Gerard David – The Wedding Feast at Cana
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. Ephesians 5:25-27
***Warning*** I have written some graphic content in this piece. This is not for children.
In my prayer, as I am sure many people have also felt, the Lord has impressed upon me the importance, to an overwhelming degree on my soul, of marriage.
You all know I have been taking classes on Kingdom and Covenant. I learned a lot in this last class discussing marriage. In learning about covenant, we understand that a blood sacrifice is made, and we know that the Eucharist is the most Sacred and Profound covenant God made with us. His own Son giving us His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. We are able to renew this covenant every single day at Mass.
Jesus gave us this outward sign of His love when he stated, “This is my body given up for you.” And we know that the Mass is known as the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. His outward gift of love presented to us, and we, the Bride of Christ (whether male or female) receive this gift of love.
Have you ever wondered about that marriage analogy? About the fact that Jesus spoke of it? Marriage must be important to God.
And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. Mark 2:19-20
Like the Eucharistic covenant, marriage is also covenant. Two Sacraments gifted to us by God. Now bear with me for a moment because I am going to get R rated here to some people, though what I am going to say is meant to show the beauty of God’s creation. The covenant of Sacramental Marriage is written in the very body of the man and woman. When a man, in love with his wife, is passionate for her, his very body has the outward expression of this. And a woman can see it. On his wedding night, a groom says with his body, “this is my body given up for you”. An outward expression of love for his wife. Additionally, since marriage is covenant and covenant requires blood sacrifice, when a a virginal woman sheds blood on her wedding night through intercourse (hymen breaking), this shedding of her blood, is just as a covenant sacrifice, and the covenant is made. Her body receives him, receives his love. A husband and wife renew this covenant again and again throughout their marriage. And the two become one flesh.
No longer two but one. These couples together, when they center their lives on Christ, their power grows exponentially. Where one puts 1000 to flight, two puts 10,000.
“How could one man chase a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, unless the LORD had given them up?” Deuteronomy 32:30
This is why the devil tries SO HARD to pervert sexuality. If he can do this he perverts the beauty of the Sacramental covenant God created. When marriage is strong societies flourish and spread love, joy and beauty. The devils goal is to destroy. And in our day and age, he set his sights on the destruction of marriage.
When we have sex outside of marriage, we give a part of ourselves away. Pre-marital sex takes part of our soul and gives it to another. Then, when we enter into marriage later, we only can give what we have left of ourselves, it is not a complete giving, because of what was left behind. When we are not whole from the start, it makes it harder to live a Godly marriage. Sex before marriage is a way that we actually can destroy other souls and our own soul. I think this is why God impressed upon me how deadly of a sin lust is.
The devil wants to pervert what God created beautiful as much as he possibly can. This is why he tries to get you to have as much sex as possible before you’re married and as little as possible with your spouse after you are married. Having sex a lot in marriage is healthy and powerful in the eyes of God because just like we renew Eucharistic covenant in Mass every day, we also renew the marriage covenant each time we have sex with our spouse. But the devil has attacked marriage from every angle; divorce, pornography, masturbation, prostitution, contraception, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, you name it, he has thought of it and tried to attack us with it.
But lest ye despair, especially if you were one that committed these sins of perversion, you must know that our God is powerful enough to overcome your sins.
When Saint Paul was in Corinth, he was preaching to a people that worshipped Aphrodite. Every woman was required at some point to be a temple sex slave. Paul was preaching to whores and whoremongers. Men and women who worshipped a goddess of sex. And yet he said this to them;
“I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him.” 2 Corinthians 11:2
How could he say this to them? How could he promise them to Christ as pure virgins? Paul could promise this because Paul knows Christ is a RESTORER who can DELIVER you.
If you have these past sins and you’re struggling in your marriage, Christ can deliver you. Ask God to show you where you need healing. Confess your sexual sins, forgive yourself, forgive those who took a part of you, and ask God to close those doors where the devil has an entrance to attack your marriage. Christ can make you whole again. You can be presented as pure before Christ. The church shows us the way. Confession is healing.
If you don’t have these sins, ask God to protect your purity everyday. Hand Him your purity to guard.
We must all of us get on our knees and pray for marriage. For our own, and for others. May God make us holy and pure.
Veil of Veronica 
Reblogged this on Pierced Hearts.
Wow! I have often said while being pregnant for our nine children..this is my body which I have given up for you.”…I think it is the woman who gives her body, in sacrifice for her husband and children. During delivery it is a blood and water sacrifice as from the side of Jesus after his crucifixion, blood and water flow in giving new life..ouch !
Yes. The woman gives her body to him for sure. That blood and water sacrifice made for children too. God always layers meaning in things. But the covenant sacrifice is supposed to be on the wedding night.
I surely agree on the wedding night and renewing of that covenant ! There sure are many ways to compare the Eucharist and Marriage. I had often talked to God about the sacrifices in marriage, during my child bearing years, and He has talked to me about the comparison of the priesthood and the Eucharist in reply- which helped me continue to accept children lovingly from the Lord the Giver of Life and helped me appreciate His sacrifical life and His Eucharist even more Thank you so much for these very real and profound spiritual thoughts on the convents of the Eucharist and Marriage !
A mother of many..
Thank you. Yes it seems that God reveals these things! I wrote about The Eucharist and the Priesthood here and it seems to mirror your prayers; https://veilofveronica.blog/2017/12/24/the-incarnation-the-eucharist-and-the-all-male-priesthood/
May God Bless you!
That is so Beautiful ! I must follow you more closely !
A thought came to me lately that because we receive the DNA of Jesus in the Eucharist, as you confirmed, do we also not receive the DNA of Mary, since Jesus got his humanity from Mary ? If so, this makes us children of Mary too, not just spiritually but humanly speaking, in our bodies… ?
Yes isn’t that beautiful. Jesus got all of His Humanity, so His DNA from her, when you think of that in the Eucharist it really shows communion and it’s breathtaking.
wow…I never thought of the whole wedding night thing as a blood covenant… what a profound idea to dwell on…everything on this earth requires some kind of blood sacrifice, and you have seemed to link up all the puzzle pieces bit by bit in my head over the posts…
I know I keep saying this, but thank you! I’m so incredibly thankful that I found your blog. I think I needed to read this and pray more for my husband and for others.
Thank you. Much of what I learned comes from my friend Jansen…. and Ashley and all of us as the Body of Christ….so it’s God who deserves the credit because he reveals things to each of us. To God Be the Glory.
I believe God is inspiring His people to help teach what has been lacking in the Body of Christ. Thank you for your time, knowledge and joint help.
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful reminder. As a society, even as Christians, we have forgotten the beauty and sanctity of marriage. We must allow the Lord to work through our marriages and our hearts to touch those living in darkness.
With love and blessings,
Bernadette
Thank you and God Bless you
I wish we as Catholics weren’t so squeamish about meditating on these truths. We have such a richly sensual (which does encompass sexuality as a subheading) faith, but we look like puritans half the time! Thank you for beautifully and respectfully sharing these mediations on the covenant of marriage.
Susan, feel free to delete this comment, it’s mostly for you.
St Thomas Aquinas teaches about the virtue of modesty, which goes far beyond simply the way we dress. It concerns our bearing, our thoughts, and the words and subjects we speak of in common.
There are some things of which we ought never to speak in an open forum out of modesty and propriety; and some of the “R-rated” (your term) material you have touched upon here should not have been written about in a public blog.
I was very upset about one or two things I read and then I stopped reading.
The intimate relations of a man and women are so sacred and so subject to disordered passion and to temptations in the imagination if treated in this manner, that they should be kept behind the veil of sacrality and mystery and not spoken of freely amongst ourselves, in the very same exact way we would not speak of some of the most intimate dealings between our soul and God.
My spiritual director once used this analogy when explaining to me that certain things should not be discussed openly, such as the intimate things of God and those of marriage.
Saint Thomas Aquinas’ teaching on the virtue of modesty shows how this virtue applies to our faculties, speech, discretion, etc.
Marie, I appreciate your feedback. And your purity. And it is precisely why I gave a warning on what I wrote. The reason I wrote it was because though people like you have a solid understanding of Saint Thomas, I am dealing with people at work who are addicted to pornography. They have absolutely no understanding of marriage, of sexuality, of what sacredness they hold in their bodies. And no one ever taught them. As a mother that fought explicit sex education I totally understand what you are saying. But you also must realize what a deficit our society is in already when the average age of seeing pornography is 9. Yes, 9. And it isn’t because they read my blog. My intent was to show the sacredness of it by explaining how it is written in our bodies. I was very careful with the language I used. Only naming one body part. Similar to Song of Songs, Which also talks about body parts and shows the beauty of what God created. I am sorry you were offended and God Bless you for your purity. You can feel free to unfollow if I offended you that much.
It looks like my first reply was lost… I simply said that I didn’t read further so perhaps the rest of the article makes the case for it.
I find it disturbing when Catholics use carnal, sexual imagery in describing our relationship with God. The Song of Song’s (one of my favorites) certainly never refers to the conjugal act nor even comes close, let alone describing it.
I don’t believe fallen human nature is capable of transcending with perfect purity in using more graphic analogies to one’s relationship with God.
I wasn’t offended (there’s so much victimhood going on today ;-), but rather simply disturbed by what I read, since I try to keep such imagery out of my thoughts.
When I read the Song of Songs I’m never even conscious of it on a physical level in the analogies used, but rather immediately transcend to the spiritual meaning. I believe it’s because the scriptures are infused with grace and raise the soul to a different level. That privilege and protection is not granted to blogs. 😉
I know people who read Song of Songs and find it extremely sensual in both the spiritual and physical way. After all we are both spiritual and physical. And yes God transcends all of it, yet He uses the marriage analogy to help us understand our relationship with Him. A communion. And one other observation, we have sex education in our schools, where it has absolutely no business being, precisely because we had a generation of angry people who were never told about sex. I have met MANY of them. And argued with them. They were forced to learn, “on the streets” so to speak, which is where you definitely do not learn the sacredness of our bodies. I was attempting to redirect back towards the Sacred, which 99 percent of the people I come across know nothing about. The absence of speaking of what our bodies are created for actually cultivated more sin because the pendulum swung too far the other direction. There is a happy medium in speaking of it. And our bodies were created for this marital covenant. That’s what I was addressing. I appreciate your feedback and will pray about it.
One more thing, it is not sinful to think of your own husband in a sexual way. It’s actually what makes you closer.
Susan, my observations have nothing to do with the thoughts of a wife towards her husband.
Rather it addresses the concern about using the carnal imagery of the conjugal act as an image of our relationship with God, which it is not.
We should confine ourselves to the imagery which our Lord himself uses… “A wedding Feast of the Lamb… Behold I stand at the door and knock, if anyone opens to Me my Father and I will come in and sup with him.”
If anything the conjugal act refers to the internal relationship of the Most Holy Trinity. The gift of his Father to the Son, anf the Son to the Father generating a Third person, the Holy Spirit in utter purity.
This is an image of the human marriage, the gift of each other to one another producing a third person from their love. To go further and to describe in graphic terms other aspects of this sexual relationship is to go too far in my opinion.
What you say about some finding the Song of Songs so sensual is precisely to the point. If they stumble on the Song of Songs, how much more dangerous is it to transfer the imagery of the marital act onto our relationship with God, something the scriptures never, ever dare to do.
Given our fallen nature, it cannot but vitiate our understanding of the unimaginably pure ad lofty image of a soul’s Union with God.
Again, I had to stop early on in the article because I found some of the imagery disturbing. Perhaps I’m not addressing your points precisely.
Yes I think you’re reading into something I didn’t say. And you’re missing the whole point of the article which is how Sacred marriage is.
One other thought… The human race has existed at least for 6,000 years without the benefit of formal sex education. I find the “anger” some have to the fact that they had to learn about sex “on the street” patently absurd.
Even Saint Therese the Little Flower said she knew about The Facts of Life simply from observing nature. Her sisters were very surprised but it was nonetheless true. It’s in her Last Conversations.
That’s very dismissive of the trauma some people experienced. Not everyone is as contemplative as St Therese.
I learned about it in the Girls’ Room when I was in 3rd grade – totally uninvited and unexpected. It was pretty traumatic. The point I am making is that once one has the Faith one transcends and exercises modesty in these matters. That’s all….
I am a mother of nine and a retired RN.
So many have been damaged by a lack of understanding of what God’s purpose for sexuality was and IS. Saint John Paul the Great explains human sexuality so well without shame or embarrassment since human SEXUALITY was SUPPOSED to be. ORIGINAL SIN interfered with this ideal and SHAME was one of the effects of the ORIGINAL sin….read these to get a notion of what Sexuality is in God;s eyes…as in the Song of Songs,,it is about enjoying this wonderfulCREATIVE power IMPRINTED in our bodies.. https://stmarys-waco.org/documents/2016/9/theology_of_the_body.pdf
http://loveundefiled.blogspot.ca/2010/06/what-karol-wojtyla-later-pope-john-paul.html
“Before he was Pope, the then Karol Wojtyla said in the book, Love and Responsibility that men must take into account that sexual climax should be reached in harmony, rather than just the man alone. As arousal in a woman rises and falls more slowly, a man must take this into account to avoid selfishness
Wojtyla said that if a husband is to truly love his wife, he should not allow intercourse merely allow to serve his climax. He must take the difference between the sexes into account. He
should attempt the climax to occur simultaneously. This should not be for hedonistic reasons, but
for altruistic reasons. Men have a shorter and more violent arousal, for this reason an act of virtue is
required for patience and self giving in the sexual act. Sexual arousal in a woman is more slow. It is
a virtuous act to contain your own climax to help bring your own wife to a simultaneous climax. It
is possible to seek pleasure of the other for altruistic reasons in service. This is a more and more
accurate symbol of the eternal joys that are to come in heaven.
John Paul said that it was possible for a man to commit adultery against his own wife. This was far outside the traditional understanding of adultery. This is in line with Jesus, who said that anyone who looked at a woman lustfully committed adultery with his own heart.
John Paul decided with the restoration of the Sistine Chapel that the original version of naked Adam should be shown as Michelangelo intended. Several hundred years ago a Vatican official had decided to cover up Adam’s nakedness with by the use of a painted leaf. John Paul decided to return to the original as purity is the glory of the human body before God.”
I believe John Paul the Great would love your explanation of the COVENANT of the marital act.
WE need to be less ashamed and more bold to speak about such beauty and sacrifice to this generation who have never been taught about the Holiness of marital bliss.
Thank you.
Amen
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