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Tag Archives: joseph breig

Nailed to the Cross…A Fruitful Meditation

12 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by Leanevdp in Family Life, Parenting, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

joseph breig, Lenten meditation

From The Stations of the Cross and Their Relation to Family Life

By Joseph A. Breig

It is a fruitful meditation for a parent to think of his own son or daughter nailed to the cross. This does not mean that my child is substituted for Christ, but that through my child–through my love for my child–I am brought closer to Christ.

We parents must learn that it is not our vocation–as it is the vocation of some few–to go to God by forsaking others. Our vocation is to go to God through the embracing of others. From love of those who are ours, we are to deepen our love of Him Whose we are.

Christian marriage does not mean that a husband and wife love each other with one love and Christ with another love. They are to love Christ and each other with the same love, and indeed with the same kind of love. There are not really various sorts of love; if we know what love is, there is one love only.

Love is not the physical embracing of another. The embracing is, or ought to be, an expression of love; and if it is not that, then it is not what it ought to be. If a husband and wife do not love each other in God and in accordance with God’s rights over us, then what they feel for each other is not truly love at all.

To love (let us mark it well) is to desire the good of the beloved, and to endeavor to bring that good to pass. But the beloved’s truest good is to live in the friendship of God; in oneness with Christ. Christian marriage, then, is a state of life in which two who truly love each other, in the true meaning of love, assist each other to love Him by obedience to Him.

For the husband, then, the wife is a door into holiness; she is a way to God; and for his wife, the husband is a path to sanctity. In the Sacrament of Matrimony, husband and wife are to cooperate with Christ in each other’s sanctification. Why else, pray, did Christ raise marriage to the dignity of a sacrament; why else did he make it one of the channels through which He pleases to dispense His divine grace?

This is not to destroy, nor to whittle away, the bodily aspects of life together in marriage. To the contrary; the joy of the coming together of husband and wife cannot be as great and as unalloyed as it ought to be unless consciences are clear.

If there is anything of spiritual reproach in married love, their married love will not give the happiness it ought to give. Nor will it confer the unity it is intended to confer–the unity, the peace, the harmony, the serenity which ought to be its fruits.

This harmony and serenity of husband and wife are the deepest foundation for the happiness of the family. How many, many children live in a deep unease, rebelling against what they know not, because their father and mother are not united in Christ, or at least imagine that they are not united in Christ!

“Imagine that they are not united in Christ.” This is a real and painful condition in our day of the opposite errors of puritanism and hedonism. Many a husband and wife are prevented, either by prudery or by the prevailing over-emphasis upon sex, from finding in marriage the joy and the security-in-God that this great sacrament was instituted to give them.

Either they enter into their giving of each other with consciences stricken by rigorism, or they expect more of their giving than even this great giving can give. In the one case, they feel guilty; in the other, they feel cheated. No; the Christian husband and wife must acquire the Christian attitude of mind toward marriage, if they are to find in marriage the depths of joy and goodness which they ought to find there.

Marriage, the Sacrament of Matrimony, is first a union of souls. Husband and wife love each other; not in the modern mistaken meaning of being “in love,” but in the right meaning that they are prepared to serve each other, to defend each other, to sacrifice for each other, to work together in mutual well-wishing for success in marriage.

Out of the union of souls, out of this true love of each other, comes the union of bodies; and each union contributes constantly to the perfecting and deepening of the other.

Husband and wife must understand that Matrimony, like the other sacraments, was earned for us by Christ on the cross. It was not a niggling and fearful thing that He wished to confer upon us–and did confer. No; Christ desires that marriage shall be generous, and that husband and wife understand that their mutual giving is good and pleasing to Him. He wants husband and wife to see each other as pathways to Him; He wants them walking hand in hand, and heart in heart, toward Him.

If we are to see Christ in the least of His brethren, are we not to see Him in our own husbands and wives? Indeed, it is in our husbands and wives, in the Sacrament of Matrimony, that we ought to see Christ most clearly and intimately.

Marriage is its own vocation, and into it we are to throw ourselves with the same kind of dedication and self-abandonment that we expect of a priest in his vocation.

For the husband, his wife and children are Christ most closely and immediately. Wife and children are his vocation; his way to holiness. It is a lesser vocation than the religious vocation, in the same sense that a man is a little less than an angel.

But this does not mean that a man is not a marvelous being; and it does not mean that marriage is not a marvelous vocation. And as a man or woman, in the order of grace, can rise higher than an angel, so can a husband and wife rise higher, in the order of grace–in the Sacrament of Matrimony–than this or that priest or Sister in another vocation.

We are not to be comparing our way of life, we wives and husbands, with the way of life of those in religion. We are not to be comparing our way of life with any other way. Our task is to devote ourselves to our own way wholeheartedly, with full trust in God’s grace and providence, and with the fullest possible realization of the sublimity of our own vocation.

Nobody, really, goes directly to God. Everybody must go through certain channels and in some service to fellowmen. The way to God for husband and wife is through each other and their children, and in love of them and service to them. That is why it is a fruitful meditation to think of one’s own son or daughter on the cross.

Our sons and daughters are given to us in order that we may help them to salvation, and they us. A parent thinking of one of his children on the cross can come closer to Christ; can understand much more of what Christ suffered for us, can be more intimately united with Christ in His Passion.

And certainly the parent can better understand, while thinking of his own child crucified, what Mary sacrificed for us.

In this kind of meditation, parents can find the true wisdom of marriage and the family. Making the Way of the Cross, and thinking of their beloved own children, they can more clearly and poignantly think of Christ, and love Christ and thank Him for His goodness.

Then, returning home, a husband can look upon his wife and children, or a wife upon her husband and children, and see Christ in them, and grasp something of the nobility and the deep goodness of Christian marriage and family life.

Valuable lessons are learned when a family works together. A child learns to respect authority. He becomes independent, does not expect others to pave the way before him, but learns that working is part of earning his way. The discipline he develops will be invaluable to him all through his life. -Finer Femininity

 

 

by Cardinal Mercier:

I am going to show you a secret to holiness and happiness.
For five minutes every day let your imagination be quiet, close your eyes to everything they see, and shut your ears to of all the world’s noise so that you can withdraw into the sanctuary of your baptized soul, the temple of the Holy Ghost.

And speak to that Holy Spirit and say to Him:

“Holy Spirit, soul of my soul, I adore Thee.
Enlighten me, guide me,
strengthen and comfort me.
Tell me what I ought to do and order me to do it.
I promise to submit to anything that Thou requirest from me,
and to accept everything that Thou allowest to happen to me.
Just show me what Thy will is.”

If you do this your life will be quiet and peaceful,
and comfort will abound even in the middle of troubles.
For grace will be given to match any stress together with strength to bear it, grace that will take you to the gates of Paradise, full of merit. Such submission to the Holy Spirit is the secret of holiness.

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A book of your favorite litanies….

Chosen by God for the incomparable vocation of spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and foster father of Our Lord Jesus Christ; St. Joseph received magnificent divine graces and favors not granted even to the Old Testament Patriarchs. Known as the most humble of men; St. Joseph received from Almighty God the authority to command both Our Lady and the Son of God Himself; and in Heaven he continues to have great intercessory power with God.
The Divine Favors Granted to St. Joseph shows how this greatest of the Patriarchs is the patron of all Christians and how wonderfully he answers prayers; plus; it gives many of the ways of honoring him and many prayers to request his intercession. One of the finest books on St. Joseph; it will surely inspire the reader with a profound devotion to this great “Patron of the Universal Church.” Impr. 176 pgs;

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support.

Jesus Meets His Blessed Mother – The Family and the Cross/5-Minute Prayer for Lent

07 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Jesus meets His mother, joseph breig, Stations of the Cross, The Family and the Cross, Way of the Cross

The Family and the Cross – Jospeh Breig

It is utterly impossible for any human being to come within a mile of appreciating fully the sacrifice made by Mary when she gave her divine Son for our salvation.

God alone can understand it. We cannot, because in order to do so we would have to be as pure as Mary, as totally sinless as she, and equally capable of love. We are not.

But there is one thing that we can understand and appreciate, and that is that neither Mary nor Christ sniveled when they met while He was on His way to crucifixion.

Jesus was wounded infinitely more, and Mary immeasurably more, than any one of us possibly can be, but they did not indulge in self-pity or in recriminations against God for appointing them to carry so dreadful a burden. Christ is God, and as God He perceived clearly and completely why He was going to His death, and what incalculable good He was accomplishing.

Christ is man, and as man He was intolerably laden with our sins.

But Mary is human only; and as a woman we salute her and boast of her.

In the hours of Christ’s Passion, she did indeed give mankind something of which to be proud forevermore. She is one of us, who are less than the angels; but she earned a place unthinkably higher in eternity than the place of the highest and holiest angel.

The poet who called Mary ‘our tainted nature’s solitary boast was inexpressibly more right than he could possibly have realized. Not any of us can ever grasp with our minds the fullness of Mary’s nobility and dignity.

No honor that we can pay to her, save only the divine honor which belongs to God alone, is too much honor. Because of her, a representative of our human race is enthroned in the highest place possible for any creature. One of our own is Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, co-Redeemer with Christ, and co-Ruler of the everlasting kingdom.

Unless we understand something about Mary, we cannot understand much about the Passion of Christ. Christ’s physical sufferings, dreadful though they were, were small and superficial compared with his psychological and spiritual agony.

If we cringe at the thought of the tortures inflicted upon Him, if our hearts ache at the sight of the beatings and piercings, then we ought to feel utterly broken in the presence of his invisible torments.

They were invisible, but they become visible to the eye of one who meditates upon Mary. For Mary’s passion was entirely psychological and spiritual; it was completely invisible, yet so terrible that had Christ’s sufferings been merely of the body and not of the soul at all, then Mary’s agony would have been an agony more frightful than His.

We cannot begin to see into the depths of what Jesus sacrificed for us until we turn our minds into the heart of Mary to perceive what she endured in contributing to our redemption. It is not enough to say that Mary suffered the equivalent of death. She suffered more and worse than the equivalent of death.

Death has its bodily terrors, but the most terrible terror of death is the rending apart of a creature in his deepest depths; it is the separation of body and soul, compared with which nuclear fission is a mild and slight division.

Now the agony of Mary was an agony incomparably more dreadful than the rending of a man’s being by death. What death tears apart is an arrangement of nature; and that is a frightful tearing. But it is as nothing compared with the forcible separation of total love from total love.

And that was what happened when Our Lady was separated from her Son. Mary’s whole matchless being, capable of unthinkably greater love than any other creature, was utterly in love with her Son.

To be separated from her Son, to see her Son reviled and wounded, was for her worse than an eternal succession of physical deaths. Indeed, it is impossible to understand how Mary’s physical heart endured the sight of the tormented Christ without physically breaking and bringing on bodily death.

I personally would speculate that her heart was miraculously preserved from breaking.

However that may be, what Mary endured was of the type of what Christ endured in the Garden of Gethsemane, when His human nature was so inexpressibly tormented by His horror of sin that He sweat blood.

It does not seem to me that Our Lady’s body, unless divinely sustained, could have survived the spiritual and psychological torture she endured in seeing her Son led to execution in unthinkable suffering. I think that God’s intervention must have been necessary to keep her from dying on the spot when she met Jesus on His way to Calvary.

We approach now the depths of this matter. For not only did Mary endure a million deaths upon millions of deaths, but she never for a moment doubted God and God’s goodness. Not for an instant did she rebel. Not even remotely did she allow her faith to be shaken. Her will never turned the tiniest fraction of an inch from her utter consecration to God and to God’s inscrutable purposes.

In the midst of a spiritual agony which ought to have shaken the universe into chaos, she freely gave her Son for our redemption. She gave Him back to the impenetrable purposes of God from Whom He had come to her. She made, willingly, indomitably, and with a courage that makes the mind reel, the incomparably, most supreme sacrifice of which it is possible for any created being to be capable.

Mary gave absolutely everything, she sacrificed all, she held nothing for herself, because her all, her everything, was Christ.

And as I said, she did not snivel. She indulged in no theatrics. Not once did she cry out that this was too much, that she could not stand it, that to ask this of her was asking more than flesh and blood could endure.

There on the way to Calvary, two beings of unthinkable nobility looked into each other’s eyes and faced squarely, without the slightest retreat or deviation, the most awful duty of which it is possible to conceive.

Christ and Mary had a work to do. They had a world to save. They had a spiritual family to bring forth in unutterable anguish. Upon them fell the grinding, crushing labor of giving birth to the children of God who are to share with God His own divine life and happiness forever and forever.

That was their task, the task of Jesus and Mary; and although it meant for each of them such suffering and rending as is utterly outside the grasp of the human mind, they proceeded to it bravely, without the slightest outcry of protest.

This indeed was nobility. This indeed was royalty. Christ and Mary did not shrink from, nor complain about, taking up your burden and my burden and everybody’s burden.

They simply took up the burdens without question because they loved not themselves and their comforts, but God and their fellowmen.

And this is what we must try to learn from them – the hidden merciful designs of God, which come out of His infinite love and wisdom, not for our destruction, but for our perfection and glorification.

bzznbsdivline

5-minute-prayer2

by Cardinal Mercier:

I am going to show you a secret to holiness and happiness.
For five minutes every day let your imagination be quiet, close your eyes to everything they see, and shut your ears to of all the world’s noise so that you can withdraw into the sanctuary of your baptized soul, the temple of the Holy Ghost.

And speak to that Holy Spirit and say to Him:

“Holy Spirit, soul of my soul, I adore Thee.
Enlighten me, guide me,
strengthen and comfort me.
Tell me what I ought to do and order me to do it.
I promise to submit to anything that Thou requirest from me,
and to accept everything that Thou allowest to happen to me.
Just show me what Thy will is.”

If you do this your life will be quiet and peaceful,
and comfort will abound even in the middle of troubles.
For grace will be given to match any stress together with strength to bear it, grace that will take you to the gates of Paradise, full of merit. Such submission to the Holy Spirit is the secret of holiness.prayer book 4

bzznbsdivline

“God has so constituted us, that in loving and caring for our own children—the richest and best things in our natures are drawn out. Many of the deepest and most valuable lessons ever learned, are read from the pages of a child’s unfolding life. There is no influence more potent than that which touches us when our children are laid in our arms. Their helplessness appeals to every principle of nobleness in our hearts. Their innocence exerts over us a purifying power. The thought of our responsibility for them, exalts every faculty of our souls. In the very care which they exact, they bring blessing to us.” J.R. Miller

16711967_643711072497573_2986484847522929676_n

bzznbsdivline

You will find this book fascinating! Rev. Ronald Knox puts down his intimate thoughts about the Mass….and he puts it in simple, readable language, as his audience was a group of school girls! It will give much meditation on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass….from the Introit to the Last Gospel!

From more info read the reviews on Amazon here.

The Mass in Slow Motion

bzznbsdivline

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A book of your favorite litanies….

Chosen by God for the incomparable vocation of spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and foster father of Our Lord Jesus Christ; St. Joseph received magnificent divine graces and favors not granted even to the Old Testament Patriarchs. Known as the most humble of men; St. Joseph received from Almighty God the authority to command both Our Lady and the Son of God Himself; and in Heaven he continues to have great intercessory power with God.
The Divine Favors Granted to St. Joseph shows how this greatest of the Patriarchs is the patron of all Christians and how wonderfully he answers prayers; plus; it gives many of the ways of honoring him and many prayers to request his intercession. One of the finest books on St. Joseph; it will surely inspire the reader with a profound devotion to this great “Patron of the Universal Church.” Impr. 176 pgs;

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for your support.

Jesus Meets His Blessed Mother – The Family and the Cross

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Leanevdp in Lent, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Jesus meets His mother, joseph breig, Stations of the Cross, The Family and the Cross, Way of the Cross

The Family and the Cross – Jospeh Breig

It is utterly impossible for any human being to come within a mile of appreciating fully the sacrifice made by Mary when she gave her divine Son for our salvation.

God alone can understand it. We cannot, because in order to do so we would have to be as pure as Mary, as totally sinless as she, and equally capable of love. We are not.

But there is one thing that we can understand and appreciate, and that is that neither Mary nor Christ sniveled when they met while He was on His way to crucifixion.

Jesus was wounded infinitely more, and Mary immeasurably more, than any one of us possibly can be, but they did not indulge in self-pity or in recriminations against God for appointing them to carry so dreadful a burden. Christ is God, and as God He perceived clearly and completely why He was going to His death, and what incalculable good He was accomplishing.

Christ is man, and as man He was intolerably laden with our sins.

But Mary is human only; and as a woman we salute her and boast of her.

In the hours of Christ’s Passion, she did indeed give mankind something of which to be proud forevermore. She is one of us, who are less than the angels; but she earned a place unthinkably higher in eternity than the place of the highest and holiest angel.

The poet who called Mary ‘our tainted nature’s solitary boast was inexpressibly more right than he could possibly have realized. Not any of us can ever grasp with our minds the fullness of Mary’s nobility and dignity.

No honor that we can pay to her, save only the divine honor which belongs to God alone, is too much honor. Because of her, a representative of our human race is enthroned in the highest place possible for any creature. One of our own is Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, co-Redeemer with Christ, and co-Ruler of the everlasting kingdom.

Unless we understand something about Mary, we cannot understand much about the Passion of Christ. Christ’s physical sufferings, dreadful though they were, were small and superficial compared with his psychological and spiritual agony.

If we cringe at the thought of the tortures inflicted upon Him, if our hearts ache at the sight of the beatings and piercings, then we ought to feel utterly broken in the presence of his invisible torments.

They were invisible, but they become visible to the eye of one who meditates upon Mary. For Mary’s passion was entirely psychological and spiritual; it was completely invisible, yet so terrible that had Christ’s sufferings been merely of the body and not of the soul at all, then Mary’s agony would have been an agony more frightful than His.

We cannot begin to see into the depths of what Jesus sacrificed for us until we turn our minds into the heart of Mary to perceive what she endured in contributing to our redemption. It is not enough to say that Mary suffered the equivalent of death. She suffered more and worse than the equivalent of death.

Death has its bodily terrors, but the most terrible terror of death is the rending apart of a creature in his deepest depths; it is the separation of body and soul, compared with which nuclear fission is a mild and slight division.

Now the agony of Mary was an agony incomparably more dreadful than the rending of a man’s being by death. What death tears apart is an arrangement of nature; and that is a frightful tearing. But it is as nothing compared with the forcible separation of total love from total love.

And that was what happened when Our Lady was separated from her Son. Mary’s whole matchless being, capable of unthinkably greater love than any other creature, was utterly in love with her Son.

To be separated from her Son, to see her Son reviled and wounded, was for her worse than an eternal succession of physical deaths. Indeed, it is impossible to understand how Mary’s physical heart endured the sight of the tormented Christ without physically breaking and bringing on bodily death.

I personally would speculate that her heart was miraculously preserved from breaking.

However that may be, what Mary endured was of the type of what Christ endured in the Garden of Gethsemane, when His human nature was so inexpressibly tormented by His horror of sin that He sweat blood.

It does not seem to me that Our Lady’s body, unless divinely sustained, could have survived the spiritual and psychological torture she endured in seeing her Son led to execution in unthinkable suffering. I think that God’s intervention must have been necessary to keep her from dying on the spot when she met Jesus on His way to Calvary.

We approach now the depths of this matter. For not only did Mary endure a million deaths upon millions of deaths, but she never for a moment doubted God and God’s goodness. Not for an instant did she rebel. Not even remotely did she allow her faith to be shaken. Her will never turned the tiniest fraction of an inch from her utter consecration to God and to God’s inscrutable purposes.

In the midst of a spiritual agony which ought to have shaken the universe into chaos, she freely gave her Son for our redemption. She gave Him back to the impenetrable purposes of God from Whom He had come to her. She made, willingly, indomitably, and with a courage that makes the mind reel, the incomparably, most supreme sacrifice of which it is possible for any created being to be capable.

Mary gave absolutely everything, she sacrificed all, she held nothing for herself, because her all, her everything, was Christ.

And as I said, she did not snivel. She indulged in no theatrics. Not once did she cry out that this was too much, that she could not stand it, that to ask this of her was asking more than flesh and blood could endure.

There on the way to Calvary, two beings of unthinkable nobility looked into each other’s eyes and faced squarely, without the slightest retreat or deviation, the most awful duty of which it is possible to conceive.

Christ and Mary had a work to do. They had a world to save. They had a spiritual family to bring forth in unutterable anguish. Upon them fell the grinding, crushing labor of giving birth to the children of God who are to share with God His own divine life and happiness forever and forever.

That was their task, the task of Jesus and Mary; and although it meant for each of them such suffering and rending as is utterly outside the grasp of the human mind, they proceeded to it bravely, without the slightest outcry of protest.

This indeed was nobility. This indeed was royalty. Christ and Mary did not shrink from, nor complain about, taking up your burden and my burden and everybody’s burden.

They simply took up the burdens without question because they loved not themselves and their comforts, but God and their fellowmen.

And this is what we must try to learn from them – the hidden merciful designs of God, which come out of His infinite love and wisdom, not for our destruction, but for our perfection and glorification.

bzznbsdivline

For the guys: “The bright husband will never relinquish the prerogative of being a gentleman. Thoughtfulness is his watch word. A kindness here and a consideration there go a long way to promote companionship with his wife. The opening of a car door for her, helping her with her coat, seating her at table, these and a dozen other little actions evidence his tenderness for her. She is precious to him, so he surrounds her with attentions.”

-Fr. Leo Kinsella, 1950’s http://amzn.to/2nypip6

bzznbsdivline

You will find this book fascinating! Rev. Ronald Knox puts down his intimate thoughts about the Mass….and he puts it in simple, readable language, as his audience was a group of school girls! It will give much meditation on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass….from the Introit to the Last Gospel!

From more info read the reviews on Amazon here.

The Mass in Slow Motion

bzznbsdivline

m of grace

Rose Garden “Queen of the Home” Apron! Feminine and Beautiful!

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Little Lady’s Charming Crocheted Garden Party/Church-Going Hat!

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Nailed to the Cross…A Fruitful Meditation

22 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Leanevdp in Family Life, Parenting, Spiritual Tidbits

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

joseph breig, Lenten meditation

12112275_1520896404593529_7807526397903463703_n

From The Stations of the Cross and Their Relation to Family Life

By Joseph A. Breig

It is a fruitful meditation for a parent to think of his own son or daughter nailed to the cross. This does not mean that my child is substituted for Christ, but that through my child–through my love for my child–I am brought closer to Christ.

We parents must learn that it is not our vocation–as it is the vocation of some few–to go to God by forsaking others. Our vocation is to go to God through the embracing of others. From love of those who are ours, we are to deepen our love of Him Whose we are.

Christian marriage does not mean that a husband and wife love each other with one love and Christ with another love. They are to love Christ and each other with the same love, and indeed with the same kind of love. There are not really various sorts of love; if we know what love is, there is one love only.

Love is not the physical embracing of another. The embracing is, or ought to be, an expression of love; and if it is not that, then it is not what it ought to be. If a husband and wife do not love each other in God and in accordance with God’s rights over us, then what they feel for each other is not truly love at all.

To love (let us mark it well) is to desire the good of the beloved, and to endeavor to bring that good to pass. But the beloved’s truest good is to live in the friendship of God; in oneness with Christ. Christian marriage, then, is a state of life in which two who truly love each other, in the true meaning of love, assist each other to love Him by obedience to Him.

For the husband, then, the wife is a door into holiness; she is a way to God; and for his wife, the husband is a path to sanctity. In the Sacrament of Matrimony, husband and wife are to cooperate with Christ in each other’s sanctification. Why else, pray, did Christ raise marriage to the dignity of a sacrament; why else did he make it one of the channels through which He pleases to dispense His divine grace?

This is not to destroy, nor to whittle away, the bodily aspects of life together in marriage. To the contrary; the joy of the coming together of husband and wife cannot be as great and as unalloyed as it ought to be unless consciences are clear.

If there is anything of spiritual reproach in married love, their married love will not give the happiness it ought to give. Nor will it confer the unity it is intended to confer–the unity, the peace, the harmony, the serenity which ought to be its fruits.

This harmony and serenity of husband and wife are the deepest foundation for the happiness of the family. How many, many children live in a deep unease, rebelling against what they know not, because their father and mother are not united in Christ, or at least imagine that they are not united in Christ!

“Imagine that they are not united in Christ.” This is a real and painful condition in our day of the opposite errors of puritanism and hedonism. Many a husband and wife are prevented, either by prudery or by the prevailing over-emphasis upon sex, from finding in marriage the joy and the security-in-God that this great sacrament was instituted to give them.

Either they enter into their giving of each other with consciences stricken by rigorism, or they expect more of their giving than even this great giving can give. In the one case, they feel guilty; in the other, they feel cheated. No; the Christian husband and wife must acquire the Christian attitude of mind toward marriage, if they are to find in marriage the depths of joy and goodness which they ought to find there.

Marriage, the Sacrament of Matrimony, is first a union of souls. Husband and wife love each other; not in the modern mistaken meaning of being “in love,” but in the right meaning that they are prepared to serve each other, to defend each other, to sacrifice for each other, to work together in mutual well-wishing for success in marriage.

Out of the union of souls, out of this true love of each other, comes the union of bodies; and each union contributes constantly to the perfecting and deepening of the other.

Husband and wife must understand that Matrimony, like the other sacraments, was earned for us by Christ on the cross. It was not a niggling and fearful thing that He wished to confer upon us–and did confer. No; Christ desires that marriage shall be generous, and that husband and wife understand that their mutual giving is good and pleasing to Him. He wants husband and wife to see each other as pathways to Him; He wants them walking hand in hand, and heart in heart, toward Him.

If we are to see Christ in the least of His brethren, are we not to see Him in our own husbands and wives? Indeed, it is in our husbands and wives, in the Sacrament of Matrimony, that we ought to see Christ most clearly and intimately.

Marriage is its own vocation, and into it we are to throw ourselves with the same kind of dedication and self-abandonment that we expect of a priest in his vocation.

For the husband, his wife and children are Christ most closely and immediately. Wife and children are his vocation; his way to holiness. It is a lesser vocation than the religious vocation, in the same sense that a man is a little less than an angel.

But this does not mean that a man is not a marvelous being; and it does not mean that marriage is not a marvelous vocation. And as a man or woman, in the order of grace, can rise higher than an angel, so can a husband and wife rise higher, in the order of grace–in the Sacrament of Matrimony–than this or that priest or Sister in another vocation.

We are not to be comparing our way of life, we wives and husbands, with the way of life of those in religion. We are not to be comparing our way of life with any other way. Our task is to devote ourselves to our own way wholeheartedly, with full trust in God’s grace and providence, and with the fullest possible realization of the sublimity of our own vocation.

Nobody, really, goes directly to God. Everybody must go through certain channels and in some service to fellowmen. The way to God for husband and wife is through each other and their children, and in love of them and service to them. That is why it is a fruitful meditation to think of one’s own son or daughter on the cross.

Our sons and daughters are given to us in order that we may help them to salvation, and they us. A parent thinking of one of his children on the cross can come closer to Christ; can understand much more of what Christ suffered for us, can be more intimately united with Christ in His Passion.

And certainly the parent can better understand, while thinking of his own child crucified, what Mary sacrificed for us.

In this kind of meditation, parents can find the true wisdom of marriage and the family. Making the Way of the Cross, and thinking of their beloved own children, they can more clearly and poignantly think of Christ, and love Christ and thank Him for His goodness.

Then, returning home, a husband can look upon his wife and children, or a wife upon her husband and children, and see Christ in them, and grasp something of the nobility and the deep goodness of Christian marriage and family life.

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Valuable lessons are learned when a family works together. A child learns to respect authority. He becomes independent, does not expect others to pave the way before him, but learns that working is part of earning his way. The discipline he develops will be invaluable to him all through his life. -Finer Femininity

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