Third annual Together in Holiness retreat encourages married couples to live their 'countercultural' vocation as spouses
SHELBY TOWNSHIP — Approximately 70 couples gathered at St. Therese of Lisieux Parish on Oct. 12 for the third annual Together in Holiness Conference. The daylong marriage enrichment initiative is hosted by the St. John Paul II Foundation and the Archdiocese of Detroit to inspire spouses to grow in virtue.
Couples had the opportunity to hear from renowned national marriage and family life speakers including Larry G. Freeney, Ph.D., director of education and assessments at Rejoice Counseling Apostolate; Greg Schutte, MSW, LISW-S, senior director of Marriage Works! in Ohio; and Steve and Becky Greene, Catholic speakers, writers and co-hosts of the “Catholic Conversation” podcast.
The day began with Mass celebrated by Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron, followed by a marital blessing.
In his homily, Archbishop Vigneron told couples that the word of God heard in the liturgy serves as a reminder that the day on which they were about to embark was not an ordinary couples retreat.
“What you are engaged in takes place within the sphere of faith, in a spirit of grace,” Archbishop Vigneron said. “(What) you hear and what you speak and what you will think about and whatever resolutions you will make as a result, will always be about this most sacred vocation. It is about growing together — growing together in holiness, which is to say the likeness of Christ. It is about raising your children, raising them in the faith, raising them to be disciples beloved by the Father and loving the Father.”
Growing together as a couple is “a mystery,” Archbishop Vigneron continued, one built into the life of the Holy Trinity.
“Your growing together is mysterious … and you living your lives together, whether it is deciding who is going to take the garbage out or whether it is figuring out who washes the dishes, does the laundry, or going to work,” Archbishop Vigneron said. “All of that is a mystery … part of walking by faith and not by sight. It is about looking at everything that is involved with your life together and seeing it as an expression of the living God in you — and that’s why it’s so important to advance in living together in holiness.”
Part of living together in holiness is sharing the truth and way of being with children and grandchildren, the archbishop added.
In their talk, “Overcoming Challenges to Living a Virtuous Life,” Steve and Becky Greene addressed the 21st century roadblocks to living virtuously and building a virtuous home and family — roadblocks such as moral relativism, worship of self, sexual impurity and envy.
The Greenes emphasized that they are still a “work in progress,” often struggling with the mountain of virtue day by day.
“In this great struggle that we're all in together to live virtuously and to cultivate virtue in ourselves, cultivate virtue in our marriages, cultivate virtue in our parenting and our kids, I come back again and again to a quote from G.K. Chesterton, the great British convert and public intellectual,” Steve Greene said. “Chesterton said, ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.’”
Chesterton didn’t mean to do things half-heartedly, but rather, if something is worth doing, you cannot wait until you can do it perfectly to begin, he explained.
“You have to just start and do it badly,” Greene continued. “Struggle joyfully, and then you've got to lean hard on the Holy Spirit to make up the deficiencies and the defects. So this work of cultivating virtue in our marriages and our families has to begin now.”
Becky Greene added that this battle for virtue is, first and foremost, a spiritual battle.
“When we're in the daily grind of life, it's very easy to point fingers, either at our spouse, at the kids, or ‘those people,’ or ‘those politicians.’ It's very easy, but we have to remember that in all of this, we are in a spiritual battlefield,” Becky Greene said. “Bishop (Thomas J.) Olmsted, who is our beloved retired bishop in Phoenix, once said, ‘God has a plan for your life, but so does Satan,’ which is just really frightening.”
Steve Greene said it is important to engage in ongoing discernment about which virtues a couple wants to see in their home, the domestic church.
“We are trying to cultivate virtue for a domestic church that can be effective in its mission to be a witness to the world,” he said. “As a school of virtue, this is meant to be the place where, as spouses, we can grow in virtue by working in the complementary way God designed for and with one another.”
When children witness and learn these virtues, they understand them to be a normal, healthy part of marriage and family life, the Greenes said.
While there are challenges, Becky added, facing challenges helps couples to strengthen “our virtue muscles” and grow stronger.
Families and couples striving to be living witnesses of virtue will be countercultural and may be viewed as “weird,” Steve Greene said, but that's OK.
“If we are striving to live virtuously, guess what? We are going to be weird; we are not going to sit well with the culture,” he said. “We can witness with our weirdness. If we, as Catholic couples, are indistinguishable from the culture in our marriage and family life, we are doing something wrong, and we are not embracing and living the mission we are called to. We cultivate virtues in our homes in pursuit of our salvation, but also to witness to the world to follow Christ.”
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