Wedding
of Wayne Marshall and Lisa Olsen
BOSTON
My dear Wayne and Lisa,
We rejoice with you both on this happy day
that you can call your own. We congratulate you and invoke God’s blessing that
will be expressed in the liturgy that follows. I cannot presume to give you any
practical advice about married life for obvious reasons but would rather leave
that to the married folk among your friends. Apart from them you will learn
from the school of life that can at times be a very demanding teacher as your
more mature friends will tell you. As your minister and God’s, my task is to
tell you about our Christian tradition regarding marriage. An easy task, this,
since it is one of those areas where I do the preaching and you the practising!
Yet in this area here as in every area of Christian life the official Church
must be open to and learn from the experience of married couples. The stories
of their married life will provide an irreplaceable dimension to the Church’s
understanding and teaching about marriage.
From today, Wayne and Lisa, you as married
Christians will signify and share in the mystery of that unity and fruitful
love which exists between Christ and his Church. By giving each other the
sacrament of marriage you empower one another to attain that holiness that no
priest or religious sister or unmarried person is capable of. Not only that, I
wish to leave you in no doubt that Jesus Christ depends on you to transmit his
love to his spouse, the Church. This is clear in the teaching of St. Paul when
he calls conjugal love a great sacrament. Every loving gesture and embrace,
every act of considerateness, emotional sustenance and reconcilement – every
such act will be a vehicle of Christ’s love for his community.
In the daily quiet of your togetherness, I want
you to pray that your faith in each other may not fail, and that you may be to
our Church and to our nation a shining example of the values of Christian
wedded love.
Once more, congratulations and may God
bless you both.
St. Lawrence Church,
Chestnut Hill
MA 02167
No comments:
Post a Comment