from Cana is Forever by Charles Hugo Doyle
Having once established the fact that marriage is a topflight career, it naturally follows that the same rules govern its success as govern those of other careers. Every successful career demands adequate preparation, intelligent earnestness, persistent industry, and the will-to-win, but marriage demands all these, plus the
anointed strength of love.
If every couple would but bring to marriage one half the consuming zeal for success that Thomas A. Edison brought to his scientific career, how different many of them would be!
As a youth, Edison spent long dreary hours practicing on the tiny telegrapher’s key, learning the code and manner of sending and receiving messages. There was a four-day walk from Port Huron to Boston in search of work. There was the penniless arrival in New York and a chance job repairing a telegraphic communication system in a stock exchange on Wall Street that led to financial betterment, but it was dogged determination to succeed that made him so outstanding as a scientist.
Take, for instance, Edison’s work on the carbon filament. In October, 1879, he determined to make his experiment work if it was the last thing he ever did. So convinced was he that the carbon filament was utilizable that he refused to leave his laboratory until he completed his work.
On the second night he said to his associate, Charles Batchelor, “We will make a lamp before we sleep or die in the attempt,” and make it he did, though it took four sleepless days and nights before the now famous Edison incandescent light was invented and the whole lighting system revolutionized in the world.
Edison’s career was successful solely because he brought to it a determination to succeed no matter what the cost. Success in any field rarely comes without great sacrifices. One has only to read about the life of Madame Curie and her devoted husband and follow the discovery of radium to evaluate the cost of success in a
career.
Madame Curie’s sufferings as she worked in the smoke-filled shed, cold in the winter and stifling hot in the summer, defy description. The work of days became months and years, and failure dogged her every minute of the time, but Marie Curie, with terrible patience, continued to treat kilogram by kilogram the tons of
pitchblende residue.
Poverty hampered her in the acquisition of adequate equipment. The obstacles seemed insurmountable in the forty-five months of experimentation, but in the end the Curie work produced radium.
Who could look at the great Marie Curie as she lay on her deathbed, after thirty-five years’ work with radium, and see her tired, burned, scarred hands without realizing the awful cost of success in a career?
Success in marriage depends upon acceptance of the fact that it is a career and upon the readiness and willingness to bring to it all the determination possible to overcome every difficulty and obstacle on the road to success. If a marriage breaks up, it is not because a man or woman must accept defeat but because the defeat is willed.
A kite cannot be made to fly unless it goes against the wind and has a weight to keep it from overturning. No marriage will succeed unless there is readiness to face and overcome difficulties and a willingness to accept the responsibilities of a parent, for parenthood is the weight that keeps most marriages from somersaulting.
When Divine Love Incarnate came to Cana of Galilee to sanctify forever pure conjugal love, He came to that marriage fresh from His terrible bout with Satan.
Since the first man and his wife had succumbed to temptation in the Garden of Eden, it was divinely planned that Christ, the New Adam, should permit the same tempter to attack Him and be ignominiously defeated and thus set a pattern for all to follow in the resistance of temptation.
His sacred presence at the wedding was ever to be an earnest of the help and special graces He would grant those called to the marriage career who would likewise resist the onslaughts of Satan. Yea, more, Our Lord would elevate matrimony to the dignity of a Sacrament and make of it a veritable channel of special graces.
It is worthy of note, however, that while en route to Cana, the Master called His first five apostles, one of them being Nathanael (St. Bartholomew), a native of Cana of Galilee. The timing of Nathanael’s call to the apostolate was, doubtless, to indicate the primacy of dignity and honor of the priesthood and religious life over marriage, and that, in that very order, they would form a trinity of top-flight careers.
It was only after choosing a nucleus for His priesthood that Christ went down to the marriage at Cana of Galilee.
We’ve heard the term before….Domestic Monastery. I understand the sentiment and I think it is a lovely term that is loaded with possibilities within the home. Personally, my home couldn’t be mistaken for a monastery at any given time…
To the modern mind, the concept of poverty is often confused with destitution. But destitution emphatically is not the Gospel ideal. A love-filled sharing frugality is the message, and Happy Are You Poor explains the meaning of this beatitude lived and taught by Jesus himself. But isn’t simplicity in lifestyle meant only for nuns and priests? Are not all of us to enjoy the goodness and beauties of our magnificent creation? Are parents to be frugal with the children they love so much?
The three Top flight vocations! That’s very nice. 🙂 thank you