A Letter To My Grandchildren (and yours!)
Dear Grandchildren,
What a gift you all are, each unique and unrepeatable, yet united as family and sustained by love.
Today I write to you about marriage and children, the Primordial or Original Sacrament. This is a letter that some of you are not yet old enough to read or understand and that’s okay. When you’re ready, this letter will be waiting. In it you will find a timeless truth: the awe and wonder of marriage and children as it was in the 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.
Furthermore, it is 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. There was a time, not long before you were born, that this was obvious to everyone.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
I write this because it is important that you know that marriage and the children brought forth from the union of a father and mother is a very big deal! In fact, it is the original, foundational, or Primordial Sacrament!
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! What’s more, there is an “echo” of this original love story residing in each human heart, experienced as a deep desire to love and to be loved.
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 about divorce. The Pharisees tested Jesus by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” Jesus, instead of limiting Himself to their line of questioning, pointed them back to the original model of marriage. He answered,
Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder. (Matt 19:3-6)
The Bible begins with the word bereshit, which is Hebrew for “in the beginning.” After five days of creation, the Garden of Eden is ready. It has been meticulously prepared for a wedding feast. Then, on the sixth day God said: “’Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ God created man in his image: in the divine image he created them; male and female he created them.” Smiling upon the newly married couple, God blessed them, saying to them: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth” (Gen 1:26-28), bring forth children for they are very good!
This is the very first thing that God chooses to say about us in the Bible—that He created us in the divine image! Human beings from the beginning were created to be the sacramental, visible sign of God, Trinitarian Love, in the created universe.
John Paull II wrote,
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—through this gift—fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence.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.2 “The body, and it alone,” John Paul II says, “is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and divine. 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.”3
What is the mystery hidden in God that our bodies express and make visible? God is love. God’s very being is love. By sending His only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed His innermost secret: God Himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He has destined us to share in that exchange.4
Said another way, the Father pours His love out to the Son, the Son receives His love and returns it, and proceeding from this exchange of love between them is a Person, the Holy Spirit! Then turning towards His creation:
God created man in His image, in the divine image He created him; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)
God is not a sexual being, He is pure Spirit, but He created us to be a tiny reflection of His image and likeness, of Love, in the created world. Since the beginning, a husband pours his love out to his wife, who receives his love and returns it, and proceeding from this exchange of love, is a person, a child! In the marital embrace, the two, husband and wife, become one, and in a cosmic explosion of love the two, who became one, become three when a child is conceived! Reflecting and at the same time being united to the love of God, three Persons in One! Invited to bring forth eternal sons and daughters who will be with us and with God for all eternity.
As physical, bodily creatures we simply cannot see God. He’s pure Spirit. But God wanted to make His mystery visible to us so He stamped it into our bodies by creating us as male and female in His own image (Gen 1:27).5 The function of this image is to reflect the Trinity, “an inscrutable divine communion of [three] Persons.”6 Thus, in a dramatic development of Catholic thought, Saint Pope John Paul II concludes that “man became the ‘image and likeness’ of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning.” And, the Pope adds, “On all of this, right from ‘the beginning,’ there descended the blessing of fertility linked with human procreation.”7
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. The body also has a “generative meaning” that (God willing) brings a “third” into the world through their communion. In this way, marriage constitutes a “primordial sacrament” understood as a sign that truly communicates the mystery of God’s Trinitarian life and love to husband and wife—and through them to their children, and through the family to the whole world.8
I end this letter saddened to think that this is the story that the world does not want you to hear. This is why the world seeks to rob you of your childhood innocence through gender ideologies, pornography, and the like. 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 had Adam, upon seeing Eve for the first time, exclaim with awe and wonder, “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!”
Don’t fall for the lies and lower the bar on truth and love. As you get older, you will be tempted to use your freedom to seek the easy life, the seemingly easy pleasures that the world entices you with, but they are illusions. They never deliver the promises of happiness that they make. The snares of moral relativism, necessary for disposing of these truths, rob you of beauty, joy, and that which you seek—love—which is something I never want you to give up.
I love you.
Grandpa
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
1Man and Woman, He Created Them, No. 15.1.
2Cf. The theology of the Body: an education in being human, article by Christopher West
3Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body, John Paul II, February 20, 1980.
4Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 221.
5The theology of the Body: an education in being human, article by Christopher West
6Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body, John Paul II, November 14, 1979.
7Ibid
8The theology of the Body: an education in being human, article by Christopher West
