Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Aloysius Roman Catholic Church, Glasgow, Scotland
Nuptial Mass of Nicholas Joseph Tomaino and Madeleine Janet Kearns
February 4, 2023
Tob 8:4-8, Ps 127:3-4, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 7:21-29
To listen to an audio recording of today’s Mass please click below:
To watch their beautiful wedding in its entirety, please click below:
This is the text that guided the homily:
While Maddy was processing in today, as she was looking at Nick at the end of the nave and Nick and everyone else were looking at her as Pat confidently and joyfully walked her down the aisle, they were intentionally hoping that their and our gaze would being going much deeper than what our eyes could see. Lily, Maddy’s sister and Matron of Honor, in an arrangement she and Maddy had composed themselves, was singing Be Thou My Vision, the original Old Irish lyrics of which scholars say may trace back to the sixth century martyr Saint Dallán Forgaill. It’s a famous prayer of protection called a Lorica, beseeching God to be our vision, light, wisdom, truth, Father, king, treasure, inheritance, deepest love, and eternal victory, and to “still be our vision” as we hope to behold him beatifically.
Maddy and Nick chose it to be sung at that moment to orient not only their and our focus at the beginning of their wedding but also to orientate their whole marriage, praying that they might keep their contemplative gaze jointly fixed on God who never ceases to look at them with love, as well as that he might permit them to see all things in his holy light.
Be Thou My Vision rephrases what we ask for in Psalm 27, that we may seek and see the Lord’s face and behold the loveliness of his dwelling all the days of our life (Ps 27:4,8). It’s a petition for what St. Paul prayed Christian spouses in Ephesus would experience, that growing in purity of heart, they might see God in each other and reverence each other out of reverence for Christ (Eph 5:22). It’s a vision that Nick and Maddy have already been seeking to make their own.
During marriage preparation, Nick told me that he was helped a great deal by Dietrich von Hildenbrand’s book Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love, in which the great 20th century German philosopher wrote, “Just as in supernatural love of our neighbor, we penetrate at one glance to that innermost, mysterious essence of the other person in which, through all his imperfections, pettiness, arrogance and triviality, he reflects God, so in natural conjugal love, the real individuality of the partner is revealed.” The gaze of spouses toward each other is meant, in other words, to reveal both God and the God-given uniqueness of the other.
Nick commented on how Maddy does this for him. “Maddy reflects God so clearly to me, in word and in deed. I witnessed that in her tremendous faith, and love of God and neighbor; her selflessness, humility, and habitual exercise of virtue; her courage, no matter the circumstance; her beauty and her earnest desire to make use of her God-given talents for His glorification; her patience and cherishing of life’s treasures and joys; her playful spirit and good cheer.” He continued, “There is something so divinely charming about Maddy.” Like God, she is “someone on whom I can invariably rely and find peace. In any pursuit, she encourages me. She’s a model, in every respect, and makes me want to be a saint—to be truly good, to be the man I was made to be. … Maddy has been a leader and companion in faith, which has affected all aspects of our life together. She’s aided my own spiritual growth and encouraged me to live out the Gospel daily and to seek out truth. She’s inspired and helped me to continue to pursue virtue, … to be more present-minded, in all circumstances, … [to become] more conscious of and intentional about expressing gratitude.”
Maddy also shared at length about Nick, in his individuality, has similarly reflected God. She told me that she knew Nick was the one for whom she had long been praying because of “how much peace and joy I felt in his company, and the fact that he had all the qualities I’d prayed for in a spouse: love of God, zeal for the truth, gentle but unbreakable strength, faithfulness, humility, chastity, and courage in the face of adversity. … He’s handsome, funny, smart, talented, virtuous, strong, loving, loyal, and profound. I love Nick’s interest in the things that matter and his disinterest in the things that don’t. … I love his humility, the way he recognizes his many talents and blessings as gifts from God, to be used in the service of others. I love his courage: He has such zeal for the truth and such fortitude in defending it. … He’s chivalrous: making sure I get home safely, taking care of me when I’m upset or not feeling well. … He’s also consistently sweet and affectionate, sending texts to say he’s thinking about me throughout the day, or leaving little ‘I love you’ notes for me to find. … Nick has a tremendous capacity for sacrificial love, which elicits and inspires the same in me. … Nick has made my good his own and has been my greatest advocate and protector. … No matter the hour or day or how busy he may be, he’s always there for me, with love and affirmation, rooting for my better self. … He has also helped me grow in gratitude and trust. When good things happen, Nick gives thanks to God. When bad things happen, he patiently embraces the cross. … He’s encouraged me to lean more on God and on him, in that order.”
We rejoice, Maddy and Nick, that you have found in each other someone to help you calibrate your vision on the Lord through reflecting various divine attributes. We give thanks to God that through human love you have come to deepen your awareness of divine love and to grow in your hunger to receive it and share it with each other.
The readings that you’ve chosen today for your Nuptial Mass reveal the supernatural perspective that is at the heart of your bond and the heart Christian marriage. In the Gospel you selected, you show your desire to build your life on Christ and his word. Jesus tells us that it’s not everyone who calls upon him as Lord, but only those who do the will of his Father in heaven, who build their life on the rock of what he teaches, who will enter his Kingdom. In the Holy Land at Jesus’ time, there was obviously not the type of heavy construction equipment we use today. Jesus, like St. Joseph, was a tekton, or builder, which meant everything from construction worker, carpenter, engineer and architect. To build even foundations on the craggy, uneven rocks and slopes found throughout the country was challenging and time-consuming, involving lots of measurements, toilsome drilling with hand tools, and various other arduous tasks. The people who were not willing patiently to put in that work would turn to dry, flat creek beds at the bottom of valleys where they would try to erect something fast. When the seasonal rains would come, however, the water flowing down from the hills would inundate the creeks, and the flood would take the house, its possessions and sometimes its occupants and wash them away.
The reality is that so many young people today are building their relationships on various forms of sand, with commitments and lifestyles that cannot withstand the storms of life that inevitably blow and buffet against them. Maddy and Nick are doing something different. They are intentionally seeking to build their marriage, home and family life solidly on the rock of God’s word and the person of Christ as the indestructible Cornerstone. They know that the rains will fall, the floods will come, and the winds — like those that routinely howl through Scotland’s famous links golf courses —will blow and buffet against the house. Together they want to build their future life on the eternal Rock who is the Lord, on his word and his will, on his revelation about human anthropology, love, marriage and family, and on his call to model their bond on his faithful, fruitful and indissoluble commitment the Church his bride, so that whatever hurricanes and deluges may come, they will not just desperately cry out, “Lord, Lord,” to a spiritual 911 operator but rather turn confidently to a Friend whom they have chosen as their full-time shelter and secure foundation. Maddy told me in marriage preparation, “Christ is the rock on whom we’ve built our relationship, which we live out through faithfulness to the Church, prayer, and our Sacramental lives.” Nick added, “Our faith serves as a rock and a guide, in any circumstance we face together. It’s our foundation.”
To build wisely in this way requires that the love that is at the foundation of marriage be truly rock-solid. Many relationships today are built on the sand of love understood simply as feelings, or attractions, or sometimes even lust, none of which can withstand the tempests of life. It’s important to strengthen one’s love with the steel-reinforced concrete of Christ’s own love. That’s why Nick and Maddy wanted the famous Canticle of Love from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians to be proclaimed at their wedding. In this beautiful passage, St. Paul takes love beyond sentimentality to the types of virtues that make it capable of withstanding category five hurricanes. St. Paul first describes the type of love we find in Christ himself, who shows us that love is patient, kind, never jealous, pompous, arrogant or rude, that it’s not self-seeking, quick-tempered, resentful, or negative, but truthful, joyful, faithful, hopeful, supportive, enduring, and ready to give away everything, even one’s life, for the ones loved. St. Paul summons all of us, and especially married couples, to pattern our love on Christ’s.
In an ambitious age in which people waste time, energy, money and basically their lives seeking after so many ephemeral goals, the apostle urges us, “Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts,” indicating to us that the “more excellent way” to attain them is by loving others by Christ’s own criteria. St. Paul says that if he powerfully preached the words of God, if he had faith to move mountains, if he gave his body over in martyrdom — all of which he did — but didn’t have love, he would just be a noise maker and would gain and remain nothing. Likewise, he could say to couples on their wedding today that if they have perfect health, a tremendous social life, great careers, lots of honorary degrees, millions of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, a big family and huge extended family, and everything else that many materially equate with happiness, but don’t have this type of Christ like love, they will lack the most important thing of all. The human person, made in the image and likeness of God who is love, cannot live without love. But this love involves genuinely willing the other’s good, body and soul. It means resolving each day, even heroically, to be kind and patient with each other, even when the other tries your patience and isn’t as kind to you as you’d prefer; it means not being jealous but trusting; it means never being pompous, inflated or rude toward the other, but humbly serving each other as a privilege; it means that rather than keeping score over the ways the other has hurt you, you remember the Lord’s mercy and share that same mercy with each other, giving the other a second chance, a third chance, and even a 70 times 7th chance, grasping that it is through mutually forgiving each other that you are helped to become more like God, whose mercy endures forever. It means ultimately — as Jesus declared during the Last Supper — the willingness to lay down one’s life for another, to sacrifice one’s own interests, preferences, and autonomy for the other’s good.
That’s why I think it’s so beautiful that as you proclaim your vows today, you asked permission, like happens in various Eastern Catholic rites, to do so holding a crucifix, precisely so that as you enter into the covenant of marriage you will do so strengthened by Christ’s cruciform love for you, as you beg him to help you love each other by that same standard. St. Paul called all Christian husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the Church and handed and handed himself over for her to sanctify her” (Eph 5:25), to you 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, as both of you do (Rom 8:28). As you embrace the cross and profess your vows today, I think it’s quite moving that you will do so before the high altar at the top of which stands St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron of this beautiful Church, himself holding a crucifix, as he looks on Christ crucified as the “power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor 2:4) and his “solitary boats” (Gal 6:14). He recognized that the crucifix is not so much a sign of pain but of the love of Christ that made even that much pain bearable. He is doubtless praying for both of you today on your wedding day that you may model your married life and love on the mystery of the Lord’s cross, with the same purity and passion he did.
Building your marriage on the rock of Christ and his words, on the reality of his love even to death on the Cross, leads you inexorably to the altar, where you intend to construct your new life on the rock of the Church’s ultimate spiritual foundation, the source, summit, root and center of the Christian life. The early Christians used to illustrate the reality between marriage and the Mass in their architecture, covering the altars with a canopy just like ancient beds were covered, to communicate that the altar is the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. Catholics believe that it’s here on this altar that we, the Bride of Christ, receive within ourselves, the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, the divine Bridegroom, becoming one-flesh with him and being made capable of bearing fruit with him through acts of love. The Mass is the means by which Christ regularly renews couples in their indissoluble one-flesh union. The Mass is the place where husband and wife receive within Christ’s love and become more capable of loving each other with the patience, kindness and all the other virtues with which he first loved them. The Mass is the place in which we behold Christ as the Lamb of God and pray that he will be our vision, light, wisdom, truth, king, treasure, inheritance, deepest love, and eternal victory.
Today around this marriage bed of Christ’s union with you and, in just a few minutes, your holy sacramental union with each other, we make the prayer with and for you that Tobias and Sarah prayed on the day of the wedding as they knelt together at their bedside, the prayer you chose to have proclaimed as your first reading. With them and you, we praise God for the gift of marriage from the beginning. We call down upon you his mercy. We ask Him to consecrate your marriage to a noble purpose as you take each other not out of lust but out of Christ-like love. We ask him to bless you and bring the holy vocation to marriage he has given you to completion. And we pray that, through helping you always keep your eyes on him, become a reflection of divine love in our midst and help us all to make him our Vision, until, we pray, we may come to the eternal wedding banquet where, with you — and hopefully many children — we will behold Him forever.
The readings for the Nuptial 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
Children too are a gift from the LORD, the fruit of the womb, a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children born in one’s youth.
A Reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians
Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts. But I shall show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty deeds in your name?’ Then I will declare to them solemnly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers.’ “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock. And everyone who listens to these words of mine but does not act on them will be like a fool who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. And it collapsed and was completely ruined.” When Jesus finished these words, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.
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