The Culmination of Prayer: Marriage to God

I was first introduced to Saint John of the Cross when I was an undergraduate in the Great Books Honors Program at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. It is from him and from Saint Teresa of Avila that I first heard that the highest point of prayer is the transforming union or mystical marriage. Knowing that this was the endpoint of prayer and the culmination of our lives here on earth, when I first started considering my theory on Genesis 1-4, I figured that it would make sense that God would have begun with that end in mind. God would have created us to be married to Him, and that would have been the case right from the beginning with our first parents. These two Doctors of Prayer teach us that the reason we were created was to be married to God. I am saying the same thing, but my argument is drawn first and foremost from Genesis 1-4, secondarily from the rest of Sacred Scripture, and all with a view of the doctrine and dogma of the Catholic Church.

That we are made to have a deep union with God, similar to a husband to his wife, is the teaching of the Church. The highpoint of Father Thomas Dubay’s book, Fire Within, is chapter ten entitled “The Transforming Summit.” The climax of chapter ten is subtitled: “Transfiguration, deification, marriage.” He begins this sections saying: “Actually, this final trait of the summit is far more than a trait. A summation of the whole, it biblically and profoundly expresses the deepest essence of contemplative culmination, the complete reason for the Incarnation and the redemption. It is the fulfillment of the divine plan for the planet. We men and women were never made simply to be men and women on a natural plane. Because God never thinks prosaic thoughts, never condones lukewarm dilutions, He had in mind nothing less than that we should be deified, that is, transfigured and oned with Him in a union beyond human words” (pgs.192-193).


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