Our daughter Katie was married this past weekend. It was a very small and simple wedding, just close family, but still elegant and beautiful. The poor groom fought back tears the entire service which meant as the officiant I had to fight back tears as well. Katie and Gerald got engaged last year in the Spring, but called it off in the Fall only to get engaged again this past February…so we had a touch of doubt whether this was going to happen or not. But such is life, a twisting and turning and seemingly random journey towards some thing…or towards something. Our family motto has become: We will do our best to live creatively into whatever is next…I think our lives’ experiences utterly undermine the sentimental and naive notion that God has a plan for each of us. I believe God is like a poet or jazz musician who is expressing God’s self through intuitive improvisation incorporating, as artists do, the light and the darkness…and we God’s beloved just have to pay close enough attention to this loving creativity as it unfolds…and muster the courage that, even when things seem dark and despairing…we muster the courage to call the whole of things good. That is a consummate act of love.
It is easy to sentimentalize love, particularly in our culture: Love, that alluring warm infatuation with our beloved, notwithstanding the fact that the divorce rate in this country exceeds 50%…but love is so much more. I tell people for whom I preside at their marriage that love can only exist in community. It is why we ask the congregation in the Marriage rite: “will you support these persons in their marriage?” In homilies and in counseling I tell them that this marriage is not just about them, (the king and queen for a day syndrome) but it has ramifications for the entire community in which they live…just as at each Baptism, at each marriage, the community is changed. I tell them that the love that they model will be witnessed by the community in which they live, and that at its heart love is sacrifice for the other, opting always for the happiness of the other which leads to true and lasting joy engendered along the twisting and turning and surprising path we call life….so our loving each other is a profound responsibility, because people need to be reminded what love looks like in the flesh, taught again what love is…our species has to see to believe….and needs reminding. So our vocation is that we are all witnesses to love on earth, and that witness may only take root and thrive in community.
But again love is more. Physicists are still grappling with the origins of the universe….but I want to say that what was in the beginning….that which burst forth…that which was unleashed at the so-called big bang was pure love, love the consummation of both energy and matter…love that creates through sacrifice, engenders all things… something always, on a cosmic scale has to give to create the new…the big bang might be called the ultimate sacrifice…a cataclysmic unleashing, pangs of the birth of a substance which is all matter and energy….all that is…still being born as we speak…everything…everything made of the same substance and that substance is love….We are incarnations of the beginning…made of love deep in our DNA. We are stardust, as it were, to borrow a phrase…Just as God is love and we of same substance, means that we are made for sacrifice witnessing to the most powerful force of the universe which is love that no manner of evil along the way can stand or last against. So we are God’s own blood kin, and therefore we are made first and foremost to love with all due courage and diligence as we improvise along with our improvisational God, along an uncertain, unplanned and surprising path towards some thing or towards something that we know to be good… We are to live lives of love, that of which we and all things are made….and the sooner the better.
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from. Many thanks for posting when you have the opportunity, Guess I’ll just bookmark this blog.