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PAGE 5 — November 23,1972
Marriage Celebrates The Miracle of Love
BY FR. QUENTIN QUESNELL, S.J.
There is no indication in the gospels that Jesus was ever
married. Some people claim he must have been, because it was
expected of everyone in his place and time. But arguments
about what Jesus must have done, based on conformity to what
everyone else did, are not very strong arguments. He was much
too distinctive an individual for that.
We do find in the gospels that Jesus talks a lot about
weddings. When he tells the story of the five wise virgins and the
five foolish, who waited up to light the way for the bridal
procession, he makes himself the bridegroom of the tale. When
he warns his disciples, at another time, to be alert for the day of
his return, he tells them they must be like servants sitting up
late at night inside their master’s house, ready to open the doors
for him “when he returns from the wedding.”
In another story, Jesus’ Father is a king who has prepared a
great celebration for his son’s wedding, And once, when the
Pharisees wonder why Jesus’ disciples do not fast like other holy
men, he answers that you can hardly expect the guests at a
wedding to fast - certainly not as long as the groom is still there
with them. He assures his enemies that this particular
bridegroom will not be with them for long, and they will have
plenty of time to fast later on, after he is gone.
Following our Lord’s lead, John the Baptist compares Jesus
to a bridegroom who is so happy in the possession of his new
bride that his joy overflows onto all his friends as well. The
wedding at Cana carries out the same theme. Jesus was not the
bridegroom there, but what an important part he played in their
celebration.
When the guests had already drunk up all the wine there was,
Jesus produced six more full jars. Since the jars held “two to
three measures apiece” and each measure was about eight
gallons, that means Jesus provided somewhere between 100 to
150 gallons of wine -- enough to quench anyone’s thirst.
What is behind all this? Why is wedding imagery so perfectly
suited to passing on the gospel message? First of all, of course, a
wedding is a happy occasion, and the gospel is “good news.”
But there are plenty of other happy occasions: birthdays,
coronations, religious holidays, also celebrated with large
parties. Why always bring in weddings?
A wedding is itself an embodiment of the gospel. It is not just
any celebration. It is a celebration of love. It celebrates the
reality of love. It celebrates the achievement of love - making us
go out of ourselves and become better than we are by the
attractive power of another human person.
A marriage celebrates the triumph of love. Getting married
means having overcome one’s fear of risk and being willing to
keep trying to overcome selfishness. It means daring to give up
the comfortable security of free, personal disposal of one’s
possessions and of one’s very self.
A marriage celebrates the strength and confidence of love. It
is a proclamation of faith before all the world. Not just a passg
fancy, but an open and firm commitment in a perilous universe.
“My beloved to me and I to him.” “Till death do us part.”
A marriage celebrates the miracle of love. It is a miracle of
creativity. In the surrenders made, there is the possibility of life
to come. The apparent loss and death is gain and life -- like life
out of death, like resurrection.
Weddings are the gospel in miniature. No wonder Jesus loved
them.
God and Love
and Marriage
W (All Articles On This Page Copyrighted 1972 by N.C. News service.)
(Know Y our F ailh J
BY DR. LAWRENCE LOSONCY
Books which deal with the spiritual life often speak about the
various kinds of friendship. They speak of the friendship which
lasts only as long as convenient or useful. Then there is the
friendship of pleasure, wherein another person is esteemed for
selfish reasons. The friendship ends when it is no longer
profitable or pleasurable.
The highest and most lasting kind of friendship is that
wherein another person is revered simply as a person. This is
what the existentialists refer to when they talk about “affirming
the other,”it is what Buber refers to when he speaks about
seeing others as a “thou” and it is what, in common parlance,
we mean by treating people as persons instead of as things.
Marriage, in order to last, must be of this high order and
mutual esteem. When people, through the marriage relationship,
achieve this loving acceptance of one another, a beautiful sign
shines forth for all to see. This is what we celebrate at a
wedding, at wedding anniversaries, in love stories, and in many
other ways throughout life. This is the kind of love to which
Jesus referred when he said the marriage bond was forever.
The Old Testament used married love to portray God’s love
for us, his people. God is portrayed as a jealous God, who will
tolerate no other lover wooing the loved ones. He is portrayed
as a brooding God, a God who marries a prostitute (Israel) and
continues to seek after his bride even after she returns to her
infidelity and abandons her husband. Faithfulness is a key
theme for God’s people in the Old Testament.
Saint Paul saw clearly these revelations and continued to
teach through the love which is marriage. He sees Christ as the
bridegroom and the Church as the bride; he sees the relationship
between Church (us) and Jesus as one of deepest intimacy. And
he sees the sacrament of marriage as a sign for the whole
community.
Saint Augustine stresses this same point of view, noting that
God is a deeply personal God who loves each one of us and all
of us deeply and forever. The married relationship is one in
which the other person is loved generously, jealously, and
fruitfully. New life comes from married love. Augustine sees
God loving us generously, jealously, and fruitfully; new life and
eternal life come from God’s love, and God’s love is forever.
We live at a time in history when married love has been nearly
equated with sexual expression, when mutual attractiveness has
been stressed in terms of youthfulness, beauty, and sexual
provocation; when the fruit of married love has been depicted as
a burden and evil to be avoided; when loving relationships have
been encouraged to end soon after they begin and are,
therefore, entered into lightly. In the United States, there is one
divorce for every three marriages. More and more of the
children in this country find themselves belonging to someone
else’s parents.
“WHEN PEOPLE, THROUGH THE MARRIAGE a beautiful sign shines forth for all to see.” A bride and groom
RELATIONSHIP, achieve this loving acceptance of one another, pledge their love and loyalty at a Nuptial Mass. NC Photo
A Family Planned Liturgy
Contrast “old fashioned” ideas about marriage with some of
the popular current ideas about marriage and you will gain
insight into the kind of love God bears for each of us. Like
traditional marriages, the relationship God established with his
Church and with each of us at Baptism will last forever; it will
grow in intensity and depth; it honors us for what we are; it can
be relied on; it is a love without reserve; it is a love which leads
to happiness; it is never easy; it is unique between each person
and God; it makes our love for other people grow because our
capacity to love constantly grows.
Unlike trial marriages or relationships of convenience,
pleasure, or business, God’s love is serious, without reserve, and
with no second guessing. For all the examples we see of
marriages which are going nowhere, we still all know of married
people whose marriage is a source of inspiration and
encouragement, people who could not even imagine what life
would be like without their husband or wife. When we see and
experience the reality of such love, we realize that no human
relationship provides a richer insight into a Christian’s graced
relationship with God than love and marriage, which in turn
permeates human love.
BY FR. JOSEPH M. CHAMPLIN
Cape Cod is a favorite vacationing spot in the summer for
many, including this writer. Mushrooming popularity in recent
years has brought to the Cape mixed blessings - economic
growth with bumper-to-bumper traffic, a thriving tourist trade
with the gradual commercialization of its rustic seashore.
Father Francis Connors, pastor of Our Lady of Victory
Church in Centerville, Massachusetts, a town only a few miles
west of famous Hyannis, has watched this enormous growth
expand his parish in 15 years from 80 to 800 families. Over the
last few years alone, they have added annually to the envelope
list 100 new family units.
These are not vacation-time visitors, but permanent members.
They are persons who once stayed for a week, a month, a
summer and now, mainly as retirees, have taken up residence
throughout the mild winter as well. That flourishing Christian
community during the warm June-September holiday months
finds its 500-seat capacity church straining to care for the
substantial number of vacationeers who flock there for Sunday
Mass.
The people at Our Lady of Victory are blessed with a
concerned pastor and two creative associates, Father Thomas
McMorrow and Father Edward Correia. Together this team has
come up with what I believe is a rather exciting approach to
parish worship: family planned liturigies on Sunday.
It works quite simply. The clergy contact one of the families
in the parish and ask if they would be interested in (a) planning
a liturgy, (b) on which weekend, and, (c) at what Mass. Once
they have an affirmative response plus the exact time and date,
a priest stops at the home several weeks in advance. He leaves
with them copies of the assigned scriptural readings as well as
the other liturgical texts and explains some of the possibilities
open to them.
The family then assigns lectors (usually the older children
and/or father read the biblical excerpts) and write a prayer of
the faithful. They plan the procession with gifts, and agree on
something special for the after-Communion thanksgiving period.
When the day arrives (this is the only family for that
particular weekend and they participate in but one Mass, the
one selected), father, mother and children “take over.” For the
General Intercessions, the whole family comes into the
sanctuary and each, or nearly each member reads an intention.
These homespun petitions, according to Father Connors,
sometimes will bring tears and, on other occasions, a smile - like
the moment when a young child prayed that God might leave
the three priests in the parish “for ever and ever and ever.”
After Communion, another person in the family, often the
mother, will step forward and read to the reflecting
congregation a favorite prayer (one chose “The Prayer of St.
Francis”), a prose passage, or a suitable poem.
This procedure proves particularly powerful in the case of
baptism. Most babies receive that first step in the Christian
Initiation process at Our Lady of Victory during the noon
Sunday Mass. The family whose infant is to be baptized serves
as the “liturgy planners” for this celebration and their very
active participation in the service adds a new dimension to what
already is a moving experience.
“After baptism it is the responsibility of the parents, in their
gratitude to God and in fidelity to the duty they have
undertaken, to enable the child to know God, whose adopted
child it has become, to receive confirmation, and to participate
in the holy eucharist. In this duty they are again to be helped by
the parish priest by suitable means.”
Those dry words from the rite of infant baptism impose
heavy responsibilities upon priest and parent. The family
planned liturgy program in Centerville, it seems to me, offers a
potent, yet painless way for the clergy, for fathers and mothers
to involve children so they will “know God” and “participate in
the holy eucharist.”
Marriage:S ign,
Source of Love
BY FR. CARL J. PFEIFER, S.J.
I asked four couples to sum up in a few words what love and
marriage meant to them. “Hard work!” was the immediate
response of one couple. “To open yourself to understand, try to
meet another’s human needs which may be very different from
your own. To appreciate the uniqueness, the unpredictability of
another’s response to a situation even though you’ve known
that person ‘for-almost-ever,’” they added.
Another seconded the need to work at marriage. “Love is like
a fire in a fireplace. If left unattended, the flames will burn less
brightly and get smaller, but the fire is still there. If you throw a
new log in the fireplace, it will once again burn brightly as
before. But if you keep neglecting it, it will smoulder and then
die out completely, Love is like that.”
The third couple expressed themselves more poetically. At
first they said, “Marriage is making love, little creatures, music,
popcorn and peace - best we can!” Then giving in to the poetic
spirit they created a poem:
“In marriage we make laughter, we make lovely, we make
mischief, we make peace, me make music, we make children, we
make pain not hurt so much.
We make things easy, we make mistakes, we make pigtails and
airplanes, we make noise, we make waves, we make laughter, we
make lovely, we make love.”
The fourth couple attempted a definition that would put it
all together. “Marriage is a pact between two members of the
opposite sex in which love, trust, understanding, problems,
sorrow and every feature of life can occur and yet have a solid
foundation on which to rest.” The profoundness of their
definition seemed to tie together what the others had shared.
You may agree or disagree with the observations of my
friends. You may compare their experience with your own. For
the Christian, perhaps particularly for the religious educator, the
experience of marriage -- whether one’s own, that of one’s
parents, friends, neighbors - is a rich area for deepening one’s
understanding of life lived in relationship with God. Perhaps no
other experience is more significant for gradually understanding
the deepest reality of God and his personal involvement in
human life. No other experience provides more fertile points of
contact with God in daily life.
Perhaps it is because marital love is so all-embracing an
experience that it finds such a central position in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition. The focal point of Old and New
Testaments is the Covenant (i.e. marriage bond) between God
and his people. The central experience of the Christian
community is the celebration of that covenant in the Eucharist.
The prophet Hosea, whose own marriage was filled with
infidelity and forgiveness, perceived in his experience of marital
love the profound reality of God’s love. From reflection on his
marriage he came to see that God’s relationship with his chosen
people was like his own relationship with his wife. Hosea
describes God as alluring his estranged wife (i.e. his people) back
to him, speaking to her heart, and inviting her back. She
responds to his call with some of the joy of their first
honeymoon. “On that day, says the Lord, she shall call me ‘my
husband.’” God then offers himself to her in a lasting covenant
bond: “I will espouse you to me forever” (Hosea 2:16-21).
Hosea’s insight was picked up by other biblical writers.
Covenant became one of the major themes of the entire Bible.
The first pages of the Bible point out that man is created in the
image of God - as male and female, united in love and marriage
(Gen 1:27). The Bible closes (Rev. 21:9) with the culmination
of earthly life described as the wedding party of the Lamb
(Christ) and his bride (his people). Between the world’s
beginning and its end man lives within the context of a
relationship with God that finds its closest model in the
experience of marital love.
It is no accident that John’s Gospel records the saving work
of Jesus as taking its start at the wedding feast of Cana (John
2:1). Nor is it insignificant that the Sacrament of Matrimony is
normally celebrated during the Eucharist, the new covenant.
Marital love finds its deepest source in the love God pledges to
share with husband and wife, who in turn can find in their
marriage the most fruitful of recognizing and responding to
God’s love.
Marriage is a sacrament, a sign and source, not only of human
love, but of God’s love as well. Marriage is also a parable which
teaches us of the riches of God’s love which touches every
aspect of our lives. “Love is like that” . . .“We make laughter,
we make lovely, we make love”. .. “A solid foundation on
which to rest” .. .“Hard work!”