Remember, the most popular Valentine legend says that after third-century Roman Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage, Fr. Valentine continued to marry couples in secret. He recognized that marriage is a sacrament instituted by God, meaning the State didn’t have the authority to ban it at all. Despite his courage, Valentine was ultimately discovered and beheaded. 

So how do we honor his day, honor true love, honor our spouses and significant others, while also paying due homage to the beginning of Lent?

Marriage is the common vocation, of course. I believe is the main argument for why we are so quiet about marriage when we discuss vocations. The majority of people will get married, so there’s no need to talk about it.

But I believe this has consequences for our Church. I think we need to talk about marriage as a vocation much more often than we do. We celebrate with couples on their wedding day, but beyond that, how many of us can say we really take time to think about our married friends and pray for and support their marriage? As a Church, in practice, we don’t treat marriage like it is a vocation that should be taken as seriously as the priesthood or religious life.

Ask any married couple you know how they are doing and I will tell you: they’re struggling.

My husband and I actually don’t fight very often. We do watch a certain reality show that involves couples who fight a lot (it features couples from different countries who have a certain number of days to be a fiancé) and often find ourselves saying, Wow, I’m so glad we don’t talk to each other like that. My husband usually sums it up by saying, “We don’t fight dirty.”

The lesson of the parable is that if we listen to Christ, the foundation of our lives will be strong, so when tragedy and disaster and suffering and hard times come into our lives, we will remain steadfast.

But can’t we also apply this parable to our relationships as husband and wife? If our relationship is strong, then even things that might shake us up will not cause our house to cave in. Even when we face tragedy and disaster and suffering, we will be unmoved from our marriage with each other. Our relationship is strong, so our wedding is strong, so the world cannot break it apart.

“But our world has turned its back on beauty. And because of that, we find ourselves surrounded by ugliness and alienation. I want to persuade you that beauty matters, that it is not just a subjective thing, but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need, we find ourselves in a spiritual desert. 

I want to show you a path out of that desert — it is a path that leads to Home.”

You might have noticed this week is National Vocations Week here in the United States. My priest talked about it this past weekend and my social media has been full of discussions about it.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice, though, was that Vocations Week only focuses on the priesthood and religious life. There hasn’t been any talk, that I’ve seen, about the vocation to marriage. 

I'm just going to say it: I'm really bad at praying the rosary. I suffer from chronic wandering mind, and no matter how much I set myself up for success, I can't seem to turn it off. It's not even that I'm easily distracted, like putting my phone in another room would do the trick. Any time I'm in a silent, distraction-free space, my mind latches onto whatever problems I think I need to solve at that moment.