Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family

Yesterday, the Church inaugurated the
Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
The gathering will last from Sunday, October 5 to Sunday, October 19,
and will focus on "The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization."

Today we've gathered six resources from Fr. Robert Barron on marriage
and the family to study as this imporant conversation takes place.
Enjoy!

Fr. Robert Barron

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Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family 2-1410

The Family is a Little Church
Fr. Robert Barron

There are, to be sure, family values on display in the Bible,
but they’re probably not the ones we would naturally expect.
We might in fact be taken aback when we see just how harsh,
blunt, and demanding are most Biblical accounts of family relations.
We tend to be rather sentimental when it comes to families (especially this time of year),
and there’s nothing wrong with warm family feelings.
But the Scriptural attitude toward families isn’t sentimental;
it’s theological and mission-focused.

A prime example of this unique Biblical perspective is a passage
from the first book of Samuel. We hear of Hannah, a devout Israelite woman who,
to her deep chagrin and embarrassment, was not able to bear children.
Every year, she went to the temple at Shiloh to pray for the grace of pregnancy.
Once, she was praying with such passion and with so many tears that Eli the
priest assumed that she was drunk and was making a shameful display.
Displaying less than exemplary pastoral sensitivity, he said,
“how long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself?
Put away your wine!” Can you imagine a more miserable scenario for Hannah?
But she stood her ground, protesting, “No, my Lord, I am a woman deeply troubled;
I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink,
but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.”
Then she told Eli precisely how she had been entreating the Lord:
“O Lord of hosts, if ony you will look on the misery of your servant…
but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before
you as a nazirite until the day of his death.”
A nazarite was an ancient Israelite version of a monk,
a person completely dedicated to God.

We then hear that the Lord heard Hannah’s prayer and in due time
she conceived and bore a son, whom she named “Samuel,” which means,
“asked of the Lord.” When the child was weaned, his mother
fulfilled her vow and brought him to the temple. She gave Samuel
to Eli and told the priest to raise the child in the temple as a man of God.
We can only begin to conceive the anguish Hannah must have felt as
she offered back to Yahweh the child whom she had begged from
the Lord with such intensity. In time, of course, Samuel grew to
be one of the most powerful and important prophets in Israel,
the one who anointed both Saul and David and set thereby the
history of salvation in a decisively new direction.

With that story in mind, we turn to the well-known passage which is
the Gospel reading, in Cycle C, for the feast of the Holy Family.
After their visit to Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph, along with
a bevy of their family and friends, were heading home to Nazareth.
They presumed that the child Jesus was somewhere among his
relatives in this caravan. Instead, he was in the temple of the Lord,
conversing the elders and masters of the law. Distraught,
Mary and Joseph spent three days looking for him.
Any parent who has ever searched for a lost child knows
the anguish they must have felt. Can you imagine what it
was like as they tried to sleep at night, spinning out the worst
scenarios in their minds? When they finally find him, they,
with understandable exasperation, upbraid him: “Child,
why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and
I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”
But Jesus responds with a kind of devastating laconicism:
“Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that
I must be in my Father’s house?”

Both stories convey a truth that runs sharply counter to our sensibilities,
namely, that even the most powerful familial emotions and sentiments must,
in the end, give way to mission. Though they felt an enormous pull in
the opposite direction, both Hannah and Mary let their sons go,
allowing them to find their vocation in the temple, which is to say,
in the space of God. Legitimate sentiment devolves into
sentimentality precisely when it comes to supersede the call of God.
Both narratives disclose that, on a Biblical reading,
the family is, above all, the forum in which both parents and
children are able to discern their missions. It is perfectly good,
of course, if deep bonds and rich emotions are cultivated
within the family, but those relationships and passions
must cede to something that is more fundamental, more enduring,
more spiritually focused.

This Biblical prioritization of values helps us to see, in fact,
what typically goes wrong with families. When something other
than mission is dominant—a son’s athletic achievement,
a daughter’s success at university, a child’s emotional reliance on her parents,
etc.—family relationships actually become strained.
The paradox is this: precisely in the measure that everyone
in the family focuses on God’s call for one another the family
becomes more loving and peaceful. John Paul II admirably
summed up what I’ve been driving at when he spoke of the
family as an “ecclesiola” (a little church). At its best,
he implies, the family is a place where God is worshipped
and where the discernment of God’s mission is of paramount importance.

I know it seems strange to say, but the most loving thing
that family members can do is to let each other go—for God’s service.

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Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family 2-1410

Marriage and Relationships

Fr. Robert Barron

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Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family 2-1410

Reflecting on Biblical Family Values

Fr. Robert Barron

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Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family 2-1410

Sex, Love, and God: The Catholic Answer to Puritanism and Nietzcheanism
Fr. Robert Barron

Many of the Catholic Church’s teachings are vilified in both the
high and popular cultures, but none more than its doctrines
concerning marriage and sexuality. Time and again,
the Church’s views on sex are characterized as puritanical,
life denying and hopelessly outdated — holdovers from the Bronze Age.
Above all, critics pillory the Church for setting unreasonable
limits to the sexual freedom of contemporary people. Church leaders,
who defend traditional sexual morality, are parodied as versions of
Dana Carvey’s “church lady” — fussy, accusatory,
secretly perverse and sex-obsessed.

Let me respond first to the charge of puritanism.
Throughout the history of religion and philosophy,
a puritanical strain is indeed apparent. Whether it manifests
itself as Manichaeism, Gnosticism or Platonic dualism,
the puritanical philosophy teaches that spirit is good and matter
is evil or fallen. In most such schemas, the whole purpose of life
is to escape from matter, especially from sexuality, which so
ties us to the material realm. But authentic Biblical Christianity is
not puritanical. The Creator God described in the book of Genesis
made the entire panoply of things physical — planets, stars,
the moon and sun, animals, fish and even things that creep
and crawl upon the earth — and found all of it good, even very good.
Accordingly, there is nothing perverse or morally questionable about
bodies, sex, sexual longing or the sexual act. In fact, it’s just
the contrary. When, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself
is asked about marriage and sexuality, he hearkens back to
the book of Genesis and the story of creation: “At the beginning
of creation God made them male and female; for this reason a
man shall leave his father and mother and the two shall become as one.
They are no longer two but one flesh” (Mk. 10:6-8).
That last sentence is, dare I say it, inescapably “sexy.”
Plato might have been a puritan, and perhaps John Calvin too,
but Jesus most certainly was not.

So given this stress on the goodness of sex and sexual pleasure,
what separates the Christian view from, say, the “Playboy” philosophy?
The simple answer is that, for Biblical people, sexuality must be
placed in the wider context of love, which is to say willing the good of the other.
It is fundamental to Catholic spirituality and morality that everything
in life must be drawn magnetically toward love, must be
conditioned and transfigured by love. Thus,
one’s business concerns must be marked by love,
lest they devolve into crass materialism; and one’s relationships
must be leavened by love, lest they devolve into occasions
for self-interested manipulation; even one’s play must be directed toward love,
lest it devolve into mere self-indulgence. Sex is no exception to this rule.
The goodness of sexual desire is designed, by its very nature,
to become ingredient in a program of self-forgetting
love and hence to become something rare and life enhancing.
If you want to see what happens when this principle is ignored,
take a long hard look at the hookup culture prevalent among many
young — and not so young — people today. Sex as mere recreation,
as contact sport, as a source only of superficial pleasure has produced
armies of the desperately sad and anxious, many who have no idea
that it is precisely their errant sexuality that has produced such deleterious effects in them.
When sexual pleasure is drawn out of itself by the magnetic attraction of love,
it is rescued from self-preoccupation.

Now there is a third step as well, for human love must be situated in
the context of divine purpose. Once Jesus clarified that male and
female are destined to become one flesh, he further specified that
“What God has joined together,” no human being should put asunder.
When I was working full time as a parish priest, I had the privilege
of preparing many young couples for marriage. I would always ask them,
“Why do you want to be married in church?” After some hesitation,
the young people would invariably respond with some version of “Well,
we’re in love,” to which I would respond, “I’m delighted that you’re in love,
but that’s no reason to be married in church!” My point was that entering
into a properly sacramental marriage implied that the bride and groom
realized that they had been brought together by God and precisely for
God’s reasons, that their sexuality and their mutual love were in
service of an even higher purpose. To make their vows before
a priest and a Catholic community, I would tell them, was tantamount
to saying that they knew their relationship was sacramental — a vehicle
of God’s grace to the wider world. This final contextualization
guaranteed that sexuality — already good in itself and already
elevated by love — had now something truly sacred.

Our culture has become increasingly Nietzchean, by which
I mean obsessed with the power of self-creation.
This is why toleration is the only objective value that many people recognize,
and why freedom, especially in the arena of sexuality, is so highly prized.
It is furthermore why attempts to contextualize sex within higher
frameworks of meaning are so often mocked as puritanism or fussy antiquarianism.
Thank God that, amidst the million voices advocating self-indulgent sexuality,
there is at least the one voice of the Catholic Church shouting “No,”
a no in service of a higher Yes!

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Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family 2-1410

Gay Marriage and the Breakdown of Moral Argument
Fr. Robert Barron

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Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family 2-1410

Savvy Headhunters and the Hookup Culture
Fr. Robert Barron

I first came across the term “hookup culture” in Leonard Sax’s thought
provoking and disturbing 2005 book, Why Gender Matters.
But the phenomenon itself I found beautifully depicted in a novel published
a year earlier: Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons.
As Sax specifies, the hookup mentality—prevalent among even some
very young people but especially among university students—dictates
that casual sexual encounters involving absolutely no
expectation of relationship, or even psychological engagement,
are perfectly acceptable. Sax, a psychiatrist specializing in family therapy,
learned of the hookup world from the veritable army of young
women suffering from depression and anxiety who were
streaming to his office. And through the figure of Charlotte Simmons—an
innocent girl from North Carolina who utterly lost her way morally
and psychologically at a prestigious university where casual sex
and drugs were far more important than learning—Wolfe showed the
debilitating effects of this self-absorbed and hedonistic culture.

Now it would seem self-evident that such permissiveness, though prevalent,
is morally problematic and something to be decried rather than
celebrated. But peruse an article titled “Boys on the Side” in
the most recent edition of “The Atlantic” in order
to find a dissenting opinion. According to Hanna Rosin, the hookup mentality is,
in point of fact, a great boon to women. She allows that lots
of books and studies have pointed out the dark side
of the hookup culture, the deep frustration and humiliation that can follow from
transient sexual encounters, but she insists that steady questioning
of typical young women today would reveal that none of them really wants
a return to traditional morality. She argues, “For most women,
the hookup culture is like an island they visit, mostly during their
college years and even then only when they are bored or experimenting
or don’t know any better. But it is not a place where they drown.”
Why aren’t they destroyed by this sexual licentiousness? Rosin explains,
“The most patient and thorough research about the hookup culture
shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living
in a world where they can have sexual adventure
without commitment or all that much shame,
and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t get
in the way of future success.” One might think that prevalence of casual
sex would produce women who are sexual victims, but Rosin
contends that precisely the opposite is the case. Young women who
choose a variety of sexual partners and who assiduously steer
clear of pesky relationships are “managing their romantic lives
like savvy headhunters.” Instead of being manipulated
by powerful men, young ladies are happily becoming
adept at manipulation. And here is Rosin’s grand conclusion:
“The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous
about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence,
the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself.”

Now I would like you to concentrate on that last statement.
Notice how every virtue that Rosin cites—freedom, confidence,
self-reliance—is a subjective disposition. No one in his right
mind would contend that those attitudes are anything but good,
but they are good precisely in the measure that they order a person to
some objective value that lie outside of his subjectivity.
We savor freedom because it is the condition for the possibility
of pursuing the good in a responsible way; we think that confidence and
self-reliance are worthwhile, because they enable one
to achieve the good easily and joyfully. But if the question of
the objectively valuable is bracketed, then those subjective
dispositions lose their orientation and devolve, in point of fact,
into something quite destructive.

What struck me throughout Rosin’s article was the complete
absence of a reference to the objectively valuable in regard
to sexual behavior. The purpose of sex? The meaning of the sexual act?
The proper ethical, or dare I say religious, setting for sexuality?
Never mentioned—and apparently irrelevant. All that seems
to matter is that young people—especially young women—have
the opportunity to define themselves sexually however they want,
to “manage” their sexual activity “like savvy headhunters.”
Can I suggest that that last phrase is telling indeed?
When the realm of the objectively valuable is marginalized,
the subject will inevitably fall back on herself, stewing in her own juices.
And let’s be honest, left to our own devices, the vast majority of us
will do what is most convenient and most selfish. (The Church, by the way,
refers to this natural tendency toward self-absorption as
the principle effect of “original sin.”) In the arena of sexuality,
the one-sided stress on freedom and self-reliance will lead,
in very short order, to manipulation, domination and indifference to
relationship. But when the sexual impulse is ordered according
to the objective values of love, commitment,
marriage and the call of God, then it is transfigured into something radiant and rare.

The hookup culture is all about sexual freedom. However, it would be
wise to remember a line from Bob Dylan, “Freedom, just around
the corner from you/ but with truth so far off, what good would it do?”
Sexual liberty without objective value produces a lot of savvy headhunters,
but they will wind up in Dr. Sax’s office suffering from a deep sadness of the heart.

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Top 6 Resources on Marriage and the Family 2-1410

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