That is what marriage really means; helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.
Interpretation
Marriage is about mutual support and personal growth.
This quote emphasizes that the essence of marriage lies in partnership, where both individuals assist each other in becoming their best selves, embracing responsibility and autonomy while facing life's challenges together. It highlights the idea that a strong marriage fosters personal growth and encourages both partners to confront and engage with life fully.
In practice
A wedding speech about the importance of partnership in marriage.
It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link...He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.
What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science.
In order to really understand, we need to listen, not reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible in order to help him better explain his experience.
Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arriveο»Ώ at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.
The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.
What is important is that we stop and realize, 'Okay. This is fine. I can enjoy that.' But what is really important, what I'm really going to take away with me from this life, is my connection with other people.
Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is.
People often ask us what we get by our frequent travel to countries. I want to tell them we do not travel to have fun; we travel to build our relationship with other countries, and it is because of our ties with these countries that we were able to rescue 7,000 people from Yemen.
Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.
One of the things that the court held in Brown v. Board of Education is that government can't impose a badge of inferiority on some of its citizens. Yet that is exactly what Proposition 8 does with respect to gay and lesbian couples in California.
You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.
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