Per Christum

Believe it or not, I attended my first Catholic wedding (Wedding-Mass) over the weekend. Actually, this is not entirely accurate, since I went to one when I was eight or so. However, since my memory of the first one is so fuzzy, for all intents and purposes, this was my first.

It is nice to finally get to see a wedding viewed as a sacrament, even though the language of the Methodist wedding ceremony I grew up with sure sounds sacramental. I remember a friend of mine in grad school came from a low-church tradition. She once remarked that she didn’t believe in seven sacraments, but believed marriage was one. While I was a little uncomfortable with this pick-and-choose your own sacramental system even then, it shows the importance even non-sacramental Christians attach to marriage. Marriage after all is something so important in the life of a Christian, that if there is a time for ritual, for something more grand and full than the usual sparseness, it is a wedding.

While I would have planned the wedding slightly differently, I thought this one was centered around Jesus Christ and his Church. I left with the clear impression that Jesus was the center of this marriage, which means that it certainly has the correct person at the center of it! I think choosing to have a wedding Mass is the best way to go, since Christ is truly and literally at the center of the wedding, since the wedding is done within the context of the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. Talk about the best guest to have at your wedding! Perhaps many of the guests at this wedding couldn’t understand why anybody would actually like it when a wedding lasts over an hour, but I enjoyed the longer wedding mass. I hope my future wedding (no plans as of yet) is this Christ-centered. As a side note, the song leader at the wedding was even a budding Catholic recording artist named Sarah Bauer, whom I talked with some at the reception. She did a great job.

Incidentally, before the wedding Jennifer and I and some friends went to a big used bookstore in the Fort Wayne, Indiana area called Hyde Brothers. I bought a few books there (of course, how could I refuse?): The Baltimore Catechism numbers #3 and #4, The Teaching of Christ: A Catholic Catechism for Adults by Lawler, Wueri, and Lawler, The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church by Edward O’Connor, and Enzymes: the Fountain of Life by Lopez, Williams, and Miehlke. I also got a pamphlet version of Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae.

What better symbol for Catholic marriage is there than the Holy Family? This is a photo I took of the Holy Family (for more of my photos, I do have a photo blog!).