From 
Mark: Meditations on the Gospel of Mark (Ignatius Press, 2012), by Adrienne von Speyr:
“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.” (10:6–8)
We will contemplate: 1. the creation of the sexes, 2. being one flesh, 3. no longer being two.
1. “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female." One can take this in different ways: God created Adam, and Eve was already prefigured in Adam so that, in order to create the woman, God did not take anything new or uncreated but made her out of Adam’s rib. Or: God made man and woman, just as before them he created the animals in pairs. In this twofold dimension of the sexes lies a structure that characterizes not only the natural world but also the supernatural and includes the Church, a structure that from the beginning was not only intimated but already present. She endured many vacillations throughout her history, but in her essence she remained the same. You know that when the Son of God became man, he restored this twofold being of man by creating the Church as his Bride. And when a man or a woman renounces natural marriage in the life of the evangelical counsels, they do not give up this twofold being. Rather, they place their life wholly within the nuptial relationship between Christ and the Church by allowing themselves to be initiated into this relationship. The Lord not only places maleness and femaleness at the beginning of his explanation, he not only presupposes it, he carries it all the way through. Being alone is not a possibility; even the hermit is not alone, for he is with God. There are cases where it does not matter whether one is a man or a woman, but a complement is nevertheless necessary. The man or woman who consecrates his life to God without marriage receives this complement from God. This completion is full of fruitfulness, is as fruitful as the completion God gave to Adam when God made woman from Adam’s flesh.
2. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” We cannot imagine the unity they form together other than as a completion that points toward fruitfulness. Being simply one, solitude as opposed to being two, is sterility. Alone, one cannot generate, cannot give birth to anything. Unity must have known the prior tension of being two and have become a unity through this tension, in obedience to God’s commandment to be fruitful.
We do not know how this fleshly unity of man and woman would have come about if sin had not entered the picture. We know only that now, oneness in the flesh is bound up with a kind of humiliation. In order to perform the sexual act, the man demands a humiliation of the woman. And on her part, the woman glimpses in the act, along with all the love that is in it, a humiliation of the man, so that the question remains open what the oneness in the flesh would have looked like if sin had not interfered, if the woman did not give birth in pain and the man did not have to experience the hardness of work. This is a theological problem. It is certain that God intended from the beginning this possibility of oneness in the flesh, since he created man in two sexes. This unity is so powerful that it breaks open every unity prior to it: the family, life with father and mother. Every bond that has this oneness as its goal simultaneously implies separation, renunciation. Just as any gift of God at the same time contains the seed of a renunciation. If a gift were so structured that no possibility of sacrifice and renunciation could be discerned in it, we would have to be very skeptical. It would hardly be a gift of God; rather, it would be a temptation. The greatest proof of this lies in the Incarnation of the Son, whose Passion we cannot contemplate except as the Father’s gift to him. In the gift of the Incarnation, all suffering is contained; suffering and renunciation are the sign of the genuineness of the joy of the gift.
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