Saturday, October 13, 2018

A Perfect Union

The last blog post concluded that the marriage between Christ, the Bridegroom, and the Catholic Church, the Bride, was an unhappy one.

A next conclusion can also be drawn, that a perfect union is not possible without Divine intervention.  There was a chance that it might have been possible in the Garden of Eden before Eve and Adam ate the Forbidden Fruit, but a sexual union did not occur since no child was conceived and born before their Fall, which gives rise to a question as to whether God ever intended Adam and Eve to be sexual with one another. Perhaps their union was to be a a union of their souls rather than of their flesh.

One could maintain that because of the complimentary male and female anatomy, a sexual union was intended, if not mandated, allowing for procreation.  After all, this is what the Bible said that God had said, quoted without references [1]:

God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.

If indeed that was what had occurred, then Adam and Eve's first disobedience was not that they ate the Forbidden Fruit, but that they did not conceive a child before the Fall when they were told explicitly to "[b]e fertile and multiply".  The Jews who wrote the Old Testament failed to highlight or explain away their first disobedience, a sin, or the real first original sin.

It was not until the New Testament that the world has learned that even though a human body features a certain anatomy, it does not mean that that it has to be used in a sexual manner. Did the Son of God Who was made man ever entered into a sexual union?  There has not been any claim by any one of either gender who had a sexual encounter with Christ.  In the case of the Blessed Virgin Mary, She was conceived by the Holy Spirit but did not have a physical union with a man in the flesh [2], quoted without references:

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” But Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” And the angel said to her in reply, “The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. [Emphasis added.]

The world has also learned that a couple's life together does not have to be procreative, like the non-sexual union between the Blessed Virgin Mary and Joseph to whom She was betrothed. [3]  Theirs was made possible by Divine intervention and thus it was perfect.  It had to be perfect to be able to raise the Son of God.  Besides this union, there is no other in the world that was or is perfect, therefore this blogger is left to imagine one.

The imagined perfect union can occur only in Heaven after a soul has been cleansed of all of its sins, it being reverted to its original "pre-Fall" state of pure and complete innocence.  It is the continuous willful union of a soul's wholesome and untainted innocence and God's omniscience and omnipotence that can be and is perfect, unbreakable and eternal.

The longing for this union can hardly be expressed simply.  In this blogger's life this longing is a scale that weighs heavily on the one side the raw pains of interior emptiness against an uncertain hope for happiness and an unattainable dream of pure joy on the other from having the Holy Spirit dwell within forever so that life is without ever a hint or a moment of unsatiated desire and from having his seemingly endless vortices of different turmoils being stilled and filled by Christ's peace and by God's overflowing and unceasing love.


[1] http://www.usccb.org/bible/genesis/1, 28.
[2] http://www.usccb.org/bible/luke, 26-35.
[3] http://www.usccb.org/bible/matthew/1:38, 18.



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