Satan Hates Your Marriage
This is the first part in a book-length reflection on answering the call of the Second Vatican Council for all Christians to live the Evangelical Counsels of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. My reflection focuses on living these Counsels within the vocation of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony as self-emptying love (poverty), love without condition (chastity), and love that listens to—literally, “turns the ear toward”—each other (obedience).
I began writing on a cold February morning in 2025 in the midst of strife after neither of us was living our vocation well. Even worse, we were not witnessing well the Sacrament of Matrimony to our children. I hadn’t planned to undertake a project of such a magnitude when I typed the words, “Flesh of my flesh”—only to remind myself what I believe and what we set out to do—be a domestic Church and, through our witness, equip our children to form their own one day.
Flesh of My Flesh
Living the Evangelical Counsels in Christian Marriage
Part 1: Where We’ve Been Is Not Where We’re Going
Satan Hates Your Marriage
Entering my senior year of high school, now nearly 30 years ago, my principal, Fr. Leon Olzamowski began his annual “Be careful how you live this year” talk with the words, “Verbum sapienti sat: A word to the wise is enough.” Father Leon is a brilliant and joyful Marist priest but stern when the moment demands it, and this talk unfolded in the later mode: “It takes a lifetime to build a reputation,” he cautioned, “It takes one night to destroy it.” Fortunately, my classmates and I had only a mild case of senioritis the following spring, and none of us destroyed our reputations with a senior prank that had two years prior cost a group of kids their diplomas.
I've found his words ring true over the years—19+ of them married and raising children with my wife while serving as an Army officer in various assignments across the United States and deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many people seem to burn it all down with panache in a single, self-destructive event. As a military commander, I’ve sat in judgment over soldiers ranging from DUIs, substance abuse, and various forms of assault, to minor infractions against good order and discipline. But our relationships are just as often broken or destroyed by the slow-burning fuse of getting it wrong for years when we fall into habits of unhealthy communication—not having or resolving important conversations, emotional distancing, resentment, pride and selfishness, addiction, shame, and self-isolation. These behaviors wound our relationships slowly and very deeply. But they also often flow out of the wounds we bring to them from our past. And like any physical wound, left untreated, they cause problems in the rest of the system.
We are human persons—both body and soul and so our wounds can have devastating impacts on our physical and spiritual relationships. In other words, the attitudes of a wounded mind can cost us relationships with other persons and imperil our soul by the loss of relationship with our Creator. As I set out to write these first words of what I hope you will read, I also hope you will ponder and internalize through prayerful discernment of your own wounds, inclinations, and modes of being in relationship with other persons—whether it be God, coworkers, the persons in your care, or your spouse. I offer them as a word to the wise.
***
At the start, I want to offer another word to the wise—words spoken to me by perhaps the holiest priest I have ever known. Father Matt Pawlikowski was my brigade chaplain while serving as a paratrooper in the 37th Engineer Battalion (Combat)(Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He picked up the phone when my battalion commander called home after a young First Lieutenant Ouellette rushed into his office on Joint Base Balad, Iraq late in the night in 2010 and told him, “Dana was told she has multiple sclerosis and can’t get an MRI to confirm it for 3 months.” Father Matt got her an appointment a couple of days later, and it turned out that the numbness in her face and half of her body was caused by the malpractice of the dentist who’d filled a cavity a few weeks prior.
We reunited with Fr. Matt in 2016 at West Point, where he served as Chaplain of the United States Military Academy. We were at a welcome BBQ at the home of one of the permanent faculty members. Unbeknownst to us, Fr. Matt was his neighbor. Dana spotted him walking in the yard next door and in an absolutely authentic Dana moment, shouted, “Father Matt, hello!” Next thing I knew we were shaking hands and hugging with smiles from ear to ear. I remember our very first Mass in the Catholic Chapel, Most Holy Trinity—the only official Catholic parish in the military. I wept manly tears of joy as I received our Lord in the Eucharist from him moments after he knelt to offer our Lord to my oldest son, Chas. His firm belief in the Real Presence was unmistakable; his face radiated joy as he offered each member of my family our Eucharistic Lord. His belief was contagious. I will never forget the feeling, to the ground of my being, of the unshakable certitude, which I confess not always being recollected to—that Jesus was truly about to come to my house.
During the Army-Navy football games, Fr. Matt traveled with the team and spent the games praying the rosary on what sideline. But anyone with eyes to see knew he was in the only fight that mattered—praying for the safety of all the players, body and soul, and, yes, an Army victory over Navy. And when the global coronavirus pandemic broke out in 2020, Fr. Matt carried our Eucharistic Lord at sunrise one morning to the highest point on West Point with to bless us all.
In the confessional, the grace of the Holy Spirit flowed out of Fr. Matt like honey from the frame of one of my beehives. He often asked me to pray for the wild success for the people I confessed a grudge against and reminded me of the humility of our Lord. “For your penance I want you to read Philippians 2,” he’d say, “and just contemplate the humility of Jesus.” Leaving the confessional, I never doubted God’s mercy and joy in forgiving me for the poverty of my love for God and my neighbor, but despite my failing; I always knew that my loving God was ready to stand eyelash to eyelash with me again as on the day of my baptism.
Five years later, I was face-to-face with Fr. Matt in his office. Now retired from the Army, but still serving God’s people in uniform, I was bearing my heart to him about the damage I’d done to my marriage and all the wounds that now stood between my wife and me.
Finally, he spoke: “Satan hates your marriage, and he’s willing to help you destroy it.”
Shalom
My parents broke my heart at an early age. They separated and then divorced just after I turned 5 over money, a breakdown in communication, my father’s emotional distance from her, and all the unspoken resentments against each other throughout the nine years of their marriage that produced my sister and me. In my young mind, I was aware of a couple of things then that have affected every one of my relationships.
One thing I felt profoundly was that I was different. Although I didn’t have the word yet, it didn’t seem normal to my young mind that a family should be like ours. And, just like any lie, the lie that I was “different” is a twisting of the truth that each family is unique and special, and this was not what God intended for the human family when he created Eve as a suitable partner for Adam. My parents were not “one flesh” [1]. But I believed the lie—the primordial attack from the Enemy on God’s purpose for my life—my vocation as husband and father. I accepted the lie and my identity as “different.” And just like our first parents, I ran and hid my shame.
My identity as different quickly led me to not want to risk relationships. To love is to risk, and all human and divine relationships are fundamentally, to risk in love the very possibility of being hurt. In relationship we put ourselves at risk—risk of being rejected and perhaps utterly destroyed. Consider, here, our Lord’s Passion and crucifixion. As he entered his Passion, Jesus was betrayed by one of his Apostles—someone so close to him that he not only washed Judas’ feet on Holy Thursday, but had given His Body and Blood as food just moments before Judas left to betray him with the kiss of peace [2]. Whatsmore, in the end, Jesus was abandoned by nearly every person he loved. Peter denied him—not once, but three times. Pause and consider the significance of the number three in Scripture as a measure of perfection; Peter—the Rock, whom Jesus had given the keys of the kingdom and appointed leader of the Twelve perfectly denied the man that the Spirit had shown him to be “The Christ, the Son of the Living God” [3]. Eventually, his people—many who probably had greeted him with “Hosanna to the Son of David!” [4] on his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday had shouted, “Give us Bar-Abbas!” [5]. Jesus was subjected to mockery, scourging, the crowning with thorns, being stripped naked, and a humiliating “death, death on a cross” [6], the most vile and humiliating instrument of torture ever conceived. Only his Mother, St. John, and St. Mary Magdeline stayed with him to the end. Jesus shows us that relationship is to hazard all for love, and I was decidedly unwilling to risk being hurt by anyone.
***
In The Great Divorce, Jack (C.S. Lewis) dreams of heaven and hell and takes us to both. Hell is a grim city which seems locked in time just moments before the last light of the sun disappears at the end of day. Lewis’ vision of Heaven, on the other hand, is a garden with high mountains—everything is so real that the even blades of grass literally hurt to walk on for the souls going through purgation. Jack takes a bus from hell and, over the course of his stay, encounters an array of characters that we can all easily identify with. They have lived lives consumed by pride, envy, lust, jealousy, and shame. And each of them has to make a choice for heaven or hell. As I consider my wounds, I can’t help but think of the one character with whom I had always least identified. Now, I think that perhaps I overlooked her and was more easily able to see the others, not because she was a woman, but because her wound is so deeply seated and walled within the fortress of my heart that I didn’t want to see the woman without a body.
With the shame and lie that I was different—that only my family was broken, I quickly believed the lie that I was unworthy of being loved. It happened like this: my parents didn’t love each other—they argued, fought, called each other names, and resented each other. I didn’t have the words, but somehow I felt deeply that they hated each other more than they loved my sister and me.
I felt alienated from my cousins, classmates, and playmates. One doesn’t just flip a switch and become a different person from situation to situation. True, some children who experience trauma at home turn to laughter and become the class clown; while I dabbled in that, I was often sad and lonely.
My first kindergarten report card said something to the effect that I was inclined to only play with Lincoln Logs and by myself. I liked to build houses and eventually to draw houses that I imagined would be the happy home I would know one day. When my teacher asked the class what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said, “An architect.”
By middle school, I had low self-esteem and picked on other kids, who probably had better lives than I did. I imagined their dads were at home and did things with them, like building model trains. Their moms made their lunch and drove them to school while I sat on the bus, staring out the window and looking at all the houses I imagined were all happy homes, too.
When I was old enough to drive, I got a job, joined the track team to spend a few extra hours away each day, and lived as much as possible in the loving homes of my friends. They were a witness to me of what a family could and should be, and yet, I didn’t want them to see me. I was still hiding in the thicket, like Adam and Eve.
***
In The Great Divorce, the woman without a body runs screaming into the story, “Go away! Can’t you see that I want to be alone!” to which the one sent to offer her the freedom of heaven replies, “But can’t you see that you need help?” [7] The human person is not meant to live alone, but rather in a community. This is God’s wisdom and the proper orientation of our lives: “It is not good for man to be alone” [8].
And just as to enter relationship is to put oneself at risk of danger, relationship also opens us to the risk of being loved. To be loved is to be received, delighted in, affirmed, shown affection, and made to feel safe. And in our broken lives, to be loved is to be healed, and to be healed is to be saved. Jesus shows us this time and again throughout the Gospels. Indeed, the name of Jesus—in Aramaic, Yeshua, meaning “God saves”, shows us that his principal mission—the very reason for his Incarnation, is healing; it is also his identity. At the synagogue in Nazareth, St. Luke records our Lord announcing his public ministry with the words of the prophet Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” [9]
In St. Matthew’s Gospel we hear that when Jesus looks upon the masses of broken persons, “He was deeply moved with compassion for them, because they were troubled and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” [10]. Twenty-eight of Jesus’ 38 recorded miracles throughout the Gospels are healing miracles! And as St. John reminds us, “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written” [11].
And yet we moderns are skeptical about everything. We might often ask ourselves, just how far is Jesus willing to go to carry out his Father’s healing work in our wounded humanity? As a paratrooper in the U.S. Army airborne community, our rallying cry was, “All the way!” We might think of fairweather friends, here for the party, gone in hard times. We might think of disappointments where promises have been broken or trust is lost even in our most intimate relationships with parents, siblings, spouses, or children. Not Jesus! As one of my favorite evangelists, Bishop Robert Barron (who must be a paratrooper at heart) likes to say, “Jesus goes all the way down” [12] into our brokenness. The Gospels are full of stories of Jesus sharing a meal with tax collectors and sinners [13]. He heals a woman caught in adultery [14].
Let’s briefly return for a moment to the The Great Divorce and the woman without a body. Near the end of Jack’s “interview” with her, she vacillates between healing and persisting in her woundedness, saying things like, “I wish I’d never been born!” and “What am I for?” as she is invited to allow her shame to come to the surface and be healed. The spirit tells her:
An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don’t you remember on earth-there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds [15].
Still, the woman without a body resists and delays healing. She lashes out, protesting, “It’s not fair [...] Now please, go away.” The spirit pleads with her, "Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?" The woman’s defenses are rising, but there is the kernel of desire for healing even as she coldly and tearfully gives her reply: “I’ve already given you my answer.” To this, the spirit says, “There can be only one remedy,” and blows a terrible horn, summoning 27 unicorns, which chase her away. We might imagine this is the trumpet of judgment, but it is meant to be the trumpet of salvation. Later on in the story, Jack, still disturbed by what he has witnessed, asks one of “the Real People”—a saint, about the fate of the woman without a body. The response affirms the horn’s true purpose: “He meant to frighten her; not that fear itself could make her less a Ghost, but if it took her mind a moment off herself, there might, in that moment, be a chance. I have seen them saved so” [16].
There is no “trick” Jesus isn’t willing to play to save the lost sheep of his flock. He even continues to be about the healing work of his Father in a personal way on his cross when he tells the Good Thief, “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” [17]. It is worth pausing to remember here, that anytime the Gospels omit a name, we are meant to place ourselves into the story. Moved by the Holy Spirit to write, St. Luke reminds us that like the woman without a body, no matter how deeply a wound is buried in our hearts—however much it has enslaved and hurt us or our relationships, no matter what that wound has cost us, if we turn to him, his mercy is waiting and healing is given.
After his Resurrection, Jesus appears many times to his disciples who had left him alone to suffer the cross, offering them his peace: “Shalom” [18]. He reminds them of their true vocation and identity in him when he fills their nets once more on the Sea of Tiberius, just as when he first called them to live in relationship as fishers of men [19]. Jesus re-presents the Passover meal he shared with them before his Passion—the Eucharist, affirming his once-for-all, loving sacrifice when he “took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them” [20]. Jesus is not ashamed of his wounds. When he reveals them to Thomas—who stands for all of us skeptical moderns, he says, “Put your finger here and see my hands and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
What is he asking us to believe? Jesus asks us to believe the truth of what he has done for us [21]. As he is about to ascend to the Father, Jesus blesses them, as he does each one of us [22], and promises them what is promised to each one of us—that he will complete his healing work in us, through the Holy Spirit, who will clothe us with power from on high [23].
The Very Image of God
“Satan hates your marriage and he’s willing to help you destroy it.”
Those words jolted me. I’ve only experienced two earthquakes—one in Alaska and a rare New York quake. The New York quake struck early one winter morning. I awoke from a deep sleep to what sounded like a freight train or Tim Allen landing on the roof. The whole house shook as if the walls themselves were afraid. Hearing, “Satan hates your marriage” was like that.
In a moment the aperture of my sadness, guilt, and shame opened to the reality of a spiritual battle. It felt like that scene in The Return of the King when the Steward of Gondor sees the plain below filled with the assembled armies of Mordor, moments from beginning their assault on the walls of his city. And while I can relate to both the poor love and the “failing rule” of this tragic character, who is, after all, only a steward—not the king, the comparisons stop there. In that moment, I felt only the steely resolve of Gandalf when he orders the soldiers of Gondor to “prepare for battle!” Even if it was too late to reconcile and live together, I resolved to entrust my marriage completely in the loving hands of the Father, to stand as a beggar before Him, and to do spiritual battle for the healing and holiness of my family.
What is at stake and why does Satan hate our marriage?
Satan hates your marriage because he is the Enemy of mankind. His name—in Greek, diabolos, often translated to “accuser”, literally means “scatterer.” Satan and all those who stand with him as accusers and scatterers oppose Jesus’ prayer to the Father, “That they be one just as we are one” [24]. Satan does not want to see us healed, whole, or united precisely because he doesn’t want to see us in communion. If we can’t be in communion with other persons, we cannot possibly hope for the Beatific Vision and the ultimate communion that we are called to—entry into the Divine Life of the Blessed Trinity in heaven.
We moderns have almost no clue about any of this in the present age. I say “we” because were all breathing in the same zeitgeist: autonomy, self-project, and freedom from imposition from any outside force. We may delude ourselves, but marriage, at its worst, is presented as a self-absorbed day of festivity worshiping the two well-put-together people who may or may not have checked all the boxes in what’s trending in wedding planning this season. We almost don’t even bother with the happily-ever-after part anymore except to inquire about the honeymoon or the hip neighborhood they’ll be living in. The modern idea of marriage is for until we outgrow each other, not til death do us part.
But the authentically Catholic view of marriage, beautifully expressed in Ephesians 5, is rooted in mutual self-gift. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us what sacramental matrimony is and what it is for:
“The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament” [25].
The Catechism further describes the family as a domestic Church. In the domestic Church, the Catechism states:
“The father of the family, the mother, children, and all members of the family exercise the priesthood of the baptized in a privileged way "by the reception of the sacraments, prayer and thanksgiving, the witness of a holy life, and self-denial and active charity. Thus the home is the first school of Christian life and "a school for human enrichment." Here one learns endurance and the joy of work, fraternal love, generous—even repeated—forgiveness, and above all divine worship in prayer and the offering of one's life” [26].
Throughout the ages, the pilgrim Church on earth—the visible part of the Mystical Body of Christ, continues Jesus’ healing mission from the Father through its saving work. Pope Francis affirms this work when he describes the Church as a “field hospital” [27] that cares for wounded persons. If the family is the domestic Church and the first school of the Christian, then we must situate the family as the field hospital on the frontline of our spiritual warfare to heal wounded persons. Of course Satan hates that.
Satan also hates your marriage because he hates God. The scatterer hates that God the Father sent the eternal icon of Himself into the World on a mission to heal the wounds between God and fallen humanity. Your marriage images the love of the very nature of God, Himself—the Trinitarian communion of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. St. John Chrysostom is attributed with the saying, “When a husband and wife are united in marriage, they no longer seem like something earthly, but rather like the image of God Himself” [28].
Moreover, as Catholics, sacramental marriage mirrors the Father’s will that Jesus Christ, the eternal bridegroom, took on our creatureliness in his humanity and consummated his marriage to all of creation in his redemptive act on the cross. The sacrament of matrimony reflects Christ’s eternal nuptial union with humanity. It is “intensified in a special way during the moment when the archetypal “form” of conjugal love is being made present: in the Eucharist. Put another way, married Catholics actively [...] receive communion always as the living sacramental sign of what they are receiving” [29].
Satan hates God. He hates the cross. He hates the Eucharist. Satan hates your marriage.
Endnotes
[1] Ephesians 5:31.
[2] Matthew 26:49.
[3] Matthew 16:16.
[4] Matthew 29:12.
[5] Luke 23:18. Bar-Abbas translates in Aramaic to ‘son of the father.’ He was probably a false messiah [find citation in Benedict XVI. Jesus of Nazarath.]
[6] Philippians 2:8.
[7] C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, and Douglas H. Gresham, The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017).
[8] Genesis 2:18.
[9] Luke. 4:18-19.
[10] Matthew 9:36.
[11] John 21:25.
[12] Barron, Robert. “All the Way Down”. Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon. Podcast audio, April 2, 2023. https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/sermons/all-the-way-down/.
[13] Matthew 9:10-13.
[14] John 8:3-11.
[15] C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, and Douglas H. Gresham, The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017).
[16] Ibid.
[17] Luke 23:43.
[18] Luke 24:36.
[19] John 21:1-14.
[20] Luke 24:30.
[21] John 13:7: “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”
[22] Philippians 1:6.
[23] Luke 24:49-51.
[24] John 17:11.
[25] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 1601.
[26] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 1657.
[27] Pope Francis. “General Audience” [Audiences]. Vatican City. 28 August 2019. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/audiences/2019/documents/papa-francesco_20190828_udienza-generale.html.
[28] Attributed.
[29] Banga, Mark. Communio: International Catholic Review. Communio 51 (Fall 2024).
