met. And also because of the physicality of this, the sensuality of this, we can mistake what’s gratifying for what’s good. We can misunderstand something that we experience as gratifying and say, ah, that’s good. When I’m talking about something that’s good, I’m talking about something that actually elevates us toward God. That’s not the case with everything that’s gratifying. It might be gratifying for me to eat six Snickers bars, but that may not be actually good at all for me, right? So we want to make sure that we’re thinking about what’s good and being deliberate about how we understand that, not confusing it with gratifying. Saint John Paul II on August 11th, 1982, said that, “The essence of a love of a husband is to lay down his life for his bride. This kind of love excludes every kind of submission by which the wife would become a servant or a slave of the husband, an object of one-sided submission. Love makes the husband simultaneously subject to the wife and subject in this to the Lord himself, as the wife is to the husband.” So we go back to this mutual submission. It’s about the husband submitting to the wife and the wife submitting to the husband, and both submitting to God simultaneously.

[00:29:05] That’s really, really important. And it brings to mind Matthew 20:25-27. “But Jesus called to them and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant. And whoever would be first among you must be your slave.'” Again, this isn’t about domination. It’s not about repressing another person or forcing another person into some kind of servile position. It’s about loving. It’s about self-giving. And so the measure of this is, going back to Saint John Paul II, what’s going on with the dignity here of husbands and wives? Are we building up the person in the way that we’re relating sexually? Are we building up our spouse in the way that we’re relating sexually? Or are we pursuing our own pleasure? Are we letting our parts dominate us and try to get their unmet needs met through the sexual relationship in a way that’s just not appropriate? Are we thinking about that? Are we praying about that? So that’s the first one. That’s all about the matrimonial covenant. So let’s go to the second strand, mystery. Right. This is from the Catechism, paragraph 1602. “Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God, and concludes with a vision of the wedding feast of the Lamb. Scripture speaks throughout of marriage and its mystery, its institution and the meaning God has given it, its origin and its end, its various realizations throughout the history of salvation, the difficulties arising from sin, and its renewal in the Lord, in the new covenant of Christ and the Church.”

[00:31:05] So Ina Siviglia gives us three kind of understandings of mystery in this paragraph of the Catechism. Mystery can be something that’s hidden and obscure. Mystery could be a visible reality that points to an invisible reality, as in the case of sacraments. In baptism, for example, you have the visible water that points to the rebirth of the person. And then, in the Pauline sense, in the sense of Saint Paul, where he particularly uses mystery in this sense, and that is mystery reflects the plan of God, the economy of salvation, which is hidden in time but is revealed in history. Now, in our culture, there’s this real de-emphasis on mystery. It’s sort of this attitude that if I don’t understand something readily, then it’s not real or it’s not true. And mystery in marriage is what is partly veiled and partly seen through the eyes of faith. One of the things that couples often lose track of is the perspective of eternity, that we are in this world as a preamble to eternal life. We tend to get very caught up in the demands of the moment. Perhaps we get trapped in the past, you know, especially if there’s been traumas, a lot of apprehension about the future.

[00:32:32] But we’re in this temporality. We’re not thinking outside of time. We’re not thinking from an eternal perspective. So we want to think about things in terms of eternity, in terms of our relationship with God. This brings up the importance of humility, of awe, of wonder. Our Lord said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God is made up of such as these.” It’s about the humility, the wonder, the awe of children, and also their trust. Right? We don’t see all things in a mystery. Isaiah 55:8-9. This is our God speaking. “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.'” How do we often operate though? Right. Especially when we’re caught up in our parts, especially when we’re motivated by our passions, we reach for omniscience. We basically say, I know what I’m about, I know what I need, I know the best course of action for me, I’m going to make the decisions. And we don’t go to what we know to be true by divine revelation. We default to what seems gratifying to us in the moment. This can again happen in our sexual relationships with our spouses. And we can get into a whole lot of trouble because we’re not trusting that God our Father knows what’s best for us.

[00:34:09] We’re not trusting that he who created us, he who saved us, and he who sustains us, actually is offering us what’s best for us through the teachings of the Church. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that by sharing God’s life, we start to see and evaluate everything as if through his eyes. So faith becomes a critical element here, because faith is a sharing in God’s perspective, his vision for us. We need to conform our ways to his ways because his ways are best for us. And that’s not obvious for us. That’s hard for us to see a lot of times, especially when we’re not actively trying to understand things through the lens of faith. And frankly, as many exasperated Catholic spouses might admit, right, there is a lot of mystery about our spouses. There’s a lot of things we don’t understand. I will tell you that even in relatively well-functioning marriages, the spouses do not understand each other very well. Spouses often know a lot about each other, but they don’t really know each other. They don’t understand the deepest things that go on in their spouse. Their vision is limited. Now, there are some exceptional couples where there’s a deep level of intimacy and a deep level of relating. But I would argue that one of the reasons why most validly married Catholic couples do not know each other very well is because they don’t know themselves very well.

[00:35:42] And when you don’t know yourself very well, it’s very difficult to know another person at a deep level, because it’s very common to confuse something that exists in you with something that exists in somebody else. There’s this way of externalizing things that we don’t like in ourselves, attributing them to other people. There’s ways that we confuse things. There’s transferences and all kinds of psychological operations that are designed to protect us from shame, from loss, from grief, from all kinds of other things that threaten to destabilize us, because we don’t have a deep sense of safety and security in an intimate relationship with God our Father, in a close unity with Mary our Mother. And we really do need our spiritual parents. All right. So that’s mystery. Let’s move on to vocation. It’s the third of the three strands that Ina Siviglia gives us. Vocation. This is from the Catechism, paragraph 1603. “The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. God himself is the author of marriage. The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman, as they come from the hand of the creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution.” So God is the author of marriage.

[00:37:18] And marriage is written into our very nature as human beings, as men, as women. So there’s some things that that this leads to. And that is, first of all, that the efficacy of the sacrament of matrimony depends on the dispositions of the spouses in the marriage. We need to be open to those graces. Sometimes there’s the sense that the graces of the sacrament should just be bestowed upon us, regardless of how open we are to those graces. Some people can be in Catholic marriages and experience nothing of the graces of the sacrament of marriage, because they are so closed, they’re so walled off, to the graces coming into their lives. We need faith. We need obedience. We especially need to be living in a state of grace. This is something that I often have seen, in that couples can come in and they’re struggling in their marriage. But neither of the couples has been to confession for years, and it’s not at all clear that they’re in a state of grace. Now, I don’t know that. As a clinician, I can’t read their souls and know what their dispositions are or know what their moral standing is with God. But if you haven’t been to confession in like years, that’s a problem. That’s the ordinary way. That’s the ordinary means of Christ forgiving our sins in the Catholic Church. Now, one of the areas of confusion that I often hear is that if one spouse is abandoned by the other, there’s this sort of sense that the marriage is over.

[00:39:00] A validly contracted Catholic marriage lasts until the death of one of the spouses. And it can be and is a source of grace until the end of the marriage, even if one of the spouses abandons the other, even if one spouse is no longer engaged. Why do we not think that, though, is because from our human perspective, we sort of expect that the graces are going to come from the spouse, not from God, not from living out fidelity to that marriage, regardless of what our spouse does and doesn’t do. And again, this doesn’t mean that we allow ourselves to be subjected to abuse or anything that violates our dignity when we can’t handle that. We need to be able to be self-possessed in order to give ourselves freely. If we are really being dominated by our spouse because we’re dependent, or because we are a people pleaser and we can’t actually stand on our own two feet, and so we allow the other person in the marriage to take advantage of us because that’s how we think we’re going to keep that other person around, that’s not what we’re talking about here. That’s not freely giving of yourself. You may need to really learn to establish some boundaries. And later, when you’re self-possessed, things may be different.

[00:40:20] Our Lord allowed his dignity to be violated in his passion and death, but he chose that freely. He chose to allow himself to go through that. So we need to be able to be self-possessed. You can’t give of yourself freely if you don’t possess yourself. Now, some people, when they learn self-possession and they are able to walk away from being codependent or overly servile or submissive to a spouse, they can take it to the other extreme and wind up being unwilling to give anything of themselves. Right? That’s not what we’re looking for either. We’re looking for that freedom to give of yourself and the willingness to do that. And I am going to encourage people to make sacrifices in their marriages, but sacrifices which do not violate their dignity. So continuing with paragraph 27 from Casti Connubii. “The subjection of the wife to the husband forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family. It forbids that, in this body which is the family, that the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body, and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart. And as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.” Right. So what Pope Pius XI is telling us in 1930 is that, yes, we have responsibilities.

[00:41:56] We have responsibilities to self-sacrifice. We have responsibilities to give up things in order to love our spouses better. And this is where people really have difficulty treading that balance, right, between on the one hand, not having dignity violated, not being exploited in a marriage, and yet also loving the spouse and sacrificing for the spouse. There’s a fair amount of discernment that needs to go into that. And as we go through this series, I’m going to help you with making those distinctions. We’re going to use really concrete examples in upcoming episodes to be able to navigate that tension or that balance between not being exploited and not having your dignity violated, not being taken advantage of, not putting your spouse in a near occasion of sin in allowing him or her to do that to you. But at the same time, being able to sacrifice yourself to the degree that you’re able. And that’s why the language from Pope Pius XI in the next paragraph, paragraph 28, is important. He says, “Again, the subjugation of wife to husband in its degree and manner may vary according to the different conditions of persons, place, and time.” Right. So there’s some situational factors here. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of judgment. And that’s why it’s hard to learn about this stuff just from books. There has to be some tailored guidance, guidance that’s focused and empathetically attuned to where each of us is at in our faith journey right now.

[00:43:30] So we need faith. We need obedience to God. We need to be willing to self-sacrifice. We need to live in a state of grace. And we need to have this confidence that God really knows what he’s doing and that our particular marriage situation is actually a gift. I’m going to go back to where we started with Romans 8:28. “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” We really need to be able to trust in God’s Providence. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that the spouse is cooperating with grace or is living a Christian life necessarily. God’s going to use whatever that spouse is doing. He’s going to work it into his plan of salvation. He’s done that from the beginning of time. A lot of times we doubt that. Monsignor Vernon Johnson, in a book called Spiritual Childhood: The Spirituality of Saint Therese, put out by Ignatius Press, originally published in 1961, said this, on page 148. “Though we would strenuously deny it if charged with it, we do, in fact, behave as if God himself had been taken off his guard by the Fall, as if he had not quite got the situation in hand. To be more than resigned to embrace the cross with joy, we must see it not as an emergency measure, but as part of the eternal rhythm of the invincible will of the Father, who ordains all things, even the most minute and insignificant with fatherly love.”

[00:45:07] So whatever your situation is in your marriage right now, God knew about it from the beginning of time. This is not something that somehow he missed or that somehow he forgot about or wasn’t paying attention to. And because of God’s Providence, whatever situations we find ourselves in are uniquely tailored to help us grow in the ways that we need to. That’s something that we can hold on to by faith. All things that happen to us are gift. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re good in and of themselves. If they’re, for example, is a marital rape, obviously, nobody is going to argue that the rape is a good thing. I’m not arguing that the rape is a good thing in and of itself. But even traumas, even betrayals, even things like that can lead us, God allows that to happen to lead us to a greater good. If you look at Catholics who have successfully resolved deep, complex traumas, betrayals, things like that, they’re actually glad those things happen to them because of the great good that they were able to see God drawing from them. Good that at one point they could only see or believe through the eyes of faith. They didn’t see it with natural eyes, but became clear in retrospect. That’s the huge challenge for us. Are we going to live by faith, or are we going to live by the light of our natural reason, by just what we’re going to be able to see with our own eyes? Faith never contradicts reason, but it brings us to a whole different dimension of what’s actually happening.

[00:46:49] All right. So we’re going to get into those situations too, when it’s really bad, when there’s separations, when there’s divorce, when there’s domestic abuse, when there’s addictions, when there’s dominance and exploitation, when there’s sexual compulsions and affairs and child abuse and incest and the whole nine yards of it. We’re going to get into all of that stuff as we continue through our series on sexuality, but we really need to understand, what are the underpinnings here? What are we really looking at when we’re understanding this through the eyes of faith, when we’re looking at this through the eyes of faith? All right. So if you’re married, I’m going to continue to encourage you to invite your spouse to listen to these episodes, can be real conversation starters. And again, you know, take a little chance. Maybe your husband, maybe your wife would be interested in this, right? Pray about it. Let grace work. Keep on drawing and writing about this in whatever way seems to work for you. We’ve really been talking about the floor here, the canopied marriage bed. Really take a look at that. Start writing about what’s going on in your foundation. What did you react to in this podcast? What did you think was just not sitting well with you?

[00:48:01] What is hard to understand? Write it all down. Right. Let’s start putting these things into words so that we can begin to use our intellects and our wills in a more direct and clear way. If you’re not a member of the Resilient Catholics Community, which grew up organically around this podcast, get on the waiting list. Go to soulsandhearts.com/rcc, stands for Resilient Catholics Community, and sign up. There’s no obligation to join just because you signed up on the waiting list, but you’re going to get cool, free stuff. I do send out a weekly email on Fridays to those that are on our waiting list. We are in a countdown now to June 1st. That’s the date that I’m hoping to reopen the community. We’re going to be working towards that. On Tuesday, April 26th from 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time. So that’s in the evening. We’re going to be doing a brief presentation about Catholicism, sexuality, and parts, really understanding how our parts, the parts of us operate in sexuality. We didn’t get as much into that in the podcast today, but we will be doing much more of that in our next podcast, the one that’s coming up next time. We’re going to talk about the Resilient Catholics Community in that meeting. We’re going to do an ask me anything about those topics, Catholicism, sexuality, and parts, and we’re just going to spend some time together, get to know each other better.

[00:49:24] So for the current RCC members, we’ve got a premium podcast coming out on Tuesday, March 16th, on Inviting God to My Bedroom. We’re going to be looking at how your parts react to bringing God into deeper connection with your sexual life. A lot of times this is very evocative for people. Bring God into my bedroom? You know, there’s all kinds of things around shame or embarrassment or just the whole idea seems weird or funky, even though at some level we know God should be a part of all of our lives, you know, because we’re giving ourselves wholly, right? We’re going to bring that in, an exercise on bringing God into the bedroom. For those Catholic therapists who listen, we’ve got a community just for you. We have reopened the Interior Therapist Community. And I’m really going to encourage you to check that out. That’s at soulsandhearts.com/itc, for Interior Therapist Community. That’s what it stands for. We have got just a slot or two left in our Foundations Experiential Groups, which are all about the human formation of Catholic therapists and learning how to do parts work with clients, IFS-informed work with your own clients. We’ve also got a premium podcast coming out for our Interior Therapist Community members called Working with Clients Parts Around Sexuality and God Images. That’ll also come out on March 16th.

[00:50:51] I’m going to encourage you to subscribe to this podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Amazon, wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe. That way, you’ll know every time a new podcast episode comes out. And in next week in episode 60, we’re going to start with the legs of the bed. We’re going to look at attachment theory, and we’re going to look at Internal Family Systems, how our parts impact how we interact with our spouses sexually. It’s going to be really important to be able to understand those four legs. The first two that we’re going to address being attachment theory and Internal Family Systems parts work. I really want to know how these episodes are landing with you. It’s great to hear from folks. Get in touch with me, crisis@soulsandhearts.com. That’s my email. My cell phone number, (317) 567-9594. Also, I am looking for somebody to help design a marketing plan for this podcast and our communities, somebody that really is interested in executing a marketing plan too, getting me more on social media, which I know almost nothing about, but I really want it to be somebody that’s attracted to this podcast and really likes what we’re talking about here, not just somebody that wants to do it as a job, somebody that really believes in what our mission is here. So if that happens to fit you, get in touch with me. crisis@soulsandhearts.com.

[00:52:10] (317) 567-9594. Also, I’m excited to announce that in my private practice, I have a new clinician joining me, Rachel Smith. And she’s all interested in this parts stuff as well. So if you happen to be in Indiana, central Indiana, looking for a therapist, Rachel is available. You can get ahold of us through our practice website at rocksolidhelp.com. And just as a little fun fact, these are the top ten countries in terms of downloads of this podcast. Number one is the US and the top five states are Indiana, California, Washington State, Texas, and Florida. Next after the U.S. Is Canada, and most of those come from Ontario and British Columbia, those provinces. Australia is third on the list, primarily with New South Wales and also Victoria. Thanks to those provinces. After that, the United Kingdom, then Ireland. So first five are all English speaking, and now we get into the ones that are not primarily English speaking. Lithuania is in number six, Croatia, number seven, Mexico, number eight, Spain, number nine. Thank you. And in number ten, the Ivory Coast. Thank you to all the people that download. We have quite an international following. There’s a lot of other countries on the list as well. I wanted to just name the top ten. And with that we’re going to end for today. And we’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.