I got married yesterday, again. Fifteen years ago when Nancy and I originally tied the knot, I was not qualified to get married in the Church, so we went to another church where the pastor was more open, and got married there. No big deal, end of story, I thought.
Two years ago when I decided to join the Catholic church, I really didn’t give our wedding much thought, after all, it was done. At that time, we’d been married for thirteen years. Pretty well locked in. Then came the diagnosis and the last two years. The deacon who guided me through the process of joining the church and helped me with all the paperwork (you haven’t seen bureaucracy in action until you deal with the Catholic church) says,”why don’t you get your marriage blessed. It’s the equivalent of a Church wedding for married people”. Knowing that Nancy would like that, I said “sure”. After we got all this paperwork done, we had our ceremony yesterday. In attendance were our daughter Erin, Nancy’s sister Mary Lee, her husband Bill, and Nancy’s other sister Peg. We gathered in the chapel to renew our vows. In the Catholic church there is a practice of “exposing the Blessed Host” where a communion wafer, already blessed is put in a monstrance and displayed on the altar. It represents the living Christ among us. It’s a very powerful symbol of all that is Eternal and present in our lives. We chose to have the Host among us for this ceremony. It went pretty much as you would expect, until it came time to renew our vows. When I was invited to say, “I, Eric, take you, Nancy, to be my lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, in good times, and bad; for better, or worse; in sickness and in health, till death do us part, I was overcome with such a powerful sense of gratitude to this woman that I could not speak for a moment. It’s one thing to say these words in the uncertainty of the future, but it’s something else altogether to say them when you  know “until death do us part” is sitting out in front of us just a little ways. I have always loved and appreciated Nance, even though I do a horrible job of showing it sometimes, and part of me would have understood if she had said, “I can’t”. But she didn’t. She looked me right in the eye and repeated the same vows. My heart had so many words it wanted to say, but couldn’t, that I started leaking all over.
When a man and woman face each other and declare their love and commitment to being there “until death do us part”, they are voluntarily taking on the pain and suffering that will come with the inevitable departure of one of them. One has to go, one has to stay. The one who stays will deal with the loss of their love, their partner. And I will submit that it is cold comfort at best in that moment of separation to know that you will be reunited again someday. If you believe that.
I’ve spent a lot of time the last two weeks looking at those who have so much less than the rest of us do, and hoping that together we might make some small degree of difference. I still carry that hope. But today, I’m celebrating. I’m celebrating that the west side Irish Catholic, beer drinking girl I fell in love with in 1997, and married on April 25, 1998 agreed to live with me “in sickness and in health, till death do us part”. What better gift could one get this time of year? May God, however you understand him/her, give you peace this Holiday season and fill your heart with the Love and Gratitude that knows no boundaries.
Grace and Peace,
E

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