When Adam was alone in the Garden of Eden, he seemed to have everything a person might need to flourish and enjoy life to the fullest: he had a beautiful home, perfect peace, all of his needs met: he seemed to have everything.  And yet, he didn’t.  He was not complete until God provided him a partner, an equal, one very much like himself, but at the same time mysteriously different.  Together, they would form a partnership encompassing all of life, participating even in God’s power to create by bringing forth children.  They would form a model of the human family, universal to all times and places. 

The human person is not meant to be alone, and we find our deepest fulfillment, as Adam and Eve did, in the giving of ourselves in love and gift for others.  No matter what vocation we have, every one of us is called to give ourselves away to others in selfless love: whether in marriage and family life, in the priesthood or the convent, or in the many ways that single people can live lives of faithful service: there are as many variations as there are souls.  But the common thread is this: we all have to have something to live for, beyond ourselves.  Selfishness, just looking out for #1, gets very boring, very quickly.  Because it’s not what we’re made for.  We’re not made for mediocre comfort-seeking; we’re made for greatness.  We live in a world that rewards and incentivizes selfishness, and we’re all tempted to make selfish decisions every day.  We’re tempted to give in to the mediocrity that our world makes so easy and so available to us.  But Christ calls us to something greater.  

And today especially, in these readings, he calls those of you who are married to something better, something more profound.  And his message is so timely.  He says that Moses had permitted divorce because of our hardness of heart.  But Christ calls us back to how things are truly meant to be, how they were in the beginning, how God arranged our nature.  Our Lord asks his followers, and asks you, those of you who are married to make a profoundly selfless choice.  It’s selfless because your marriage vows didn’t read, “I’ll love you as long as it’s comfortable or convenient for me.”  Or, “I’ll love you as long as it’s good for my career, or as long as you keep your girlish figure or your muscle tone.”  You vowed to choose to love each other, to keep loving each other, no matter what, for better and for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, when you’re good each other and when you’re not.  While emotions will naturally come and go in any human relationship, you made the choice to dedicate yourselves to a deeper love, a love which goes beyond mere emotion.  You make the choice every day to love, a choice that shapes your whole life, the choice to see each other through to the end, no matter what. 

This is the kind of love, this is the kind of choice, that is at the heart of any vocation.  As a priest, I’ve dedicated myself for the rest of my life, to love and serve my bride, who is the Church, and my family, which is you.  And I try to be faithful to by doing what the Church needs and asks of me, by never betraying her trust, by treating our most precious family time, which is the Holy Mass, with the greatest possible attention and reverence.  When you get right down to it, it’s not all that much different.  Real love involves sacrifice.  And it involves vulnerability.  That means it hurts sometimes.  It’s why the King of Love hangs on a cross.  But as messy and painful as it can be, this is the love that truly fulfills us, that makes us happy, that gives us peace.  May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, reign in all of our minds and hearts, and may true charity and love prevail now and forevermore.