On Facebook, someone asked,

What, in your opinion, is the purpose, function, and effect of the sacrament of marriage? I think that if we can nail down what exactly this sacrament is supposed to do for those who receive it, we can thereby determine whether or not the sex and gender of the couple involved is essential to its matter and form.

I started to reply in a comment, but it grew too long, and is probably too important to be lost in a comment, so I’m sharing it as a blog post.

Thursday, I had my first discernment committee meeting. I wrote about it in a blog post, Discernment Committee Reflections 1/15/16

In part, I wrote:
" I came from a relatively poor family with a relatively strict father. In elementary school, my classmates made fun of the clothes my mother bought me from thrift shops, and the food we ate was simple, either home grown, inexpensive, or day old. In spite of doing well academically, it often felt like I could never please anyone, not my father, not my classmates. I was never good enough. Other than the care I felt from my mother, I rarely felt particularly loved.

And here I am, exploring becoming a priest. Why? Because I finally came to believe that God really does love me, not just as some sort of nice concept that we talk about in Sunday School, “God loves you”, but a deep full love greater than we can understand, a love beyond our deserving, made accessible through the cross. In experiencing that love, I came to believe that I must go show that love to whomever God leads me to."

In a comment on Facebook, my wife responded, "Hey, *I* love you."

To her, I responded, " I know and appreciate that. I believe it is part of the reason I can now more fully experience and share God's love and am finally ready for this the phase of my spiritual journey."

For me, this captures a core aspect of marriage, particularly as a sacrament. Marriage is an outward and visible example of the love between a person and another person like the inward and invisible relationship between a person and God.

For me, recognizing the love between two people should not depend on the genders of either people, any more than the love between a person and God depends on our understanding of the gender of either person or God.

Postscript: I realize that not all marriages are wonderful, are blessed. I also realize that not all relationships with God are what they should be. I do not intend to imply ones marriage reflects ones relationsihp with God, or vice versa. However, I do believe that when we see a really good marriage, we are seeing, in part, a sign of the relationship to God that is available to all of us.