Vigils Reading – 7th Day in Octave

GOD’S DESIGN FOR LOVE

From the writing of Pope St Paul VI

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As holy scripture teaches us, before it is a sacrament marriage is a great

earthly reality: God created man in his own image; he created him in the image

of God: he created them man and woman. We always have to go back to that

first page of the Bible if we want to understand what a human couple, a family,

really is and what it ought to be. Psychological analyses, psychoanalytical

research, sociological surveys, and philosophical reflection may of course have a

contribution to make with the light they shed on human sexuality and love; but

they would blind us if they neglected this fundamental teaching which was given

to us at the very beginning: the duality of the sexes was decreed by God, so that

together man and woman might be the image of God and, like him, the source of

life: Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it…

The Christian knows that human love is good by its very origin; and if, like

everything else in us, it is wounded and deformed by sin, it finds its salvation

and redemption in Christ. Besides, isn’t this the lesson that twenty centuries of

Christian history have taught us? How many couples have found the way to

holiness in their conjugal life, in that community of life which is the only one to

be founded on a sacrament!

Love one another, as I have loved you. The ways in which they express

their affection are, for Christian husband and wife, full of the love which they

draw from the heart of God. And if its human source threatens to dry up, its

divine source is as inexhaustible as the unfathomable depths of God’s affection.

That shows us the intimacy, strength, and richness of the communion which

conjugal love aims at. It is an inward and spiritual reality, transforming the

community of life of husband and wife into what might be called…“the domestic

Church”…

Such is the mystery in which conjugal love takes root, and which

illuminates all its expressions. The rapture which moves husband and wife to

unite is the carrier of life, and enables God to give himself children. On

becoming parents, the husband and wife discover with a sense of wonder, at the

baptismal font, that their child is from now on a child of God, reborn from

water and the Spirit; and that the child is entrusted to them so that they may

watch over its physical and moral growth, certainly, but also the opening out

and blossoming in him of the new nature. Such a child is no longer just what

they see, but just as much what they believe, “an infinity of mystery and love

which would dazzle us if we say it face to face”… Therefore [the] upbringing [of

children] becomes true service of Christ, according to his own saying: whatever

you do for one of these little ones, you do for me.