A letter to my grandchildren (and yours!)
Dear grandchildren,
What a gift you all are, each one unique and unrepeatable, yet united as a family and carried by love.
Today I write to you about marriage and children, the original sacrament. This is a letter that some of you are not yet old enough to read or understand, and that is OK. When you are ready, this letter is waiting for you. In it you will find a timeless truth: the awe and wonder of marriage and children as they at the beginning. The original model which, despite the effects of the sins of fallen man (men and women), is still the fundamental building block or cell of every human society throughout history.
Moreover, it is good to remember that modern man, who would like to believe otherwise, despite his folly and pride, did not create marriage any more than he created himself. There was a time, just before your birth, when this was obvious to everyone.
You, on the other hand, are growing up in a time unprecedented in human history. A time when man has redefined marriage, demanded the right to kill his own children, and can no longer define what a woman is. All of this has shaken the foundations of human civilization around the world, and you, the most innocent and vulnerable, are bearing the brunt of the resulting chaos.
Almost since you could walk, there have been forces that want to rob you of your innocence and replace in your heart what is objectively true, good and beautiful, especially the beauty of love, with a fake, a lie. You grow up in an environment of subjective moral relativism, in which man tries to replace the Creator and become the final arbiter of what is good and what is evil.
Today, the pride of man who has made himself a god has reached such a fever pitch that children are constantly exposed to distortions about the most basic things like the meaning of human life and dignity, marriage, family, real love, the true meaning of sex and sexuality and much more. Particularly disturbing is the sexual indoctrination, grooming and desensitization of your conscience in the public school system and through the tiny reflective screens you have been programmed to stare at for hours every day.
I am writing this because it is important for you to know that marriage and the children that come from the union of father and mother is a very big deal! In fact, it is the original, fundamental or primal sacrament!
At the beginningBefore original sin and the constant barrage of sins of fallen men and women, there was a Pure, holy, cosmic explosion of love! Furthermore, in the heart of every person there is an “echo” of this original love story, which is felt as a deep desire to love and be loved.
Jesus reminds us of this when he calls the people of his time, in this case religious leaders, back To the beginning when they asked him about divorce. The Pharisees tested Jesus by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any reason?” Instead of limiting himself to their questions, Jesus referred them to the original model of marriage. He answered:
Have you not read that at the beginning he made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one?’ So they are no longer two, but one. What God has joined together, let no man separate.(Matthew 19:3-6)
The Bible begins with the word bereschitwhich means “in the beginning” in Hebrew. After five days of creation, the Garden of Eden is finished. It was carefully prepared for a wedding feast. Then, on the sixth day, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them.” God smiled at the newlywed couple, blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth” (Gen 1:26-28), bring forth children, for they are very good!
This is the very first thing God says about us in the Bible – that he created us in his divine image! People from the beginning were created to be the sacramental, visible sign of God, the Triune Love, in the created universe.
John Paul II wrote:
The human body, with its sex, its masculinity and femininity, is not only a source of fertility and procreation in the mystery of creation itself, as is the case in the entire natural order, but it also bears “from the beginning” the quality of the “bridegroom”, that is, the capacity to express love. It is precisely that love in which man becomes a gift that realizes – and through that gift – the very meaning of his being and of his existence.1
He then presented his thesis, which, if taken to heart, will revolutionize our understanding of the human body and sexuality.2 “The body, and only the body,” says John Paul II, “is capable of making visible the invisible, the spiritual and the divine. It was created to convey the invisible mystery, which has always been hidden in God, into the visible reality of the world and thus to be a sign of it.”3
What is the mystery hidden in God that our bodies express and make visible? God is love. God’s nature is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of love in the fullness of time, God revealed his innermost mystery: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to participate in this exchange.4
In other words, the Father pours out his love on the Son, the Son receives his love and returns it, and from this exchange of love between them a person is born, the Holy Spirit! Then he turns to his creation:
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)
God is not a sexual being, He is pure spirit, but He created us as a tiny reflection of His image and likeness, Love, in the created world. the beginningA husband gives his love to his wife, who receives and reciprocates his love. From this exchange of love, a human being is born, a child! In the marital embrace, the two, man and woman, become one, and in a cosmic explosion of love, the two who became one become three when a child is conceived! Three persons in one, reflecting the love of God and at the same time united with it! Invited to give birth to eternal sons and daughters who will be with us and with God for all eternity.
As physical, corporeal beings, we simply cannot see God. He is pure spirit. But God wanted to make his mystery visible to us, so he imprinted it on our bodies by creating us male and female in his own image (Gen 1:27).5 The function of this image is to reflect the Trinity, “an inscrutable divine communion of (three) persons.”6 Thus, in a dramatic development of Catholic thought, Pope John Paul II comes to the conclusion that “man has become the ‘image and likeness’ of God not only by virtue of his humanity, but also by virtue of the community of persons that man and woman form from the beginning.” And the Pope adds: “All of this has been accompanied from the ‘beginning’ by the blessing of fertility, which is linked to human reproduction.”7
The body has a “nuptial or conjugal meaning” because it reveals the vocation of man and woman to give each other a gift, a gift that is fully fulfilled in their union as “one flesh.” The body also has a “generative meaning” that (God willing) brings a “third” into the world through their union. In this way, marriage represents a “Original Sacrament” understood as a sign that truly communicates the mystery of the Trinitarian life and love of God to man and woman – and through them to their children and through the family of the whole world.8
I end this letter with the sad thought that this is the story the world does not want you to hear. This is why the world tries to steal your childlike innocence through gender ideologies, pornography and the like. This story is the “echo” in your heart of the original innocence of man and woman before sin and their experience of the mystery of truth and love that made Adam, when he first saw Eve, exclaim in awe and wonder: “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!”
Don’t fall for the lies and lower the bar for truth and love. As you grow older, you will be tempted to use your freedom to live a comfortable life, the seemingly simple pleasures the world lures you with, but they are illusions. They never fulfill the promises of happiness they make. The traps of moral relativism necessary to get rid of these truths rob you of beauty, joy, and what you seek – love – and that is something I never want to ask of you.
I love you.
Grandpa
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
1Man and woman, he created them, No. 15.1.
2See The Theology of the Body: An Education for Humanity, article by Christopher West
3Male and female he created them. A Theology of the Body, John Paul II, February 20, 1980.
4Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 221.
5The Theology of the Body: An Education for Humanity, article by Christopher West
6Male and female he created them. A Theology of the Body, John Paul II, November 14, 1979.
7Ibid.
8The Theology of the Body: An Education for Humanity, article by Christopher West
