God has entrusted you with a little corner of the world to cultivate: your marriage and your family. What kind of fruit is growing there? The vineyard readings from Isaiah and Matthew got me thinking about that question, and about how easily I can expect good fruit without doing the daily work of love (I'm preaching to myself here, too).

In this conversation, I'll share why the garden is such a helpful image for marriage, what tending it looks like through forgiveness, humility, and affection, and how that care connects to a mutually fulfilling life of intimacy. I'll also return to the wedding feast at Cana and the hope that God's grace can make more of your marriage than you could produce on your own, even through the struggles.

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Hey there.

I don't usually reflect on the Sunday mass readings, but these readings from Last Sunday, the 27th Sunday in Ordinary time, which was what, October, they really, really reminded me of something that I talk about quite frequently here.

And so the readings were all about the vineyard in the Old Testament.

In Isaiah, we get the story of a vineyard that was planted and then it yielded wild grapes instead of good fruit, it yielded bad fruit.

But the.

The owner of the vineyard, he spaded it, he found a fertile hillside, he cleared it of stones, planted choice vines, built a watchtower, hewed out a wine press.

You know, he did all these things for the vineyard and then looked for the good fruit.

And then again, we get this parable from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew about the bad tenants, right?

The owner of the vineyard created the vineyard, did all the same things that the story from Isaiah mentioned, and then put tenants in charge of it.

And then when it time, when the time came to collect the fruit, the produce of the vineyard, the tenants, of course, killed the servants, then finally killed the.

The landowner's only son in the ridiculous hope that they would get the son's inheritance if they kill them.

So now, undoubtedly, Jesus himself tells us, Isaiah tells us, the psalm tells us that the vineyard is representative of Israel.

The psalm refrain literally says, the vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.

Boom, right?

It doesn't get much more clear than that.

And yes, that's absolutely true.

Isaiah says, the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel.

That's where that refrain came from.

So this is primarily, of course, about Israel, about, in the New Testament that, like now, it's about the church, it's about the people of God and what fruits we produce for the Lord based on all the goodness that the good things that he has given us.

This just really makes me think about marriage on so many levels.

On so many levels.

So, first of all, keeping with the primary meaning of these texts, what is the fruit that God is looking for from us as a church?

Yes, but it's easy to hide in the, you know, large body that is the church and think about what the church should do for the Lord.

No, no, no.

What should I do for the Lord?

What are the fruits from my own life, from my own heart?

What are those things?

What is God looking for from me?

And that's where it gets a lot more personal and a lot more challenging, of course.

And the fruits that God wants from each one of us, we get a really clear clue into this by looking simply at our vocation.

Our vocation is what God has called us to do.

That's what vocation means.

Vocare means to call.

That's where the word comes from.

So God has called us married men to the vocation of marriage.

What do you think the fruits are that he's looking for?

Well, he's looking for good holy marriages, right?

And the fruits from marriage are, you know, a beautiful family, faith within the family and love.

I mean, it always comes down to the two great commandments, doesn't it?

Which actually was the daily reading for today, on Monday, October 5th, the next day.

Huh?

Just realize that.

And the two great commandments are, love God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength, all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Well, primarily is my neighbor.

It just means love others, right?

Not just people out there, starting with the people in here.

In my own home, if my own wife doesn't count as my neighbor, who in the.

Who in the world does?

Right?

If my own children don't count as my neighbor, who does?

Love our wives as ourselves, love our children as ourselves, and yes, love our neighbors as ourselves as well.

Love God and love each other, though that is the fundamental task of the Christian life.

And why?

Because in loving God, in loving others, we conform ourselves to God.

We conform our hearts to the heart of Jesus.

And that is the task of sanctification right there.

That is why one of the ends, one of the purposes of marriage is, yes, procreation of children and also the sanctification of the spouses.

How does that get worked out practically?

It gets worked out practically by becoming, by marriage and family, becoming for us a school of love, learning how to love.

Because God is love.

And if we want to share the heavenly kingdom with God, who is love, we ourselves need to conform ourselves to that love.

We need to receive it, we need to share it with everyone around us, starting in our own homes, with our own wives, with our own children.

So those are the good fruits that God is looking for from us.

And what will happen if we don't yield those fruits?

Oh, well, Isaiah and the Gospel of Matthew both have some pretty harsh words for those who don't yield the good fruits.

In Isaiah, the landowner will take away the the vineyard's hedge, give it over to grazing, break through its walls, let it be trampled, make it a ruin.

It's not going to go well for those of us who don't love well.

So that's the first thing.

Another thing that this makes me think of is the metaphor that I often use.

And constantly you will hear me talk about this is understanding our own marriages, understanding your marriage as a garden.

And I think this is so helpful because so many of us have a somewhat mechanical metaphor, a mechanical understanding of marriage and of relationships.

We talk about fixing in air quotes, fixing our relationship, our marriage, our relationship with our.

Any relationship with our wife, with our children, good friends, parents, whatever.

Any good human relationship doesn't work like a car.

It's not like I can just swap out the transmission, change a timing belt and be on my way and have it humming along as good as ever.

It just doesn't work that way.

Relationships are organic.

They're between people, not things.

And in order to quote, unquote, fix, the better word is heal.

The better word is grow, right?

And mature.

So if I have a plant who is diseased, which is diseased, I don't fix it in the way that I fix a car.

I care for it, I tend it, I water it, I weed it, I fertilize it, I protect it from the harsh weather, right?

Whatever I can do to help that plant heal itself and grow and mature.

That is a better analogy, a better metaphor for a marriage.

It's a garden.

And when our marriages need attention, when we know that they've maybe been on the back burner for a while, maybe they've been neglected for a while, maybe there's some big things we need to work out with our wives, whatever it is, maybe it's just we feel like we've gotten into kind of a routine, a ruthless, and we need to break out of that rut a little bit, and we need to strive for something more, right?

It can be any, any of those.

Any of those things.

We don't get to the next level.

We don't heal our relationship, we don't move forward.

We don't yield good fruits by thinking about fixing our relationship, like just, you know, swapping out a belt or, you know, changing apart, fixing apart, whatever it is, without mechanical understanding, we don't make a few little tweaks here and there that make it hum along again like.

Like our car.

No, we have to put in time and effort.

That's what makes relationships valuable.

Because relationships call from me a consistent effort.

That's what love requires, a consistent effort.

If I'm going to grow a garden, a vineyard, I don't just plant it once and then expect it to be perfect for the next 10 years.

No, no, of course not.

What's going to happen if I make it a beautiful vineyard and then I neglect it for 10 years, it's going to be overgrown and hardly recognizable at the end of 10 years if I don't give any effort to it at all.

Well, our marriages are the same, right?

We need to tend it, we need to weed it.

We need to weed out those feelings of frustration, those areas that we need to ask for and grant forgiveness from our wives.

We need to weed out pride.

We need to embrace humility.

We need to water our garden with affection and love and tenderness and care and time and attention with our wives.

We need to tend our garden in all these ways in order for it to bear good fruit, in order for the marriage to bear good fruit.

Keeping with this metaphor, if we completely neglect our marriage and it's overgrown with weeds and it's maybe really dry because we haven't watered it and you know, all these things, how can we possibly expect good fruits from that marriage?

That's what God is expecting from us, is good fruits from our marriage.

We are responsible for tending this little corner of reality that he has entrusted to us as men.

He is entrusted to us our marriages.

He is entrusted to us our family, our children.

He's entrusted to us our homes.

This is our little garden.

And we're responsible for tending it, for growing it, for caring for it, for yielding good fruits for him and for the world.

So we need to be intentional and focus on our marriages in all these ways.

And what are some of the good fruits?

I talked about them a little bit, right?

A holy, holy family, children who love the Lord, ourselves, like increasing sanctity for ourselves and for our wives.

Part of marriage is not only personal sanctity, but also helping the spouse attains sanctity.

And sometimes this occurs not because, you know, we're so nicely helping our wives and sharing our great spiritual wisdom with them.

I used to think that sometimes, but I'm.

I'm over that.

How, speaking for myself, how I most help Sarah grow in sanctity is merely the fact that she has to put up with me all the time.

She gets to grow in patience and, and forbearance and forgiveness every single day living with me.

That's how I help her grow in holiness.

And it's a little bit mutual, I know, but, you know, so.

So we do help each other grow in holiness just by the mere fact of living together as two fallen, sinful humans who are making our way as best we can towards heaven.

What are some of the other good fruits from marriage?

Well, here's one of the good fruits of marriage that I talk about on this podcast.

Quite a bit.

And one of the good fruits of marriage is a beautiful, mutually fulfilling life of intimacy.

In marriage.

So many of us make the mistake of thinking of sex as its own kind of thing, right?

Like it's completely separate from the quality of our.

Of our relationship, of our love, of our bond, of our connection with our wives, which is really unfortunate, to say the least.

Our expression of physical intimacy is a direct reflection of the reality of our relationship.

The Church says this right in its catechism, that the physical intimacy, sex is a.

Is a reflection of the love and the connection and the bond that the spouses share.

You can't get away from this.

It's.

It's like body language.

It really does reflect the reality of the relationship.

Well, think about that.

If your relationship is not great, if your connection is suffering, if your bond really needs some attention, if.

If you need to forgive and reconcile, reconnect, you know, if your marriage has been on the back burner, in short, if the garden of your marriage needs some attention, maybe it's a little overgrown, maybe it's a little dry, then the quality of your physical intimacy will reflect that.

It should be no wonder at all if your sex life is suffering, if your marriage is suffering.

But if your marriage is really, really strong, that is the best possible thing you can do to improve your sex life as well.

Now, there are some other things involved in a specific aspect of physical intimacy, which, you know, I talk about in other areas as well as in my course, Holy Desires, we go through all the practicals, but technique, no amount of, you know, learning about arousal and different levels of desire, none of that will matter if your fundamental relationship is suffering.

Like, that's where you have to start.

You have to truly love each other and then reflect that love, express that love physically.

So that's how it works.

So these readings about the vineyard really got me thinking on all sorts of different levels.

And here's one last observation or thought that I had about this.

And it ties directly into the wedding feast at Cana, which is what my wife's.

The ministry that my wife and I created is called Cana Feast.

That's sort of the broad umbrella brand, if you will, that we have for everything that we do to help Catholic couples embrace a beautiful marriage.

So what is one of the things that the landowner does in Isaiah and in.

In the Gospel of Matthew, he hews out a wine press.

I. I love this detail.

Of course, you know, of course the vineyard is there to produce grapes, and then the grapes are there to produce the wine.

In the wedding at Cana, the head steward turns to the bridegroom and says, you know, most people serve the good wine first, but you have saved the best for last.

And I see that as such a great image of how God has saves the best for last in marriage.

Our marriage should just get better and better over time.

The best is for last, right?

And then the very, very best when we get to heaven, right?

Everything until then is just a foretaste.

The very best is the very last, and that's in heaven.

But wine is such a powerful biblical image of, of divine grace, of celebration, of joy, of, like, super abundance.

And there's some really profound aspect of transformation, right?

We start with grapes, and they're good fruit.

Good fruit.

I like grapes.

But then through the process of making them into wine, they become something even more beyond what they started as.

And that's sort of the process in our marriage, right?

We bring our good fruits of everything that we have to offer ourselves.

All of our hopes, our dreams.

We join it together with our wife.

She brings her hopes and dreams and all of our best intentions.

And in all of that, when we embrace the vocation that God has given us, when we embrace the sacrament that God seals us with, and we embrace the true grace that comes through that sacrament, if your marriage is a sacramental marriage, then there is sacramental grace coming through your marriage.

And we can.

We can embrace that.

We can conform ourselves to it.

We can welcome it into our lives.

When we do, the garden of our marriage produces not just good fruit and not just grapes, but God will transform those grapes, transform that good fruit that we produce, and elevate it to a whole new level through grace.

And that is just what is really, really exciting when you step out on this path of following God's voice in your life in a really radical and serious way, man, the adventure begins because God's plan for you is so much bigger than your plan for yourself.

His vision for who you are is so much bigger than your vision of yourself.

And his plans for your marriage are so much bigger than your plans that you have for your marriage.

And the minute you let go and your own pride, let go of your own ideas and really open yourself up to God's grace, to his, to him leading you to his spirit in your life.

When you really conform your heart to his heart and open yourself to that love, then you can start to love your God with all your heart, mind and strength, even more, and love your neighbor as you love yourself and enter into a truly profound adventure through life.

Which only increases.

I cannot promise you that you won't have struggles.

In fact, I can promise you the opposite, because Jesus promises you the opposite.

Jesus himself promises that you will have struggles.

He literally tells his disciples, take up your cross and follow me.

Right, but let me go back to the the second reading from today.

I've quoted the other two may as well.

And the psalm may as well round it out.

And here's.

Here's what happens when you truly embrace God's will in your life.

This is from the letter to the Philippians.

Have no anxiety at all.

But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.

Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

That's what happens.

Even though you take up your crosses, even though there are struggles, even though there are challenges, all of those things will remain.

But God's grace will be added to all of them.

And God's grace will guard your hearts and minds and in Christ Jesus and give you peace beyond anything that you know.

And that is My prayer for all of you.

So embrace the the work of cultivating your vineyard.

Embrace the work of cultivating the garden of your marriage.

Embrace the work of reconciling, of forgiving, of shedding your pride, embracing humility, of loving.

It all comes down to love.

True, authentic love.

Embrace the work of love, love of God, love of neighbor, and especially starting with your wife and your children in your own home, and God bless you.