What could be stronger than marriage, or what shapes any particular life-form more profoundly than does marriage?

The "Meditation of the Day" in the Magnificat today is from Hans Urs von Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord Vol. 1. However before getting to the meditation read today's Gospel selection, Matthew 19:3-12. 

Some Pharisees approached Jesus, and tested him, saying, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?"

He said in reply, "Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator 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 flesh? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate."

They said to him, "Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss her?"

He said to them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery."

His disciples said to him, "If that is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry."

He answered, "Not all can accept this word, but only those to whom that is granted. Some are incapable of marriage because they were born so; some, because they were made so by others; some, because they have renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever can accept this ought to accept it."

I grant you that the meditation below is dense yet it is full of jewels that we should contemplate on for hours on end. Hans Urs von Balthasar's use of the word "form" may be difficult to grasp yet what it means, just as in the reading from Matthew, Jesus' proclamation, is that one is being called to make a single definitive life choice. Hans von Balthasar understands that marriage serves to integrate the Absolute into the relative - the transcendence or vertical with the worldly - that is an immanent or horizontal form. The key is to see marriage as an indissoluble form. The spouses choose the form not based on a reciprocity between each other but rather on Love in and through the Trinitarian model. This opens up a freedom in persons through marriage that was not available before. And the warning in the last paragraph has a relevance in today's time that perhaps could only have been guessed at the time of the original writing. Please go slowly and pause frequently to allow his words to create a contrite and humbled heart (Ps 51).

What could be stronger than marriage, or what shapes any particular life-form more profoundly than does marriage? And marriage is only true to itself if it is a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual's cravings to "break out" of its bonds and assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence's tendencies to disintegrate, and it compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modelling his life on the form enjoined.

When they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves - the shifting songs of their own freedom - but rather on the form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons. As persons, the spouses entrust themselves not only to the beloved "thou" and to the biological laws of fertility and family; they entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life - from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and of life in the Holy Spirit. And now, suddenly, all fruitfulness, all freedom, is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery ... which mystery is no longer accessible from the profane sphere of the general.

But what are we to say of the person who ignores this form and tramples it underfoot, then to enter into relationships answerable only to his own psychology's principle of "this far and no further?" He is but quick-sand, doomed to certain barrenness. The form of marriage, too, from which derives the beauty of human existence, is today more than ever entrusted to the care of Christians.