MORE RICHLY TOGETHER – Mark 10: 3-16
I remember sitting across from a young couple on a crowded train somewhere in southern California many years ago. They might have been in their early twenties, wearing what I think of as the uniform of their generation – blue shorts and tee-shirts. They embodied all you could imagine of oneness, joy, love and peace, of harmony and contentment. It was high summer of 1995 or six, and it was warm, and they were in that bespoke way of being – ‘oneness’ when bodies and spirits, minds and hearts are as one.
Over the time I’ve had momentary wonderings about how their lives unfolded. Did they live happily ever after? The fleeting memory came to mind as I read the Gospel for this 27th Sunday: “They are no longer two, therefore, but one body.” I think of couples today who are living into their nineties and beyond, and spouses who stay together for sixty years and more. One such couple mentioned that lifetime perseverance is not because of infatuation, feelings or emotion, but a daily decision to be each other’s helpmate.
They vowed on their wedding day to love, comfort and honour each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it but even when they don’t feel like it at all. Marriage vows are extravagant. They give away their freedom and take on themselves each other’s burdens. What do they get in return?
They get each other in return. They never have to face the world alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they’re lucky, even when the honeymoon is over and the first infatuation passes, they still have a kindness and a patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside.
If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don’t have children, they each become the other’s child.
They both still have their lives apart as well as their lives together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than either of them could ever have managed to become alone. The late Rosemary Haughton, British convert to Catholicism and writer, held that marriage is meant to transform people into who the Creator meant them to be.
Fr. QQ – 03/09/2024