Friday, June 12, 2015

My return and our anniversary

The dip in blogging this week has been due to my participation in the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy's annual Symposium on campus in South Bend, where I led a 2-day seminar on "The Deacon in the Life of the Church." I did make it home in time for my twenty-second wedding anniversary, which is today.



How wonderful it is to have the anniversary of the day we began living out the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony fall this year on the Solemnity of the Sacred of Jesus! All of this made choosing a Friday traditio a bit more complex than I would care for it to be, which only shows that, a per usual, I take all of this way too seriously.

Since it is a long-standing traditio for us to watch the movie "So I Married an Axe Murderer" on our anniversary each year, I'll go with this:



So, to my still lovely bride, whose seemingly effortless and never-failing love for me, because I do not deserve it, is a great grace and a sacramental sign of Christ's love both for me and our children:

There she goes
There she goes again
Pulsing through my veins
And I just can't contain
This feeling that remains


After 22 years and six children, I know very well that love that lasts not only a lifetime but forever cannot be reduced to a mere feeling. The truth is, if that were the case it's highly unlikely we'd celebrating our marriage today. And so while it should not and, in fact, cannot be so reduced, to insist that feeling, that affectivity, plays no role at all, only serves to reduce love and marriage to a white-knuckled act of the will, a view that strikes me as equally disastrous. Married love is multi-faceted and multi-layered, the layers built struggle-by-struggle, grace-by-grace over the years. Deo gratias!

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