In his apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, St. John Paul II exhorts families to “become what you are” (paragraph 17).
I’d like to re-echo him. The world doesn’t need your marriage if it’s just like everyone else’s. The world, in other words, doesn’t need you to conform to the world. The world needs the unique culture formed by the coming together of the particular husband and the particular wife that form your marriage.
The love that forms the basis of your life together will have certain characteristics shared with all other marriages. These are the skeleton that is consistent, a mission for all families “to guard, reveal and communicate love” (ibid. paragraph 17). St. John Paul II enumerates four main pillars for this mission: forming a community of persons, serving life, participating in the development of society, and sharing in the life and mission of the Church.
The way that you two are called to live out that mission is unique. That means that while we can look to other examples in particulars, we can’t mindlessly copy what we see others do. And it means that if we don’t discover the unique means that we have of fulfilling our mission, that part of the mission to guard, reveal, and communicate love will fail.
Not that we should be unique in order to forestall disaster. No, we should be unique because our love is calling something out of ourselves. The beauty of the beloved inspires a greatness of soul; your beauty does as well. I just want you to realize you won’t be helping anyone by not responding to that call.
The world can be served when we stop being conformed to it. That’s good to know. But that’s not a sufficient reason to not be conformed to the world. Something greater than what the world offers has to have a claim on us to let go of the need to be like other marriages. And beauty places such a claim on us. When we see the beauty of our spouse, we’ll have the wherewithal to live a more beautiful life together. And beauty, then, will save the world.