Your Love Is Not for You
A Wedding Homily
If you know Jackie and Cameron, you know that this is not a couple who does half-measures. When we met back in the spring to talk about wedding preparation, I gave them three options: a sponsor couple program, an extended retreat, or working with me for several weeks. Jackie and Cameron looked at each other and then said they would like to do all three. So, they did. They worked with Fr. Al Scharbach and his wife Abby in a sponsor couple program. They attended a 4-day, comprehensive marriage preparation retreat at Our Lady of Bethesda Spiritual Center.
When it came time to work with me, Jackie and Cameron asked if we could go through a book on marriage. “What is the best book out there on Christian marriage?” they asked. I told them that the best book I know of is called The Nuptial Mystery by Cardinal Angelo Scola, a dense, 400-page work of sacramental theology. Well, they looked it over, and a few days later I came to my office and found a copy of the book on my desk, along with a reading schedule. Jackie and Cameron had mapped out the whole program for us.
But then we got busy. Jackie with nursing school, me and Cameron at the Basilica, both Jackie and Cameron working on other wedding details. The summer came and went, and I never heard from them about the book or the reading schedule. We haven’t talked about it a single time.
So, what I thought I would do with the homily today (I have the book with me), Cameron and Jackie, is ask you guys some questions from the text to see how prepared you really are for marriage. Cameron, on page 39, Cardinal Scola talks about the communio personarum and its relation to the human being made in the image of God.
How?
Ok. You have no need to worry. That is not my homily.
What I think we see in your desire to give more than you could give to your marriage preparation—each of you desiring to give well beyond your means—is a hint, something a shadow, of what St. Paul describes in his Letter to the Romans:
I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.
St. Paul talks about what happens when the human person—body, soul, and spirit—becomes wholeheartedly committed to Christ. He identifies the pattern of Christian existence. A commitment is made. That commitment exceeds the limits of what a person can do with ease, without sacrifice. And so, what is lower suffers for the sake of what is higher. The suffering of the body leads to the renewal of the mind, the pattern repeating day after day, year after year, and somehow, someday, the human person becomes transformed in Christ. That kind of transformation takes root in each of us in different ways; no two Christians are called to the same life.
But every Christian is called to make the kinds of commitments in life that exact a physical toll upon what is lower. We live in a strange world today. People want to make commitments that matter, but most don’t want to suffer. And I’m not talking about the suffering of an athlete on the field who exhausts his body through exercise and training. I’m talking about the kind of bodily sacrifice that impacts the life of the mind—anxiety, doubt, sorrow, worry, sadness, fear. The kind of sacrifice that Abraham confronts in our First Reading. Most people think that to experience these kinds of mental sufferings means that something is wrong, something is broken—maybe something needs to change.
Why? Why can’t those kinds of mental sufferings point us toward the deep truth that sometimes we get life right and make commitments that exceed the limits of what we can do with ease, without sacrifice? What about the experience of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane makes us think that a good and complete human life should pass its years free from sorrow and anxiety? What about the experience of Christ on the Cross makes us think that we should expect to, or even want to, live a life that does not stain the ground from time to time with blood sweated from our own brow?
A real commitment demands a sacrifice of the whole person—body, soul, and spirit. And a sacrifice of the whole person challenges our basic instinct for comfort and self-preservation to such a depth that the mind becomes afflicted, conflicted, divided, beaten down, and then, somehow, someday, and by the grace of God—renewed. No longer is a sacrifice so painful. No longer does the suffering of what is lower for the sake of what is higher strike us as so unnatural, so foreign from what is good for us. We start to want to sacrifice. We start to want to give of ourselves in ways that run up against our basic instinct to care for ourselves first, and others second. The pattern repeats, repeats, repeats, and the human person becomes transformed in Christ.
We call that kind of life ‘the life of love.’ Love is what is best for us, what is best about us, but no other reality in human life challenges our basic instinct for comfort and self-preservation more than does love. And all that I am really trying to say to you today, Jackie and Cameron, we can summarize in two basic truths: (1) love goes all the way down, engaging spirit, soul, and body, what is lower suffering for the sake of what is higher and (2) love begins with a commitment.
If those two truths add up, if they make any sense at all, then what that means is that today, Jackie and Cameron, today is the day you start to love. Maybe that seems like a strange thing to say. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t love each other. But the way I see things, if love goes all the way down, the lower suffering for the sake of what is higher, and love begins with a commitment, then when you do the math, it adds up to say that with each new commitment in our lives, love begins again—and so does life.
The love that brought you here will not be the love that sustains you in the years ahead; that love has done its work, and the commitments that gave life to that love have served their purpose.
Now it is time for something new for you—new life in Christ. The lower dying for the sake of what is higher in new ways because a new commitment is being made. The pattern of your life changes today, but the purpose of your life—and St. Paul could not be clearer on this point—the purpose of your life remains the same: to live for others, to renew your mind and transform yourself in Christ through the work of charity and love. The pattern changes but the meaning of life remains the same. Your love is not for you—it is for the other, for your children, for the poor, for the Church.
Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, exercise hospitality. Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Have the same regard for one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly; do not be wise in your own estimation. Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all. If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.
Your love is not for you, and if you keep that reality close to your heart, then your life will become a living sacrifice, what is lower suffering for the sake of what is higher, and you will become transformed in Christ.
About 10 pages into his book—which might be about as far as either of you made it with The Nuptial Mystery—Cardinal Scola quotes Shakespeare: Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove.
He goes on to say: Love is love only insofar as it is indomitable in affirming the other [giving to the other, sacrificing for the other]—always and no matter what.
That kind of life, that kind of love, begins for you today. Marriage, if you get it right, will change you. You will learn to live like Christ. Your mind will be renewed. You will become transformed.
Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on October 28th, 2023.