Two Summers ago I was blessed to reconnect with my good friend, John Bradford, who is the founder of a men’s apostolate in the Church called Wilderness Outreach. John started this apostolate as a way to build up Catholic men to live out their vocations more fully. As John puts it on the Wilderness Outreach website:
“I believe that our Church, families, children, men and women are under attack by the world (culture), flesh (self) and the devil. Men in particular have opted out from their responsibility of living lives of conviction, purity, integrity, duty and honor and need to be challenged to re-engage in a Christ centered life of action. I believe that one of the most important works of the New Evangelization is building a system of masculine formation that helps men understand what they are as a male creature, and what they are called to be and do as men. Men need to understand how the world is attacking manhood and fatherhood and respond by going on the counterattack. We need to actively defend our families and Church from the corruption of the secular culture.”
I have seen firsthand how John’s work through Wilderness Outreach encourages men to grow in our dependence on Christ in order to be the men Jesus is calling us to be. One of the main things he does through Wilderness Outreach is take groups of about a dozen men into the mountains for a week of work, fellowship and prayer. During the day, you work caring for hiking trails in the wilderness areas of our country, and in the evenings, you engage in communal prayer and study about healthy masculine spirituality. It is a great experience.
John is a wonderful man and attributes his success to the encouragement and support of his wife, Laura. I remember him telling me the story years ago of when he was looking to step away from the construction business that he and his wife had built. Laura challenged him to do something in service to the Church. That strong encouragement eventually led him to found Wilderness Outreach. As John himself puts it: “Through her encouragement and sacrifice and the grace that flows from [our] sacrament of marriage, Wilderness Outreach continues on its adventure into the discovery of manhood, and the formation of men.”
This is a beautiful image of what we see St. Paul speaking about in his letter to the Ephesians in the second reading. In our confused society which has so completely forgotten the beauty of the complementarity of the sexes and the grace of the Sacrament of marriage, his words about subordination can come off as a dated homage to a paternalistic society that no longer exists. But it is not that. In fact, if we dig deeply into St. Paul’s inspired words, there is a wealth of powerful teaching to remind us of what marriage can be and what the Church can be when we give ourselves away.
St. John Paul II reflected deeply on this very passage during his papacy. He looks at the idea of subordination in the context of St. Paul’s wider analogy of the head and body in a marriage and the related image of Christ the head and His body, the Church. He highlights that when we speak of subordination of the body to the head, it is in the context of a deep union. The head and body are part of a single organism, which makes them interdependent. Husband and wife are not just two individuals bound by vows, but two parts of a single body bound by love.
So when St. Paul speaks of subordination, it is in the context of the woman as the body dedicating herself to supporting the mission of the head, her husband, whose job is to lay himself down for the body (his wife) and care for it unceasingly. This is why right after speaking of the subordination of wives to their husbands, St. Paul commands husbands:
So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one hates his own flesh
but rather nourishes and cherishes it,
even as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body.
As St. John Paul II puts it: “love not only unites two subjects, but allows them to interpenetrate each other, belonging spiritually to one another…the ‘I’ becomes in some way the ‘you,’ and the ‘you’ the ‘I’ (in the moral sense, of course).” St. John Paul II speaks about a deep belonging whereby, through our loving self-donation and reception of the other, we start to recognize the other as another me, that our good is bound up together, as the good of head and body are bound together.
Thus, when we see a holy union of spouses, where they are bound up together in concern for each other, the bride building up her bridegroom so that he might more fully give himself for her; and the bridegroom serving his bride so that she might flourish, we see an image of what Christ and the Church are. St. Paul links spousal love purified and perfected by grace to the great mystery of Christ and the Church. In the mystery of the Church, we are made more ourselves by actively receiving Christ the head and Bridegroom as members of the Church, His body and Bride.
This challenges each of us to consider how well we are living as people made for spousal self-giving and active reception. In the relationship of Christian spouses, the giving of the bridegroom and the active receiving of the bride in love allow them to form that unit whereby both see themselves in the other and thus build each other up through self-sacrifice for the other. John Bradford would not be the man he is without the grace of being united to and giving himself for his wife, Laura. It was her encouragement which built John up to also give himself to the mission of building up other men.
You who are spouses, how can you build each other up so that you both can fulfill your vocation to love more fully? We live in a toxic culture where so often we see ourselves in conflict with others and only look for ways to tear the other down. This is not the way of Jesus. He calls us to that mutual submission whereby we recognize that we are bound up with each other and become more ourselves by giving ourselves away.
Subordination is a positive good when we recognize it in the light of love. It allows us to be built together into one another and thus to be built up by one another through the grace of Christ. Think about the attitude of St. Peter in the Gospel as the crowds are walking away in disgust after hearing Jesus’ challenging teaching about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Jesus, the bridegroom, approaches St. Peter and by extension, all of us in His bride, the Church. He doesn’t say to St. Peter, “Come on, Peter, let’s get out of here, forget those people.” He asks him, “Do you also want to leave?” In this moment, Jesus is giving Peter the grace to subordinate himself to His mission, but shows Peter the possibility of turning away from the loving gift of himself for that mission. I pray that we all choose that loving subordination to Jesus as a member of His Body and His Bride, and through our thoughts, words and above all, our actions, we would say, with Peter: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
I pray that we engage in that subordination of love both in our marriages and in our relationship to Jesus, our Heavenly bridegroom, as members of His bride, the Church. When we do this, we will begin to experience the miracle of that spousal union in the Church where we will begin, with St. Paul, to see Christ living in us and making us more ourselves.
+ Father in Heaven, thank you for the gift of marriage and how it images for us the deep reality of our union with your Son. Jesus, help us not shy away from putting ourselves underneath your mission as members of your Bride and Body, the Church. Holy Spirit, quiet any fears in us and cleanse us of the sin that would keep us from finding ourselves by giving ourselves away in love to Jesus. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +