By Deacon Roger Carr-Jones, Marriage and Family Life Coordinator
Maintaining our spiritual health matters and ensuring that we obtain a balanced diet is an ongoing process. This thought brings to mind the many engaged couples who will be joined in Matrimony over the summer months, where the diet of married love will provide unexpected tastes and flavours. Like the disciples waiting in the upper room for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, these couples occupy what is a liminal space of uncertainty, dreams and unknown change.
The period between the Ascension and Pentecost for the disciples and for these engaged couples is a bridge period. Importantly the bridge offered is not simply the means of moving from one place to another, it is a liminal space, with its own beauty and integrity. The couples, like the disciples, are living in an in-between place, where there is a tension of uncertainty and the potential for transformation. Just as you cannot experience marriage until you are married, neither can we experience the transformation of discipleship without the Holy Spirit.
The upper room is place of positives and negatives, though when we feel unloved we often fixate on the disappointments in life at the expense of noticing the ongoing recipient of blessings. Psychologically, we tend to focus on negative experiences, failures and attitudes rather than on the positives. When we realise that the Holy Spirit is active in our future marriage and family life, we begin to hear and listen differently.
In being open to the Spirit the engaged couple will become proficient in using the new language of married love. Whilst the emotional and relational bonds are present, the reality of emerging into the world as a married couple effects a real spousal change. This is reflected in that transformative move from the time of speaking of ‘me’ and ‘you’ to the new language of 'us’.
At Pentecost the disciples were amazed and astonished when they realized that they spoke their native language, yet heard and understood one another. Similarly, the new love languages of married life are scriptural: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. Pentecost is a sign of God’s new language, one that has its own particular accents and forms in married love.
The ‘experience’ of Christian marriage brings security and stability. ‘Marriage’, as Pope Leo XIV said, ‘is not an ideal but the measure of true love between a man and a woman’. Pentecost is a time of preparing for mission, a time of new beginnings and one that has its unique expression in married love.
