Tag: Family & Relationships

The other morning I was in that in-between state of half awake, half asleep. I had a dream in which I wore a mask and tried to get my parents to guess who I was.

I’ve wondered what to call such invisible states marking life’s transitional moments — dreamy to conscious, life to death, healthy to sick, sinner to saint. I’ve often thought of these in terms of crossing some line or threshold. But that morning, something caused me to rethink whether such ‘lines’ exist.

This week our writers took a look at marriage and examined its definition.

Pastor Eric Blauer wrote, "Marriage is a sacred circle of death and resurrection, one that should be entered with fear and trembling as much as passionate intoxication and longing communion."

The human consciousness evolves and so, therefore, do relationships.

The whole idea of marriage was to ensure that a couple, man and woman, could procreate and thereby extend the size and power of a particular tribe or even religion.

What is marriage? From a Catholic perspective, marriage is a covenant relationship between one man and one woman reflecting the covenant between God and human.  Like the divine covenant, marriage ideally creates and sustains a bond that is eternal, always faithful and fruitful.

Being single, I may not have the best idea when it comes to marriage. From what I have seen with my friends who are married is that it takes compromise, trust and a whole lot of other factors.

Early in 2013, there was a buzz around the blogosphere regarding the Christian Purity Culture or Abstinence Movement. The authors of these blogs, mostly women in their mid-20s to mid-30s, are seeing in hindsight that the purity pledges they took as teens had far greater consequences that just retaining their virginity.