Your Life Will Not Be Ordinary
A Wedding Homily
For the last few weeks, I have been working my way through a book on the origins of the modern identity. The author likes to ask big questions: How do we understand ourselves today? Who do we think we are? How do we create identities for ourselves and try to fill our lives with purpose and meaning? How do we decide on the values and systems of belief that will define our lives? These are the kinds of big questions there in the background of our lives, and when we answer those kinds of questions, we shape our identity, we become the persons we are.
The book is really a history. The author wants to give an historical account about how we people living in the modern world understand our lives in ways very different from people who lived before us. The most significant difference between us today and people who lived in centuries past, says the author, is that we modern people have fallen in love with ordinary life. What does that mean? Well, in the past, to live a good life usually meant to become very good at living as a public person. Maybe you would try to become a great warrior; maybe you would try to become a great citizen; maybe you would try to become some kind of a saint, retreating to the desert or a monastery, or going on dangerous pilgrimages, or spending your life in service to the sick or the poor. For most of human history, says the author, the idea of staying at home, working a job, and raising a family just did not meet the standards of living a good life; that’s just what most people did, but there was nothing special about it.
Maybe five centuries ago, around the time of the Protestant Reformation, life changed for us, and we fell in love with the ordinary. Most people today consider the good life to consist of staying home, working a job, and raising a family. Are there still warriors and public servants and saints out there doing the extra-ordinary in the world? Sure, there are. But most of us think that family life is where our lives find their purpose and meaning. And so, today, William and Claire, what I want to say is that the two of you are making an eternal commitment to living ordinary lives—there probably won’t be many violent battles or acts of national sacrifice or death-defying pilgrimages in your future. Those are the kinds of possibilities in life of which you are letting go today.
What I want to say to you today I have not yet quite worked out for myself in my mind. I have this thought that has been with me for the last few weeks, and reading the Gospel you chose for today drove home an intuition for me that I want to share with you. Here it is: most people find meaning and purpose today in the living of an ordinary life of work and family, but we Roman Catholics understand that the work of family life is filled with potential for the extra-ordinary.
There is this tension in the Gospel that I find fascinating. Christ teaches us that a man joins his wife and the two become one flesh. He teaches us that what God has joined together, man must not separate. So, the origins of family life are found in God. There is a way that God has brought man and woman together to form a home, to raise children, to educate them in the ways of faith and love. But then notice what happens: every successive generation of children is called to leave mother and father behind to form a family of their own. The divine vocation that forms families, with an origin rooted in God’s design for the world, is the same vocation that pulls families apart, children leaving mother and father to form a family of their own.
What am I trying to say? Marriage and the life of the family is not ordinary, not when people live it well. Marriage really isn’t a matter of settling for some kind of domestic life, heading to the beach each summer, coaching soccer in the fall, getting the three- or four-bedroom house with a yard, maybe a dog, and working enough to get kids through high school and into college. That kind of a life is ordinary, the kind of life that most people who don’t have any faith in God want for themselves, even the kind of life that many people who do have faith in God want for themselves.
But for the believing Christian, for the Christian who is really committed to the life of discipleship, the family is a domestic church, a locus for holiness, a foundation for the work of love. St. John Paul II teaches us that:
All members of the family, each according to his or her own gift, have the grace and responsibility of building, day by day, the communion of persons, making the family “a school of deeper humanity”: this happens where there is care and love for the little ones, the sick, the aged; where there is mutual service every day; when there is a sharing of goods, of joys and of sorrows.
A family does not exist for itself, but for the world, for the Church, for those in need. A family is where parents, called to a divine vocation in Christ, give life to new generations of the faithful who will do the work of love and building up the Church. St. John Paul goes on to say that the work of the family in the world is fourfold: forming a community of persons; serving life; participating in the development of society; sharing in the life and mission of the Church. There is nothing ordinary about this kind of labor. To form new generations of persons in Christ, to sacrifice for the good of human life, to further the mission of the Church in bringing the Gospel to a broken world . . . this kind of work is extra-ordinary.
There is this spark of divinity in the reality of marriage that makes the extra-ordinary possible for you, William and Claire. And I hope you pursue the extra-ordinary with all your hearts, minds, and souls. Christ teaches us in our Gospel today that the origins of marriage are found in the life of God. The destination of marriage is also found in the life of God. Marriage, for those who live marriage well, is a movement out from God and journey back to God. God is, to borrow from our second reading today, the Alpha and the Omega. Our lives begin and end in his life.
William and Claire, I love that you chose this vision of a new heaven and a new earth for your wedding Mass. The God who has called you to this altar today also calls you to remember each day your divine vocation to build up a family rooted in Christ and dedicated to the work of love and mission. The new heaven and earth of which we hear, Christ wants us to share in the building up of that kingdom. We each have our parts to play in his saving work. And the family—your family—is a place where the saving work of Christ takes root and then flourishes out there in the world. That kind of life is far from ordinary.
Homily preached on July 15th, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary