Dear friends,
I want to share with you some thoughts about love and marriage. What got me thinking is Frank Sinatra’s hit record “Love and Marriage” (1955).
What I want to share with you is something that we priests used to use at marriages (weddings), but now is not used, as far as I know, and I miss it. During my early years as a priest, I had a “built-in” homily ready for weddings called the exhortation. Nowadays, most priests make up their own homilies. It’s probably the same for most ministers. I don’t know what style is better, but I do know that the exhortation, used years ago, contained everything substantial and spiritual about a marriage.
First, I’ll share with you some of the formerly used exhortations. You enter a union that is most sacred and most serious. Why? It was established by God himself.
God gave a man and a woman a share in the greatest work of creation — the continuation of the human race. In this way, God sanctifies human love and enables them to help each other live as children of God — a common life under his fatherly care.
Because God is the author, marriage is a holy institution. Therefore, it requires a complete giving of self. Jesus added more beauty and a deeper meaning. He refers to the love of marriage as like his own love for the Church.
Jesus gave to Christians what married life ought to be — a life of self-sacrificing love, like his own.
St. Paul tells us that marriage is for all time a great mystery — intimately bound up in the union of Christ and his Church.
The union is most serious because it binds a couple together for life in a relationship so close and so intimate that it will profoundly influence your whole future. That future, with its hopes and disappointments, successes and failures, pleasures and pain, its joys and sorrows, is hidden from your eyes.
These elements are in every life and are to be expected in your own. Not knowing what is before you, you take one another for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness or in health, until death.
Sacrifice is usually difficult; only love can make it easier.
Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Love and marriage — they go together like…?
