Embracing the unknown: Couples celebrate the sacrifice, love of lifelong marriage

Many – many – years of marriage were celebrated and honored at a Marriage Celebration Mass on Aug. 10 at St. Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha.

More than 100 couples were on hand for the 10:30 a.m. Mass presided by Archbishop Michael G. McGovern.

Several pews were reserved for those who were celebrating 40, 50, 60, or more years of marriage this year. Those celebrating five to 25 years of marriage were also part of the celebration.

In his homily, Archbishop McGovern compared the faith embraced in holy matrimony to Abraham’s faith, which was recounted in one of the Scripture readings at Mass. 

St. Paul wrote that “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; he went out, not knowing where he was to go.”

Married couples, likewise, “have set out into the unknown together for life,” the archbishop said, “to go about the mission of loving one another in a way that imitates the love of Christ, that self-emptying love of Jesus, the love that gives itself away in order to live together as husband and wife.”

He read an exhortation that used to be read before Catholic couples exchanged wedding vows, one that his parents would have heard 72 years ago.

The exhortation reminded couples who were about to be married that their union would “bind you together for life in a relationship so close and so intimate that it will have a profound influence on your whole future. That future – with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows – is hidden from your eyes.”

A generous, self-sacrificing, Christ-like love is required for facing those unknown but inevitable challenges. 

“Sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome,” the exhortation said. “Only love can make it easy, and perfect love can make it a joy.”

“May Jesus strengthen our married couples,” and those in other walks of life, Archbishop McGovern said, “that we might truly imitate the Lord in that gift of sacrificial love.”