Who we are
We are Kevin and Crystal Sullivan, living in the Chicago area of the United States of America. We have been married thirty-two years and have been blessed with two children and three grandchildren. It will be our great joy to share with you in upcoming issues of this magazine our experiences and thoughts on married life as we continue to grow in love with each other and God. Our journey is both unique and universal. Though we differ culturally and as women and men, as celibates and married persons, we share our common humanity and human vocation.
Crystal
Much of what I now know about God’s plan for my marriage I had to discover the hard way. In 1991, I was a young, independent, and spiritually immature woman who was still adjusting to life at home with young children. Married life with children is often idealized in the abstract but involves a level of maturity and other-centerdness that is challenging. Seven years into our marriage, Kevin and I still loved each other, but because we had grown up in different home situations, we had different perspectives and different forms of communication. All of that caused us to have a hard time relating to each other.There was a constant tension as Kevin and I measured who was working harder, he in his career or me at home with the children. So, after a few too many incidents where angry words were shared, we decided to attend a Worldwide Marriage Encounter retreat which was designed to help us grow closer to each other by helping us effectively communicate our feelings and needs.
Things were going very well, untilat one point, on the last day of the retreat, the presenting couple shared that the goal of married relationship was unity. I chafed at the idea of unity with Kevin, who in temperament and opinions was so different than me. Of course, I later learned that I had completely missed the point. The problem is that unity in relationship is indeed very hard to understand and even harder to live.
At our wedding mass, we had chosen the popular reading from Genesis 2:24: ”A man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”It wasn’t until I had an understanding that God was truly present in my life as a spiritual reality that I could understand that the one-ness, or unity, we are called to in marriage does not mean being the same, but being willing to love each other in such a way that shows others that God lives within us. That clearly leaves out selfishness, pride, revenge, or laziness. No wonder unity is so hard to achieve, it goes against the most basic of human tendencies, which is to put our needs and wants first.
One of the most obvious challenges is that God made us male and female. I am not fond of stereotypes, but it’s hard to ignore that there are some common differences about the way men and women react in the world. The good news is that by virtue of our differences, men and women feel an almost magnetic attraction to one another. So the differences can actually be a great gift if we recognize them as such. We can be open to being influenced by the one we are attracted to. That enables us to take on their good points and their strengths, in addition to our own. In our marriage, Kevin is the solid, trustworthy man who takes responsibility that his family is safe and well cared. He is logical, faithful and driven to succeed. I am the emotional one, valuing relationship with family and friends above all other things. I value beauty over function, caring over performance. What we have discovered is that by relying on each other’s goodness, we can become the couple God created us to be. In some small way, when we serve each other, our children or others, we are giving them a glimpse of God’s lavish love.
Kevin
I can remember that life-changing retreat experience some 25 years ago like it was yesterday. Up to that point I had allowed the culture to tell me who I should be as a father and as a husband. Life was challenging, and I poured myself into working hard to provide for my family. I wanted to be seen as a success by my friends, family and neighbors. Unfortunately, it seemed the harder I worked and the more successful I became the more tense and stressful things became at home, where Crystal carried much of the burden of raising our two young children. On the retreat, I realized that I no longer had to measure my success against that of so many others. My new priority was to love Crystal as God intended me to.
Over the next twenty years we embarked on a wonderful journey to try to discover how to be married in a way that was pleasing to God. We learned new ways to share our feelings, thoughts, needs and desires in ways that would help us to overcome our different backgrounds and views on marriage and child raising. And what a blessing it has been to return my focus back on Crystal, a beautiful woman whose heart overflows with a passionate desire to loveGod and to bring happiness to others.
While we chose to live in unity we have come to appreciate that it is an ever-moving target that changes its shape as our lives change. While the journey has been a joyful one it has not been without occasional side trips into hurtfulness and loneliness as we remain two imperfect human beings with differing emotional and physical needs for love. We discovered that because we had experienced the joy that comes from seeking to live out God’s plan, low spots in our relationship could feel even more intense. While we have always had the tools and the love to work our way out of these occasional pitfalls, it made us realize that there may be something missing in our understanding of how God wanted us to live together.
About five years ago, we discovered that indeed there was more to learn about unity. Through a program called Living in Love, which is based on Scripture and St. Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, we came to understand that God calls us to live a pure, other-centered love. We recognized that we had chosen to “love another” (John 13:34)as a goal for our marriage, but we had not yet identified the Father and the Son as our role models. We were asked to contemplate the life-giving love of the Father manifest in our very creation as man and woman created in His divine image (Genesis 1:31) and to take on Jesus as our role model for loving each other as He loved the Church (Ephesians 5:21-32). It seems as though God is saying, “Kevin, I commend you for seeking to love Crystal the way she seems to need to be loved, but now I would like you to look to my Son Jesus and strive with all your heart and soul to love her the way that We love her.” God has revealed His plan for loving one another through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. As we seek to return to the eternal love of the Father we have come to believe that our journey is to grow ever closer to Jesus so that we might better know how to love others more perfectly. It is this journey that we hope to share with you in future issues.
Crystal and Kevin Sullivan have been involved in ministering to young couples for years. Kevin retired early from his legal firm to dedicate himself full time to ministry. Crystal left the corporate world to raise her children, completed a Master’s in Pastoral Theology and is into various forms of ministry. They have a daughter and a son, and three grandchildren.
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