Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, Princeton, New Jersey
Nuptial Mass of Mene Oluwadurotimi Ukueberuwa and Anna Marie Wood
February 3, 2024
Tob 8:4-8, Ps 128, Rom 8:31-39, Mt 5:1-12
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- It’s fitting at this Church dedicated to St. Paul that we begin with the passage Anna and Mene chose for today’s epistle, in which that great apostle emphasized that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not anguish, distress, persecution, famine, poverty, peril, persecution, present things, future things, death or any created reality. These were not abstract concepts for the former Saul of Tarsus. We know that after his conversion he had himself suffered multiple imprisonments, beatings, scourgings, stoning, shipwrecks, imprisonments, betrayals, rejections and organized plots against his life (2 Cor 11:23-29). But he was able to write to the first Christians in Corinth, that he was “afflicted in every way, but not constrained; confused, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8-9), because he knew not only that none of those hardships could separate him from God, but that in the midst of them, the presence of the risen Lord Jesus strengthening him in his weakness would shine out all the more (Phil 4:13).
- This is a powerful truth to ponder on the day you, Anna and Mene, are about to make a sacred commitment to each other in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in poverty and prosperity for the rest of your life. You are making this public promise not just before God but also with and to God, who himself promises as he joins you to be with you in all the vicissitudes and victories that await. Nothing can separate you from his love, not illness, not death, not even sin — as St. Paul himself realized, who before his conversion persecuted the Church of God and presided over the murder of the innocent St. Stephen. Like the prodigal son, we can wander far away from the Father’s house, we can waste our gifts and act contrary to the dignity we’ve received, but God never stops loving. And today, on the cusp of your making in just minutes this beautiful covenant with each other and with God, the Lord through St. Paul reminds you of the depth of his love for you and says to you, “Love one another as I love you” (John 15:12). Let nothing separate you from the love of each other, whether anguish, distress, poverty, peril, quarrels, bad days, sleepless nights, or even suffering and death. God gives you his love so that, with that love that conquers even death, you can love each other.
- This is the type of love we see between Tobias and Sarah whose witness you wanted to be proclaimed in today’s first reading. Sarah, afflicted by a curse, had already experienced the death of seven husbands. With great courage, trust in God and love for each other, however, she and Tobias made a lifetime commitment to each other, entrusting themselves to the merciful love of God. On their wedding night, as we heard, they knelt together, praised God for the gift of marriage, and called down his mercy, so that they might consecrate their love to a noble purpose and take each other not out of lust but out of the total self-giving, faithful, fruitful, reverential love we find in God’s love for us. It’s moving to me that since last May, the two of you have made and kept a commitment to pray together like Sarah and Tobias, normally each evening, preferably in person but sometimes on the phone. You’ve prayed the Rosary, novenas, and litanies, first for Begho after his shocking death, then for your family and friends, for your own relationship, and for many other intentions. Such prayer is indeed the best means by which to remember, and open yourselves to, the love of God in your life and in your relationship. You told me, Anna, that you’re convinced that such nightly prayer, arising out of tragedy, is what has ultimately brought the two of you much closer to each other and to God. Nothing can separate you from the love of God — and everything, including the hardest of human experiences, can be a means by which we can enter more deeply into the gift and mystery of divine love.
- That’s what the Gospel you selected for your nuptial Mass emphasizes, in which Jesus overturns earthly expectations and reveals to us the path to receive, and imitate, the love of God. In a thanatophobic age struggling to understand the relationship of death to life, Jesus promises that those who love enough to mourn will indeed experience great comfort through the truths of faith and the fact of his own triumph. In a world that seeks after money, that places its faith, hope and love in material positions and in things that can be bought, Jesus tells us that the truly blessed are those who are poor in spirit, who treasure his kingdom above all. In an epoch that relies on force, when people and leaders often bully their way to power, Jesus tells us that real happiness comes from being meek, from making peace, from being merciful. In a world addicted to the lust of the flesh, leading to so many broken hearts, lives and families, Jesus proclaims the importance of purity of heart, which sees God in others, reverences and loves him. At a time in which a globalized indifference to others has gone viral, Jesus says that the path to happiness is compassion, through hungering and thirsting for justice and through the perfection of charity that is holiness. In an era when people crave publicity, idolize celebrities, and yearn for social media likes, influence and popularity, Jesus says we will be blessed, rather, when we’re insulted, persecuted and calumniated because of our love for him. These are not easy words. The reality to which they point is likewise difficult to live. But they are the path Jesus himself lived, the way he calls you and us to follow, and the life that will ultimately unite us to the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
- We rejoice that the lessons of today’s readings are not just discarnate theological truths for you, but something you have already discovered in your relationship and hope with God’s help to continue to mature in over the course of your married life. The very fact that you are here today, you believe, is not a fruit of random occurrences, but of the love of God at work over the course of your years.
- Several of us know the story. Anna and Mene first met at an Easter party in 2013, Mene recalls, but it made no lasting impression whatsoever on Anna. Three years later they met at a lecture on the theory of art composition at NYU’s Catholic Center, where during the cocktail reception Mene made a strong impression on Anna, but Mene has no recollection at all of that meeting. God, however, didn’t stop trying to bring the two of them together in fulfillment of their vocation. He providentially arranged for both of them to start going to Sunday Mass at St. Michael’s Church in Manhattan, where Mene was a parishioner and volunteer living next door, and, Anna, ten years ago last month, was welcomed into the Catholic Church, received the Sacrament of Confirmation, and was subsequently hired as a cantor. They used to see each other regularly during the coffee hour in the parish hall after Mass, talking about music, art and life. Anna even wondered if Mene was interested. But they were destined to become living witnesses of how love, to take the first adjective St. Paul uses to describe love — both divine and human — is “patient” (1 Cor 13:4). In 2017, they started to co-host “Fish Friday” dinners every week during Lent, where Anna complemented Mene’s bachelor-level cooking with her feminine touch and harmonized his tenor with her soprano during sung Evening Prayer. In 2019, Mene asked Anna to go to the Metropolitan Opera “as a friend” on, of all days during the year, Valentine’s Day, but after a beautiful rendition of Tchaikovsky’sIolanta and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, friends they remained.
- Finally, in October 2022, when Anna was back in New York from Texas to attend the wedding in Tarrytown, New York of her friend Katherine Doe to Michael Marsh, she needed a plus-one, someone who could get along with her musician friends, be a good conversationalist, like to dance and whom she wouldn’t feel awkward asking. Mene, and Mene alone, came to mind. She asked and Mene accepted. They went. And what happened next is one of the greatest signs that God was done waiting and wanted to start actualizing his plan of love in their lives. Waiting in line during the cocktail hour, after small talk, the celebrant of the wedding, Reverend Gareth Evans, pastor of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Irvington, asked, “So are you two dating?” Episcopal clergy are not normally renowned for either boldness or indiscretion. After Mene and Anna somewhat awkwardly mumbled that they were just friends, Father Evans, rather than changing the subject, boldly doubled down, a confirmation that God was indeed at work, some might say even miraculously considering the context. He asked, “So why aren’t the two of you dating?” It’s was clearly a question from above, perhaps eleven years waiting to be made explicit. Mene seized the opening to ask, “Yeah, Anna, why aren’t we dating?” Anna told him that she thought he knew the answer to that question — that he hadn’t yet asked — and hoped he would take the hint. At the end of the night, he did. After their Uber dropped her off at her friend’s place, Mene said that he would love to take her out when she was back in New York. Anna, as her mother Judy noted, “got back really quickly after that.” Within days, she found a new job and an apartment. Three weeks later, on October 29, they had their first official date for brunch on the Hoboken waterfront. Exactly one year after God, it seems, through Father Evans, asked them why they weren’t dating, Mene proposed in the catacombs of the Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s. Nothing, including faulty memories, multiple unrealized encounters at Church, and missed signals even on Valentine’s Day, could ultimately separate them from the love of God at work in their life. For that we all give thanks!
- And, conscious as St. Paul affirms, that everything works out for the good for those who love God (Rom 8:28), we likewise thank God for what he’s done in the intervening eleven years to get both of them ready for this day. You told me during marriage preparation, Anna, that, by the time you started dating Mene, you had sensed that he was the “answer to years of praying for a devout husband” and that you felt not only peace but a great “sense of relief” in being able to “trust someone who I had known so long to be a solid and steady friend.” You knew him to be a man of character, honor, constancy and gentleness with whom you could “bring up anything that needed to be said and discussed,” knowing he wouldn’t be defensive or angry. You told me that “he truly has a heart of gold,” he’s simple in needs, intelligent, a wonderful interlocutor, interested and interesting, focused on what matters, disciplined, courageous, adventurous, hard-working, thoughtful, consistent, calm, peaceful, empathetic, encouraging, joyful, trustworthy, vivacious, driven to excellence, appreciative, sacrificial, and loving of his family. You stated, “With Mene, I feel so acutely aware of God’s goodness and gifts.” He’s reminded you, in short, of the divine Giver and so many of God’s attributes.
- Mene, in marriage preparation you told me that, looking over the course the last many years, you’re convinced that “God has brought us together.” There were, you added, “certain moments when God pushed us toward each other while we were friends and created opportunities for us to grow closer gradually. A lot of that took place under his roof, at St. Michael’s. Worshiping God together has provided the main structure of our relationship. God has given both of us the graces we’ve needed in order to give each other our best.” Over the course of time, you said you’ve come to “love Anna’s faith more than anything” and noted how “praying regularly comes naturally to her and she’s woven it deeply into her daily routine.” You said that you now pray much more with Anna than you prayed before on your own, appreciate how she’s helped you grow in knowledge and love of the saints, and believe your prayer with her has overflowed into your personal prayer. You also described that you love how energetic she is, how much time she spends thinking about her family and friends, about how they’re doing and what they need. You love her passion for music and education; how intentional she is and how bold, taking a leap to move to New Jersey so that you could be closer. You said you also love how much she respects you as an individual, interiorizes what you discuss and has always made the effort to get to know the real you. The way she has treated you has, in short, reminded you of how you know God loves you, how he searches you and knows you, as Psalm 139 beautifully attests.
- And so today, after, as Mene understatedly says, “we took our time and discerned marriage,” you have come to the day on which God, who has begun this good work in you, seeks to bring your relationship closer to perfection (Phil 1:6). You are both conscious of what is really happening today. Anna, you eloquently told me that marriage is a “sacrament, an indissoluble life-long covenant between a man and a woman that is a lived metaphor of Christ’s love for the Church, an honorable and joyful calling that is meant to lead both spouses closer to holiness and therefore to God and to collaborate with God in his creativity through bringing children into the world.” It’s a summons, you said, to “die to our old selves and be remade into his likeness so that we can love each other with that love and so that that love might extend outward to our children and the world.” You added, Mene, that “marriage is God’s way of uniting and improving men and women, letting us share in his generative work, and bringing spouses and children closer to him. The relationship between husband and wife represents the union of God and men” and leads to “taking on a new nature in God’s eyes, becoming permanently united to each other and jointly united to God in a new way [with] a new vocation in the Church.”
- During this Mass, you’ve asked to add two elements that signify your faith and the help you’re asking of God so that you may live up to your vocation as Christian spouses through the Sacrament of Matrimony. Toward the end of Mass, you will process together as husband and wife to the Altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Daughter of Zion who teaches us how to be faithful disciples of her Son, the woman God the Father chose to be the mother of his Son and Jesus himself from the Cross chose to be our Mother, the loving Lady who interceded with her Son for the couple in Cana of Galilee for his first miracle and who doubtless is interceding for you now. You will present her flowers, asking for her prayers that the divine grace her Son bestows will truly flourish in your marriage. You will also entrust yourself to her maternal intercession with a prayer of consecration you both have composed. We join you in those heartfelt, filial prayers.
- The second element you wanted to incorporate is that when you profess your vows, you will be holding in your hands a crucifix. This is a tradition common to Christians in the Eastern rites that you witnessed at a recent wedding in Bosnia-Herzegovina. You will use a crucifix Mene treasures from his years living at St. Michael’s. Making your vows embracing Christ on the Cross will be a public witness that, as you enter into the covenant of marriage, you do so strengthened by Christ’s cruciform love for you, as you beg him to help you love each other by that same measure. St. Paul, the patron of this parish Church, called all Christian husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the Church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her” (Eph 5:25), to seek in marriage to say to each other, “This is my body given for you,” making your married life a commentary on the words of consecration. It’s a challenge of course to commit oneself until death not just for better, richer and healthier but for worse, poorer and sicker. It requires great faith in God, in each other, and in God’s capacity to draw good, even love, from difficulties, economic hardships, suffering and even death. But as you hold the Cross, you recognize that God the Father drew the greatest good of all time — his Son’s resurrection and our salvation — from the evil of Jesus’ crucifixion and that he, similarly, will make all things work out for the good for those who love him (Rom 8:28). As you make those vows to each other and to and before God, we pray that you will model your married life on the mystery of the Lord’s Cross and see in the cross the deepest expression of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord from which we cannot be separated.
- At every Mass, we Catholics believe that we not only hold onto the Cross but enter liturgically in time into the eternal events of Jesus’ once-and-for-all sacrifice from the Upper Room and Calvary. This is where we believe we receive his love for us and are strengthened from within to love each other by that same standard. This is where we seek to unite ourselves to Christ who is the face of the Beatitudes and who helps us, in turn, to become truly blessed men and women through living them. This is where Christians, even in the midst of persecution and distress, anguish and famine across the centuries, have risked their lives to come to worship the Lord and receive him with love. This is where the early Christians used to build canopies over altars to symbolize that the altar is the marriage bed where the union between Christ and his Bride the Church is consummated, when the Bride of Christ receives within herself the Body and Blood of Christ the Bridegroom, and is capacitated to live filled with the spousal love of God. The altar is indeed the marriage bed where generations of Catholic couples, in imitation of Tobias and Sarah, have prayed not just on their wedding day but throughout their marriage, that the Lord may pour out his mercy upon them, deliver them from every evil, and strengthen them in the noble purpose of Christian marriage for the rest of their life. It’s where they say together “Amen, Amen!,” that beautiful Hebrew verb for “uphold” or “support,” professing publicly that they will make Christ and his divine mercy given for us in the Eucharist, the efficacious sign of his inseparable love, the true foundation of their life. Today, around this marriage bed, we all join you in praying, that God, who has waited for this day not just for eleven years but since the foundation of the world, will bless you with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, and through you, and the love of God you radiate, bless us all.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Tobit
When the girl’s parents left the bedroom and closed the door behind them, Tobiah arose from bed and said to his wife, “My love, get up. Let us pray and beg our Lord to have mercy on us and to grant us deliverance.” She got up, and they started to pray and beg that deliverance might be theirs. He began with these words: “Blessed are you, O God of our fathers; praised be your name forever and ever. Let the heavens and all your creation praise you forever. You made Adam and you gave him his wife Eve to be his help and support; and from these two the human race descended. You said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make him a partner like himself.’ Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose. Call down your mercy on me and on her, and allow us to live together to a happy old age.” They said together, “Amen, amen,”
Gradual
Happy are all who fear the LORD, who walk in the ways of God. What your hands provide you will enjoy; you will be happy and prosper: Like a fruitful vine your wife within your home, Like olive plants your children around your table. Just so will they be blessed who fear the LORD. May the LORD bless you from Zion, all the days of your life That you may share Jerusalem’s joy and live to see your children’s children. Peace upon Israel!
A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans
What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him? Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who acquits us. Who will condemn? It is Christ [Jesus] who died, rather, was raised, who also is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: “For your sake we are being slain all the day; we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew
When he saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him. He began to teach them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
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