Fr. Salvador Gonzalez, OMI: “God’s Plan for the Couple.”

Originally Published in The Messenger, for Spanish-speaking people in the Diocese of Belleville   Click here to read the article en Español

God’s plan for the couple is a current and valid plan.

The origin of this plan is found in our Sacred Scriptures.

Genesis 2: 18-25 speaks of a path to which God calls and invites man and woman, a path to mature and to enter adult life. This path leads to the person making a leap of faith from a state of the single life, to unite to his partner and begin the road of becoming one flesh with each other. This is another form of being “born again” one could say.

This path from being “single” to being “united” requires the “leaving” the security and dependence of the parental home.

God is very specific about this movement of “leave” to “unite” a good 4 times in Scripture Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19: 5, Mark 10: 7 and Ephesians 5:31.

This requirement reads “this is why a man leaves father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.”

This plan is a plan of God for all time, so a man and a woman can achieve a good marriage. Without the plan of God, couples do not know how to build up their marriage and can easily loose themselves; they get frustrated and want to leave the road and quit the journey prematurely.

Here are some elements of this plan of God for the couple.

Leave

First, God’s plan for marriage is that the husband and wife must leave their parents. What does leaving their parents’ home mean?

Leaving the parents’ home means that your relationship with them must radically change, no longer a relationship of a dependent child but one of an adult. It means that henceforth the couple chooses and listens to the ideas, opinions and advice of the spouse rather than those of their parents. Communication and relationship between husband and wife becomes the path of holiness for the couple. The will of God is revealed in mutual dialogue between the couple. God speaks and reveals himself in the voice of the spouse.

The stage of being “married” and “leaving” parents means that the two, agree, and decide that their relationship takes precedence over every other human relationship.

Unite

The will of God for marriage is that the husband and wife together give themselves over to each other.  A mutual oblation of self to one another.  A marriage is based on a commitment, a response to an invitation from God to leave everything behind and become one flesh out of the two.

Marriage according to God means that the spouse knows he and she are not alone on this path of re-creation. The couple knows that they can and must rely on God and this way be born again as a one new flesh. This process of adhering to each other is not a fast one; it takes place today, tomorrow and forever. God gives us all the graces necessary for this process through; the prayer of the couple, the Sacraments of the Church and through the people of God.