Dear EDGE Family,

This week at Edge, we began with a fun wedding day competition where the youth made wedding dresses and tuxedos out of toilet paper and proceeded to an obstacle race with different challenges that mirrored married life. The teaching was given by Beth and Kevin Zorn about the Sacrament of Matrimony, specifically how it is a path to holiness for each spouse and that they help one another reach heaven through their marriage. After the teaching, the youth competed in a series of challenges while they learned more about the four aspects of marriage — that it is free, total, faithful, and fruitful. The Edge Night ended with a story about Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin (and their daughter Saint Therese) a prayer for their intercession for all marriages and families.

Check out our Parent Life website at ltparentlife.com for resources on how to guide your teen in a faith-filled way through modern day culture! 

Main Ideas: 

• Man and woman were created by God for each other. They were created to love each other perfectly, to live in peace with one another, to bring new life into the world through their children, and to watch over and take care of all of God’s creation. (CCC 1604-1605)

• The Sacrament of Matrimony is unique because the husband and wife are the ministers of the Sacrament; the priest is just a witness to the Sacrament and blesses it. (CCC 1623)

• There are a lot of ways that marriage has been misrepresented or broken in our current culture, but no matter what it has looked like over the history of humanity, “God Himself is the author of marriage.” No one can change the definition of marriage. (CCC 1603)
  
  

Catechism Reference: 
“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.” (CCC 1601)

Scripture Reference: 
“So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:21-24)

Family Reflection Questions: 

• What is something new that you learned about marriage?

• How does the Sacrament of Matrimony help the married couple in the path to Heaven?

• What about the story of Sts. Louis and Zélie stood out to you (or their daughter Saint Therese)?

• How is their story, and Kevin and Beth Zorn's living witness, good examples of the Sacrament of Matrimony?