The Love That Pours Itself OutThe hermeneutic of the gift — in marriage, the priesthood & the celibate life
Moving from marriage to what marriage shows: the nature of love, which is the nature of God — sacrificial self-gift.
Look under God's left arm
The figure He already holds — long read as Eve, watching from within the divine embrace. Woman was intended from the beginning.
What "Theology of the Body" means
Last week we glimpsed the mystery of God's love — shown to us through marriage, the image of the Trinity's own self-giving.
- The invisible it reveals: the nature of God, and the love between the Persons of the Trinity.
- So how does the body reveal this?
- Because the body as male and female calls human beings to see in one another the call to union in love — and that union is marriage.
- And so marriage becomes the lens through which we see the very nature of God.
God and humanity — a marriage
If marriage is the lens onto the nature of God — who is love — then it shows us more than how to love each other. It opens onto the mystery of the Church and her relationship with God.
Until now, TOB could sound like a course in getting better at marriage — on the grounds that we imitate the Trinity. But a lens is meant to be looked through, not at: I don't look at my glasses, I see through them to the world beyond. So now marriage steps back, to make God's love clearer — His relationship with us, and the mystery of our salvation.
God and his bride
The relationship between God and humanity is crystallized in Christ and the Church — and from beginning to end, Scripture frames it in spousal, marital terms. This isn't a meaning we impose; it's a thread the tradition follows from Genesis to Revelation.
Ephesians 5 — the great "marriage passage," on husband and wife — closes by naming what it was really about:
The marriage runs through the whole story
- Israel's idolatry as adultery. The prophets cast unfaithfulness to God as betrayal of a husband — Hosea marries the unfaithful Gomer as a living sign; Ezekiel 16 and Jeremiah 2–3 do the same.
- The bride leaves her family for the King. Psalm 45, a royal wedding song: "forget your people and your father's house, and the king will desire your beauty." The tradition reads the king as a figure of Christ.
- The divine love-song. The Song of Songs, read as the love between God and His people. Isaiah: "your Maker is your husband" (54:5).
- Jesus the Bridegroom. He names Himself so (Mark 2:19–20); John the Baptist is "the friend of the bridegroom."
- The Marriage Feast of the Lamb. Revelation 19 & 21 — the Church as Bride, the New Jerusalem "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband."
The Cross as the symbol of God's love
Recall our definition: love is to will the good of the other. The Cross is that definition carried to its furthest point — Christ wills our good at the total cost of Himself.
Marriage
Two persons give themselves to each other in mutual self-gift.
The Cross
The Bridegroom lays down His life for His Bride, the Church.
Same shape, one greater than the other. This is why the unity cross speaks so powerfully: it holds both realities in a single sign.
The woman at His side is the Church
She holds a cup, gathering the blood and water that pour from His pierced side — His own life, given to her. And from what she receives she bears fruit: the Church, the people who are now the children of God.
How exactly are we saved?
Many metaphors — one that holds them together
Scripture describes our salvation in many ways:
- A debt paid
- A ransom from slavery
- A legal acquittal
- A victory over death
But the most encompassing image — the one that runs most consistently across Scripture, and gathers all the others into itself — is familial union. God is not merely settling a ledger. He is bringing us into His own "family".
How do you enter a family you weren't born into?
The mystery of adoption
This is the very heart of the New Testament: we become children of God not by nature but by adoption — a true divine adoption. There is a great mystery in it.
We were already created in the image and likeness of God — a great dignity. But this adoption lifts us to another level: a divine identity we never had before, greater even than being made in His image.
But think of how adoption into a family one wasn't born into ordinarily happens?
through marriage
So our adoption presupposes the marriage we've been tracing: Christ and His Bride, the Church.
admirabile commercium — the wonderful exchange
As in marriage what belongs to the husband becomes shared with the bride, so everything that is Christ's is now conferred on us. He takes our poverty; we receive His riches.
The wonderful exchange
that man might become God."St Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §54
This is the doctrine of divinization — echoed by Irenaeus and Aquinas. It means sharing in God's own life by grace — not becoming God by nature, but truly drawn into the life of the Trinity.
Marriage shows us our salvation
Marriage has become a primary lens — not only for the Trinity, but for what God is doing to save us.
And what it shows is this: God pours Himself out to us and for us, giving us His own life, so that we might be with Him.
In the Jewish betrothal custom the bridegroom departs to prepare a place in his father's house, then returns for his bride. Jesus speaks as that Bridegroom.
There is another metaphor still
A further image of our salvation — and strangely, it too is bound to marriage. We see it through the lens of marriage; perhaps we even see marriage through it.
The enduring metaphor
Marriage — the spousal love that runs from Genesis to Revelation, the Bridegroom giving His body and life to His Bride, as in the unity cross.
The Church's official image
Ritual sacrifice in the priesthood — the most official of the Church's images of what Jesus does on the Cross, rooted deep in the Old Testament.
Without this second image, our salvation would almost have no meaning. It is the figure who carries out the ancient practice of —
ritual sacrifice
the High Priest
What is a priest?
The ancient pattern of priesthood is simple: a person takes something of value and offers it in sacrifice — to make peace with God, to set a broken relationship right.
And notice what "setting it right" really means: the restoring of union between persons — between divine and human persons.
Into this picture steps Jesus. He offers the supreme gift to restore our relationship with God — and that act of sacrifice is a priestly act.
Fr Donald touched on this himself when he spoke of Jesus being the sacrament — the one who joins heaven and earth, God and human beings.
He offers — and the offering is Himself
Here is the astonishing turn: Jesus is both priest and victim. He is the one who offers, and what He offers is His own life — freely, out of love.
who offers+The Victim
who is offered=One self-gift
So the priesthood expresses the same reality marriage shows us: self-giving, sacrificial, outpoured love. God is this love — agape, sacrificial, priestly.
And just as we can see the priesthood through marriage, we can see marriage through the priesthood. The spouses become a kind of priest — under the one priesthood of Jesus — each offering themselves to the other: "this is my body, given up for you." This offering is shown through the conjugal act, which is a sign of the whole gift: the giving of their bodies to each other is a sign of the giving of their lives to each other.
This priesthood belongs to every Christian: at Mass we join our whole lives to Christ's one sacrifice, offering them to God. Marriage is not the only place we make this offering.
What exactly is love, again?
A reminder — what love truly is
To will the good of the other — as other.
Our culture shrinks the word "love" down to mere feeling. And yes, feeling is involved — but the bottom line of love is this: to take your life and pour it into the life of another, for their sake.
Love
I will your good. I ask how I can give myself for you.
Its true opposite — use
I bend you to my benefit. The other becomes a means to my satisfaction.
So the real opposite of love is not hate — which is only another feeling — but use: and that is worse. It is the utilitarian mindset the world now runs on, in marriage and far beyond it — a deep poison wherever persons are treated as means.
This is precisely how marriages — and so many relationships — break down: when self-gift quietly curdles into use.
…the bottom line — for any accountants in the room.
The Personalistic Norm
A person is the kind of being who may only ever be loved — never merely used as a means.
Where does this dignity come from?
Funnily enough, our very word person begins in the theatre. The Latin persona was the mask an actor wore — the role he played. The Church then borrowed the word to speak of the three Persons of the Trinity, and later extended it to human beings, conferring on us a dignity bound up with God Himself.
But a caution: the Trinity is not one actor wearing three masks. That mask-image is only where the word came from — it is not the reality. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are truly distinct — each fully God — yet so perfectly one in being that we rightly say there is one God.
And since God is love, the only response worthy of a person is love — which always means giving yourself for them.
The Hermeneutic of the Gift
This is simply another way of naming what marriage shows us — a whole orientation of the heart. And it is seen just as clearly in the high priesthood of Jesus: the one who offers himself for others.
The question changes everything. I become more concerned with how I can be a gift than with what I can receive.
So what is the point of it all?
Beyond how astonishing it is, this lies at the very centre of our lives: the gift of human sexuality is intertwined with our life of faith. The body helps us to see the invisible.
And it answers the question so many struggle with, though it stands right in front of them: what am I to do with my life?
The answer, in the end, is simple: find the way in which you can make a gift of yourself. For in giving, you shall receive.
And the Church, in her wisdom, gives us codified paths for living that one gift.
Marriage — the obvious path
The first path is the lens itself: marriage — the ordinary one, to which some eighty or ninety percent are called. Its purpose is to —
show people what God looks like
Be the image of God
Father, mother, children — an image of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and of Christ and His Church: a communion of persons in love.
Be a gift
Pour your lives out to each other, your children, and the community — lived by the hermeneutic of the gift.
At its deepest, this is the priesthood of marriage: a shared, priestly self-sacrifice — each laying down their life for the other as Christ did for the Church — our lives, individually and as a family, taken up into the one sacrifice of Christ at Mass.
And when we fail in marriage, that image is distorted — we misrepresent the God it was meant to reveal.
The celibate witness — the gaze turned to God alone
Some are called, convicted in their hearts, to set themselves aside for the Kingdom — to desire God alone. It seems contrary to all of this; it isn't. Marriage was only the lens; the reality it reveals — the inner life of God, which is love — is greater than marriage itself.
Consecrated life
Nuns and religious brothers — set apart to pray, their whole lives ordered toward God.
The single life
A more recent path: ordinary lives and jobs, yet single for the same love — seeking prayer and service within an everyday life, freed from the demands that family rightly asks of us.
The great model is Mary, the spouse of the Holy Spirit — an intimacy not conjugal or physical (the Spirit has no body), but real: "the Spirit will overshadow you" (Luke 1:35). She says yes and bears fruit — Christ Himself — and so she bears fruit for the whole Church, for in Him she has given us all.
In the same way, the celibate life is ordered outward. I do not take the singular fruitfulness of marriage — poured into one family, one partner — but instead open myself to love God, and, in Him, to love many: to belong not to one household but to the whole Church.
A promise staked with a whole life
Christopher West: the celibate life is a vouchsafe — a living promise that the eternal Kingdom is real, and satisfies more deeply than marriage ever could. (Marriage is only the lens.)
The greater marriage
Heaven = the beatific vision: to see God as He is and be like Him (1 John 3:2). Its other name — the Marriage Feast of the Lamb. Every wedding day is only a foretaste of it.
The cost
To forgo the lesser marriage that promises so much. Yet even a marriage as perfect as one could be — untroubled by sin — still could not satisfy as the Marriage Feast will: the beatific vision, the union of Christ and His Church.
It is real. It is coming. You are not alone in hoping for the eternal union of Christ and His Bride.
The sacred priesthood
Every Christian shares in a priesthood — we are all anointed priests at our baptism, each with a sacrifice to offer. But the ministerial priesthood is something more: a man stands before God in the official rite instituted by Christ, the true High Priest.
Fr Donald stands in the place of Christ, offering Christ's own sacrifice — His Body and Blood — pleasing to the Father, and giving us to partake, that we might be adopted, made one with Him, and drawn into union with God. All of this he facilitates at the Mass and in the sacraments.
If you are a man, unmarried, and wondering — could this be me? — it is a calling worth every consideration. Every Christian man, given the chance, should ask whether God may be calling him to it.
The Eucharist — the one-flesh union
Through the priest, standing in his place, Christ makes his own sacrifice present to us — and gives us to partake of it. Recall the unity cross: here that same gift becomes the one-flesh union of Christ and his Bride.
The exchange
All that belongs to Christ is conferred on us — the adoption, this holy union greater than marriage. What was shown on the Cross is now received.
Its fruit
Having received him, we can carry him to others — bearing Christ into the world as the Church, his Bride, bears fruit.
Some may be scandalised by the parallel with the conjugal act. Both are bodily, and both carry a spiritual element — but the conjugal act is a sexual reality, whereas the Eucharist is our eating of what appears to be bread but is in fact Christ himself, body, soul, and divinity. What the two share is the pattern — a bridegroom and bride becoming one flesh — though the material differs entirely. And having received him, we can carry him to others.
Take your life — and give it away
The vocation of every person: take your whole life in your hands and give it away, in love. One gift — three shapes.
the lens — "I give my life to you," fruitful in children Celibate witness
God alone — a promise the greater marriage is real Priesthood
in the place of Christ — offering His sacrifice
Same love, same self-outpouring — only the material differs.