Star Heart

A Wedding Homily

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

From time immemorial, the great sages and divines of every age have assured us that the universe is far grander, far more expansive, than we could possibly comprehend. And yet we’re always surprised when we find out that they were right. Every time we think we have a handle on the beauty and grandeur of Creation, we discover that we were wrong; that there’s far more, and indeed it is wondrous.

Take a look at the recent images from the James-Webb Telescope: galaxies scattered like grains of sand; a cosmos of color and dynamism; over distances so vast as to boggle the human mind. And how does that make us feel? Small, insignificant? No. It makes us feel awe; and gratitude; and joy. We delight in the beauty of it all.

And that, my friends, is what love is like; that’s what marriage is like. It is the Copernican Revolution of the soul, when we cease be the center of our own little system and revolve now in a dance around the white-hot heart of love.

You two are in love. That much is obvious to anyone who’s met you for more than five minutes. And that love has brought you to today, surrounded by friends and family, standing before both the societal and the sacred, in order to reaffirm the bedrock truths of life and love and joy that make our lives worth living.

Everyone loves a wedding. We love to come and see what love has done, what it’s doing even now: the excitement, the bliss, the heat of it all; new relationships, new children, new memories. Weddings are ancient and ever new. It is rebirth. It is resurrection. It is light amidst the darkness. Little wonder that in the Gospel of John, Jesus’ first miraculous sign is to vint over a hundred gallons of good hooch with which to celebrate a wedding.

But now hold up, some old hands here will say. Marriage isn’t always easy. One can’t expect all roses and sweet cream in the gardens. Real love means compromise, and sacrifice, and patience, and forgiveness. Real love means getting up next to the same person and watching them floss beside you at the bathroom sink for the following 50 years. Because it is true what they say: The more you love someone, the more you want to kill them.

But that’s what’s so great about it. That’s how you know it’s real.

Because the truth is that for as much as you love one another, for as wonderful as that truly is, and for as far as it will take you, nevertheless, your love will not hold your marriage together. It won’t. But if you do it right—and you will—then your marriage will hold your love together. Love, after all, is not an emotion. Love is not the same thing as feeling in love. And thank God for that, since emotions are ephemeral, mercurial things.

Love, rather, is a choice, an act of the will, to put the good of your beloved even before your own; to get up every morning and say, “Not me but you,” to pour out yourself into one another. And that hurts. Love hurts. It takes strength and effort and humility and grit. But if it didn’t, then it wouldn’t be love, would it? It would just be infatuation. And infatuation fades.

And then hold on to your hats, because it all doubles down when we have kids. Having children splits your heart wide open. I promise you, you’ve never loved the way you’ll love your kids. It’s like your soul is running about on little legs of its own. And somehow, the love that you two share—it doesn’t diminish at all. As family grows, your love grows. Because love isn’t like gold or precious gemstones to be hidden and hoarded away. It’s like fire, and it spreads like fire, even as it burns us up.

Because marriage? Kids? It is death and resurrection every day. A spouse and children will beat the ego out of you like nothing else on earth. It’s so awful. It’s so wonderful. It’s so real. We lose it all to gain infinitely more. And you will sit there, dazed and confused; with everything in your house broken; covered in all manner of fluids; exhausted, stressed, and sleep-deprived; yet lo, I tell you a mystery: you won’t want to trade it for the world.

That’s why I think that marriage, on some level, will always be religious; why weddings are to be signs of God’s love for us all. The central tenant of the Christian faith is that God so loved the world that He became one of us; to live with us, to laugh  with us, to cry and bleed and die with us; and to bring us all home in Him. And we killed Him for that. We nailed Him to that Cross. Yet even as we were in the midst of murdering Him, He proclaimed to us His undying love and forgiveness. We threw everything we had at Him, and it could barely slow Him down.

That’s what love is like. It kills you, yet not even death can keep it down. Death in fact is drowned in love.

And as for the love that you two share, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the road, it won’t be the same as it is today. You will have changed. Your spouse will have changed. Your love will have to change as well. But that just proves it’s still alive. With attention and wisdom and patience and love, you two will grow together rather than growing apart. Your lives will twine into a whole greater than yourselves. And you will look back one day and be amazed at the life, the family, the adventure, that you’ve forged and created together.

Life, death. Me, you. Old, young. It all melts away in the fires of love. And we are left with joy and awe and wonder and gratitude for the grace that is given unto us.

Now let us die and rise anew.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.