Planting and Marriage (?)

Finished planting the sweet sorghum today. Working on keeping the acre of peanuts hoed.

 

My zucchini plants are big and beautiful-but no flowers. Can't figure that one out. The ground is rich, but no livestock has been on it for a year.

 

Good to have the boys home from college for the summer even if we don't see them much because of their jobs. We joke that they seem like they lost some smarts in the past year-but in reality I am impressed by their confidence and knowledge. (Thanks Wyoming Catholic & College of St. Mary Magdalen - NH).

 

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Recently I finished reading (again) Dietrich Von Hildebrand's book on marriage (Marriage - the mystery of Faithful Love [Sophia Institute Press]). One of the theses: the primary end of marriage is procreation, but the primary meaning of is love.

 

Some consequences to this; one of which, interestingly enough, (this book originally published in 1929 in Germany) gives a concise but powerful reason for one to understand why homosexual marriage is impossible. Here's some excerpts from this section (Note, it is not all about sex and biology, but more about the spirit):

 

The special character of conjugal love is, furthermore, marked by the fact that this love can only come into being, between men and women and not between persons of the same sex, as is the case with friendship, parental love, or filial love.

 

It would be quite wrong, however, to reduce this characteristic to the sexual sphere and to say that conjugal love is just friendship plus sexual relations, presupposing a difference of sex. It would be incredibly superficial to consider as a mere biological difference the distinction between man and woman, which really shows us two complementary types of the spiritual person of the human species.

 

Certainly, man and woman have ultimately but one task, "to be reborn in Christ," and to glorify God by their sanctity. Yet man and woman represent two different types of mankind, both having their respective significance according to the divine plan, and their special value quite apart from their procreative function. .......

 

... At any rate, for the human species this difference represents two manifestations of. the person, analogous - if this comparison be admissible - to the various religious orders, which although they are identical in their aim, represent different ways in the imitation of Christ. These two types, man and woman, have a unique capacity for complementing each other. Their meaning for one another is something quite unique. They are made one for the other in a special way, and they can, purely as spiritual persons, form a unity in which they reciprocally complement one another. Marital love - involving the gift of one's own person, whose decisive character is that the partners form a couple, an I-thou communion, in which the whole personality of the beloved is grasped mysteriously as a unity in spite of all outer obstacles - can exist only between two types of the spiritual person, the male and the female, as only between them can this complementary character be found.

 

Oremus pro invicem!