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#516 Marriage (and Children): The Primordial Sacrament...A Letter To My Grandchildren (and yours!) · Claymore: Become Who You Are

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: I'm Jack Brigger, your host.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: I hope you're doing well.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Such a beautiful morning, watching the sun come up early in the morning, just beautiful.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: The awe and wonder, and I started to think about how creation reflects something of God.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: All of creation is a sacrament meaning.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: It makes visible something about God, putting us in touch every morning, the sun, in touch with the creator, who's always truthful, always goodness, always beauty and especially the beauty of love.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: If you think about nature and the sun, it repeats itself.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: It comes up in different ways, different looks, never the same, but it's always telling us the truth of the bridegroom, the eternal bridegroom.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: The God who created us is going to be faithful.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: His truth, his wisdom, his goodness, his beauty doesn't change.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: It continually comes up, reminding us that you know he's not a person of moral relativism.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: You know he has eternal truths within him.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: So I just sat there watching that sun come up, thinking about you know, it's not the sun and the stars and nature that's bringing all this craziness and havoc, it's the human heart, and this is why it's so important just to sit in silence sometimes.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: So I open my heart in silence, and of course it's not pure silence.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I hear the birds starting to sing, and I was just taken up with the birds singing, and then I felt a breeze, a slight breeze coming through.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Ooh, I missed all this.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: A breeze, a slight breeze coming through.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Ooh, I missed all this.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: And that's where Jesus in John, chapter three.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: He says the wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it's coming from and where it's going.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: So is everyone who's born of the spirit of the Holy Spirit.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: You know, we don't know, we don't understand the big story.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: We will someday, you know, but we didn't create the universe.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Isn't it amazing that man has become so prideful, right?
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: So we're so full of pride.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: We have a whole pride month now, and when you sit back and you absorb this, you realize how small you are, yet you're pulled into a greater story.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: God knows who you are.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: The wind is blowing.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: I don't know where it came from or where it's going, but that's how my heart is in the spirit.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: That's what Jesus said.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: So I don't know where God's going to take me, but I know I trust in him because I've been at this for a long time and I hope you can too and I just sat there in silence and then I thought back in my life.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Time passes so quickly.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: I have all these grandchildren now and you just go wow, where did it go?
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: All this worry, all this concern, all these things?
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: And I look back and I remember times where Jesus just plucked me up and just rescued me.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: So I just leaned back into his heart and I felt like I'm leaning back with John the apostle and I just said a couple of times Jesus, I trust in you, jesus, I trust in you.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: I thought back to the son again.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Psalm 19 is this beautiful psalm, talking about the bridegroom coming up from his chamber and speaking a little bit about this.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: When we think about the chaos in the world and stuff that's not coming from God, when we think about the chaos in the world and stuff that's not coming from God, it's called God's glory in the heavens and in the law.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: The heavens declare the glory of God.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: The sky proclaims its builder's craft.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: One day to the next conveys that message.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: One night to the next imparts that knowledge.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: There is no word or sound, no voice is heard.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Yet their report goes forth through all of the earth their message to the ends of the world.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: God has pitched their intent for the sun.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: It comes forth like a bridegroom, from its chamber and like an athlete, joyfully runs its course.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: From one end of the heavens it comes forth, it runs its course to the other.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Nothing escapes its heat.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: The decree of the Lord is trustworthy, giving wisdom to the simple.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: The command of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eye.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: The statues of the Lord are true, all of them just more desirable than gold, than a hoard of purest gold, sweeter also than honey or drippings from the comb.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: By them, your servant is instructed.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Obeying them brings much reward.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: And I thought back on my life.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: It's so true how the bridegroom coming up every morning to meet the earth, to meet the earth, is bride and all of us.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: It's just an analogy of when we go to mass, the bridegroom hanging on the cross who gives his life to his bride.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: But there's reflections of this all around.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: I just had Bishop Athanasius Schneider on the show.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: If you haven't seen that post to our website the video of that or listen on any podcast app.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: As you know, he wrote a book Flee from Heresies and we talked about through history.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: He's a historian too and we talked about the different heresies came up.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: So at one point I just said you know, are the times that we're in any different than this?
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: It's just another heresy.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: And he goes the times we're in today are unprecedented.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: And I said what do you mean unprecedented?
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: He said, in the past, when a heresy came up, say the Arian heresy in the fourth century, this was one heresy that the church had to fight and throughout history, that was one here, one there and the church would fight.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Now, now we've thrown out the truth, the truth.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: This is why I open up the way I did.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: You know, the sun's coming up.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: It's always going to show you that God's always going to bring the truth.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: He's not going to change this.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: The sun doesn't come up in the West one day, or it doesn't just not come up one day and we all freeze to death, right?
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: No, it comes up.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: If it doesn't come up the way it's supposed to, we're in big trouble, right?
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Well, he said, today we've thrown out that truth.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: We've thrown out the idea of moral goodness, we've thrown out beauty itself.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: And when you do all those things, you'll never find love.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Love will escape you, authentic love will escape you.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: So no objective truth.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: You know it's like a hydra.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: You know a hydra, the many-headed serpent, all attacking we talked about all at the same time, at all these different angles.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: So in a world like this you can float on the top of it.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: You know, staring at your little screens all day long, never getting to the heart, never sitting with God in the heart, never sitting back and watching the sun and the stars.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: If you think about it again, the sun and the stars, they don't cause the destruction.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: The destruction starts in the man's heart and so in a heart right, when evil is allowed to come in, destruction then starts in the world.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: So when we sit there with God in silence and say Jesus, I trust in you, he comes into your heart, he sits with you, he instructs you.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: How prideful is man?
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: We reject this God right, we go to Genesis 3.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: You know it's the oldest lie.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: Moral relativism is the oldest lie in the history of mankind Genesis 3.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: You can be like gods.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: You can call evil good and good evil.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Isn't this where we're at?
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: And so then my thoughts turned to my grandchildren, and the reason is the oldest one is in high school already and she flew by herself for the first time to visit relatives in Arizona.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: And I go, whoa, they're growing up so quickly.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: And the hydra, that hydra, that many-headed serpent, the greatest injustice, the greatest evil coming out of that is the attack on marriage and the family, but especially the focus on children, taking the most innocent and vulnerable among us, attacking that vulnerability and attacking their innocence.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: And so I decided to write them all a letter.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: So far I have seven grandchildren, six girls and a boy, and I think about, oh, how the culture just wants to twist and distort them.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: So I'll read it to you today.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: It's a lesson for all of us, I hope, and a lesson hopefully you can share with your children and your grandchildren.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: So listen today and they get a copy of it.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Read it, share it.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: I will post it in a newsletter this week.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Sign up for our newsletter on our website.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: You'll see that in the show notes, or perhaps both.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Sign up for my sub stack, where you'll be able to go and reference it anytime.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: So, sub stack, if you don't know, it's just a place where writers can write different things and you'll see some different things I posted through time, but anyways I'll post this there and you can pick up a copy at your will and share it.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: From there, everything will be in the show notes.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: And here is a letter to my grandchildren.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: A letter to my grandchildren.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: I titled this marriage and children, the primordial sacrament.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: It's always been a love story, dear grandchildren, what a gift.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: You all are, each unique and unrepeatable, yet united as family and sustained by love.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: Today I write you about marriage and children, the primordial or original sacrament.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: This is a letter that some of you are not yet old enough to read or understand, and that's okay.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: When you're ready, this letter will be waiting.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: In it you'll find described a timeless truth the awe and wonder of marriage and children, as it was always, since the very beginning, the original model that, despite the effect of the sins of fallen man, men and women, is still the basic building block or cell of every human society throughout history.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: Furthermore, it's good to remember, despite the folly and pride of modern man who would like to think otherwise, he did not create marriage any more than he created himself.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: There was a time, not long before you were born, that this was obvious to everyone.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: You, on the other hand, are growing up in an unprecedented time in human history, a time when man has redefined marriage, demanded the right to kill their own children and can no longer define what a woman is.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: All of this has shaken the very foundation of human civilization all over the world, and you, the most innocent and vulnerable, are experiencing the brunt of the resulting chaos.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: Almost from the time you could walk, there have been forces out to rob you of your innocence and replace in your heart what is objectively true, good and beautiful, especially the beauty of love, with a counterfeit, a lie.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: You are growing up in a milieu of subjective moral relativism, where man seeks to replace the creator and become the final arbiter of what is good or evil.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Today, the pride of man who has made himself God, has reached such a fevered pitch that children are continuously subjected to distortions about the very basics concerning the meaning of human life and dignity marriage, the family, authentic love, the true meaning of sex and sexuality and more.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: The family, authentic love, the true meaning of sex and sexuality.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: And more Particularly disturbing is the sexual indoctrination, grooming and desensitizing of your consciences in the government-run school system and through the tiny reflecting screens that you have been programmed to stare at for hours each day.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: I write this because it's important that you know that marriage and the children brought forth from the union of a father and mother is a very big deal.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: In fact, it's the original, foundational or primordial sacrament.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: In the beginning, before original sin and the steady barrage of the sins of fallen men and women, there was a pure, holy, cosmic explosion of love.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: What's more, there's an echo of this original love story in the beginning residing in each human heart, experienced often as a deep yearning, burning desire to love and be loved.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Jesus reminds us of this when he takes the people of his time, in this case religious leaders, back to the beginning when they question him on divorce.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: The Pharisees tested Jesus by asking is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: Jesus, instead of limiting himself to their line of questioning, points them back to the original model of marriage.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: He answered have you not read that he who made them from the beginning, made them male and female and said and for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: So they were no longer two, but therefore God has joined together.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: Let no man separate.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: The Bible begins with this word, the Hebrew word.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: After five days of creation, the Garden of Eden is ready.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: It's been meticulously prepared for a wedding feast.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Then, on the sixth day, god said let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: God created man in his image, in the divine image he created them.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: How Male and female.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: He created them.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Smiling upon the newly married couple.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: God blessed them, saying to them be fertile, multiply, fill the earth.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: This is from Genesis, chapter one Bring forth children, for they are very good.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: This is the very first thing that God chooses to say about us in the whole Bible that he created us in his image, in the divine image he created them.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Human beings, from the beginning, were created to be sacramental, a visible sign of God Trinitarian love in the created universe.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: John Paul II wrote this the human body, with its sex, its masculinity and femininity, seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and of procreation, as in the whole natural order, but contains from the beginning the spousal attribute that is, the power to express love, precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and, through this gift, fulfills the very meaning of his being and his existence.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: He went on to state his thesis that, when allowed to sink in, will revolutionize the way you understand the human body and sexuality.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: Here it is the body, and the body alone, john Paul said, is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and the divine.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial, and thus to be a sign of it.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: What is the mystery hidden in God that our bodies express and make visible?
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: God is love.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: God's very being is love.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: By sending his only son and the Holy Spirit of love in the fullness of time, god has revealed his innermost secret.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: God himself is an eternal exchange of love the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and he's destined us to share in that exchange.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: It's said another way the Father pours his love out to the Son.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: The Son receives this love and returns it, and it's so beautiful and profound.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: Proceeding from this exchange of love between them is a person, the Holy Spirit.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Then, turning towards creation, he says let's make a created version of the inner life of the Trinity.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: So God created man in his image.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: In the divine image, he created them, male and female.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: He created them.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Genesis 1, verse 27.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: See, god is not a sexual being, he's pure spirit.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: But he created us to be a tiny reflection of his image and likeness.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Which is what Of love in the created world?
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Since the beginning, a husband pours his love out to his wife, a wife receives his love and then returns it, and it's so beautiful and profound that, proceeding from this exchange of love, is a person, a child, in the marital embrace, the two, husband and wife, become one.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: In the marital embrace, the two, husband and wife, become one, and in the cosmic explosion of love, the two who have become one become three.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: When a child is conceived, reflected and at the same time united to the love of God, three persons in one.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: So that union and communion, where the two become one, become three, is a tiny reflection reflecting back up this Trinitarian love.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: At the same time, though, it's efficacious.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: It's being united to the love of God, who is also three persons in one, invited then to bring forth eternal sons and daughters who will be with us and with God for all eternity.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: As physical, bodily creatures, we cannot see God.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: He's pure spirit.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: But God wanted to make his mystery visible to us in this created world, so he stamped it right into our very bodies by creating us, male and female, in his own image.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: The function of this image is again to reflect the Trinity, an inscrutable divine communion of three persons.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Thus, in a dramatic development of Catholic thought, st John Paul II concludes this that man became the image and likeness of God, not only through his own humanity.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: Each one of us is created in the image of God, but the fuller sign of that is through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: And the Pope adds on all of this, right from the beginning, there descended the blessing of fertility linked with human procreation.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: The body has a nuptial or spousal meaning because it reveals man and woman's call to become a gift for one another, a gift fully realized in their one flesh union.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: The body also has a generative meaning that, god willing, brings a third into the world through their communion.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: In this way, marriage constitutes a primordial sacrament, understood as a sign that truly communicates the mystery of God's Trinitarian love and life to husband and wife and through them to their children and through their children to their grandchildren, through the family then, and then out to the neighbor and into the whole world.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: I end this letter saddened to think that this is the story that the world does not want you to hear.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: This is why the world wants to rob you of your childhood innocence through gender ideologies, pornography and the like.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: This story is the echo within your heart of man and woman's original innocence before sin and their experience of the mystery of truth and love that the world wants to take away from you.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: The echo within you recalls the mystery of the original innocence of our first parents that had Adam, upon seeing Eve for the first time, exclaiming with awe and wonder.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: This one, at last, is the bone of my bone and the flesh of my flesh.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Can you imagine?
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: I woke up this morning looking at the sun, the eternal bridegroom that comes up, god himself that wants to unite intimately with us.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: God put this story in our heart Now, when we think about it.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: What is the beauty in the world, what is the most beautiful creature in the whole world that really will get your heart stirring?
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: For a man, a woman, a woman, a man, adam again, when he sees the sun come up, he go ooh, this is beautiful.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: He sees the stars at night ooh, beautiful.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: It draws him upward to God.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: But it was Eve when she came out of that primordial forest, the awe and wonder he felt.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: This one, at last, is the bone of my bones and the flesh of my flesh.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: See, this is what John Paul is getting to, this is what the biblical scriptures tell us, that that is a sign, a little reflecting sign, of Trinitarian love.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: But that should always be in union, in communion, linked to Trinitarian love.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: So we're filled with divine love, so we have something to give to one another.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: So don't fall for the lies and lower the bar on truth and love.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: That's the world's job, not ours.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: As you get older, you're gonna be tempted to use your freedom to seek the easy life and the seemingly easy pleasures that the world entices you with.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: But you will find them to be an illusion if you fall for the lie and become insulated from actual truth and love by your own value system of subjective moral values and opinions, such as believing that marriage is anything, and hence meaningless, and children are biological tissue that can be destroyed at will.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: If you fall for those lies, you will not find the beauty that you seek, especially the beauty of love.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: I love you, signed Grandpa.