Here's to many more years of faithful perseverance in love!
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50th
Anniversary Mass Homily: Richard and Frances Hakey
Gn
2:18-24; Eph 5:2a, 21-33; Mt 19:3-6
Now I suspect that I might surprise some of you here when I
say that, even after 50 years of marriage, Fran and Dick have what I would call
a “modern” marriage. Yeah, I know that they
got married at the time when the Mass was still in Latin and that I seem to
remember them having dinosaurs for pets (oh wait, that was the Flintstones). No, even knowing that, I’d still call their
marriage “modern”. Because, you see,
Fran and Dick, I would guess, married each other for love; and “marriage for
love” is, actually, a somewhat modern thing.
Just take a look at any ancient account of marriage. What were they done for? They were done to create political alliances
between nations/kingdoms; or they were done to help bolster a family
economically; which, of course, meant that they were almost always arranged
and, thus, that the bride and groom almost never married because of love. In the 19th century, however, the
“modern” period of history emerged: ushered in by the Enlightenment and a new
focus on the liberty of the individual.
One of the consequences of that focus was that men and women now saw
marriage as primarily for themselves, instead of being a way to advance one’s
family or kingdom. Thus, “marriage for
love” also emerged.
As human persons, we all know love in some way, and we know
that love always involves at least two things: someone who loves and an object
being loved. Further, I would guess that
most of us can tell the difference between the superficial love we have of
things, such as coffee, chocolate, or a delicious steak, and the love that we
have for other people. I would even
venture to say that those of us self-styled as “pet lovers” would still be able
to distinguish between the love we have for Snoopy, Rufus, Fluffy, and Mr.
Pickles and the love we have for our wives, our husbands, our children, and our
close friends. We recognize that the
deepest, most authentic love is something that is shared equally, and that even
the most loyal dog or loving cat, or even the most decadent slice of Ghirardelli
chocolate cheesecake, cannot return our love to us as equally as we can give
it.
Thus we hear in the reading from the book of Genesis that
the “suitable partner for the man” was not found in the wild animals and birds
of the air, but in the woman, who was “bone of his bones and flesh of his
flesh”—in other words, his equal—and
that it is for this reason that “a man leaves his father and mother and clings
to his wife…” And so, perhaps “marriage
for love”, even though it has emerged only recently in history, was how God
meant for it to be all along?
Anyone who has been married for 50 years can tell you that
love of this kind—that is, true, authentic love—is not a feeling, but a choice:
the choice to do whatever is truly good for another even when there seems to be
no advantage in it for one’s self (or even, perhaps, when it seems to be
detrimental to one’s self). With this
understanding, then, “marriage for love” is to feel so strongly a desire for another
person’s happiness that one is willing to make a life-long commitment of
working towards that end and, thus, that “marriage for love” is most perfect
when that desire is shared by two persons who hold that desire for each other.
And so when Saint Paul says that wives should be
subordinate to their husbands, he’s not saying so because he’s trying to uphold
some unequal cultural power structure between men and women, but rather he’s
instructing them on how best to love them.
In other words, wives love their husbands best when they get behind and
support their husband’s “program of life.”
And what is that? Loving their
wives as Christ loved the Church. And
how did Christ love the Church? By
handing his life over completely for her so that she might be made holy:
“without spot or wrinkle or any such thing”.
(Wives, doesn’t this sound like a project that you could get behind?) Therefore, the husband is to hand his life
over—that is, to sacrifice all of his personal ambitions—so that his wife will
become holy; and the wife is to get behind this project, thus sacrificing all
of her personal ambitions as well so that she can be made holy; and in doing so
she in turn supports her husband’s own path to holiness, for no one can hand
over his life for the good of another without himself becoming holy. And isn’t sainthood—that is, eternal
holiness—what we’re all here for? (This
truly is a “great mystery”, isn’t it?)
Fran and Dick, I hope that I am correct in stating that you
indeed did marry for love; and that the love for which you married resembles in
some way what I’ve described here. If
so, and even so, I would say that, while you married for love, you remained
married for these past 50 years by grace.
True love, as I’ve described it here, is hard and so God’s grace is
needed in order to persevere. Your faith
in God, and in his abiding love for us in Jesus, his Son, and your fidelity to
the sacraments, most especially to the sacraments of the Holy Eucharist and
Reconciliation, have provided the grace to remain faithful throughout these 50
years and thus to celebrate the fruits of this grace: being surrounded by your
children and your children’s children.
And so you come here today surrounded by loved ones to give
thanks to God for the grace that has worked in and through you and to ask for
his continued blessings on you in the years to come. On behalf of everyone here, let me say “thank
you” to you for your great witness of faith and love over these past 50
years. May this witness, strengthened by
this Eucharist, inspire each of us to be faithful to our vocations to love so
that when our Lord Jesus returns he will find us holy and thus ready to be
welcomed to the eternal banquet he has prepared for us in heaven.
Given at Saint Patrick’s
Parish: Joliet, IL – October 5th, 2013
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