Marriage as Vocation: A Living Portrait of Cana's Vintage

If allowed to age carefully, to sacramentally preserve and purify, enhancing and maturing us together into the fragrance and flavor, the bouquet of Christ, we will be shocked by our appreciation of the subtlety, delicacy and quality of the Marriage vintage. With the celebrants at Cana we might discover ourselves exclaiming, "You have kept the good wine until now!"

NASHVILLE, TN (Catholic Online) - Weddings are such a heady experience, full of promise, celebration, anticipation. The champagne and laughter fizz with the possibilities, the potential, and hope. What could be more thrilling, more intimidating, than pledging to age, like an excellent wine, with the one you love? 

No bride or groom, embarking on a happily certain future together, imagines on their wedding day how deeply hidden in Christ they might one day become. Tragic turns of future events are unfathomable then, and no one conceives that in service to a spouse, the first fruity flavors and impressions of Cana might one day become the vintage chalice of Christ.  

I see him every Sunday at Mass, he and his wife. There's nothing in particular, physically, to commend him. A senior of rather small stature, he sings in the choir, but is otherwise inconspicuous. If it weren't for one marvelous thing, one would hardly notice him at all. Characteristic of saints, I hear.

Not long ago I headed to Mass and noticed Brent for the first time in his place at the back corner of the church where the choir sings; his wife was seated beside him in a wheelchair. She wore bold earrings, full makeup, and a somewhat fixed stare.

I watched him speak softly to her and caress her face as he found the entrance music in the missal and gently fixed her stiff fingers around it before resting it in her lap. He patted her hands.

He performs this assistance for her throughout every Mass, between singing with the choir. As always, he was tender as he sang that morning, leaning over her as though he sang for two. He replaced her missal and took a seat beside her against the back wall of the church.

At Communion, I saw him struggle to fit the wheelchair between the organ and the aisle; the short way was blocked by oncoming communicants, so he carefully navigated all the way around the back of the pews and down the center aisle so she could receive Communion.

A year ago, just after Brent retired, his wife Terry fell down a flight of stairs and sustained a severe brain injury. He spends his retirement caregiving. While she recovers arduously, the difficulties involved in caring for one who is disabled or handicapped cannot be overstated.

Several years ago when my son had a devastating accident that left him immobile for an extended period, we were both discouraged by how the most mundane tasks, dressing for example, took excruciatingly long to accomplish. Limp, heavy limbs are uncooperative, so that what once took only a minute or two suddenly required an hour to achieve.

I wondered, watching them, how long it had taken Brent to bathe his wife, apply her makeup so carefully, choose her Sunday dress, decorate her with earrings and perfume, place her in the car to meet her Savior in the Eucharistic chalice.

Because it is so real, and raw, and tender, Brent's sacrificial love for his wife, and her submission to it, are together the most stunning illustration of the nuptial mystery St. Paul conveys in Ephesians 5 that I have personally ever seen. The glory of it draws me in every week.

Terry, Brent's bride, submits in humble charity to the frustration and sufferings to which she has been called. It is always difficult to submit to God's care through a another when feeling helpless and weak, but she looks silently into her husband's intimate gaze, leans into his presence, his gentle touch, the things he whispers in her ear, telling everyone with an eye to see that her submission is a labor of thankful, tender joy.

It was at wedding celebration in Cana that Jesus began His public ministry at the direction of His Mother, Mary, a day ripe with marital promise, hope, and potential. "They have no wine," she said, as though the marriage were somehow doomed without the wine He could provide. Jesus then changed approximately 150 gallons of Jewish ceremonial water into wine.

Later He would teach that this "new wine" could not be placed in old wineskins, it must be preserved in something new. Just before His final entry into Jerusalem to complete His Passion, Jesus spoke of the chalice of suffering and sacrificial service.

Then, on the night He was betrayed and when the supper was ended, He took the chalice. He gave it to His disciples and said, "Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant." 

It is the New Covenant first intimated at a marriage through Cana's wine, and one He offers each of us who receive the Sacraments of Marriage and Holy Orders. It is a Covenant made possible and sustained by His being broken and spilled out for us. On the day we marry, whether our spouse is human or Divine, we accept the vocation of pure, loving sacrifice, even to death, in the service of another.

Like Brent, we must allow time and circumstance and challenge to age our marital covenant, altering it, softening its youthful bite, and encouraging the development of a more complex flavor, structure, and aroma. Brent has quaffed this chalice, appreciated the mingling of aromas, both bitter and sweet. I pray that he receives continual grace to drink the precious dregs to the last drop.

Cana's vintage is cleansing and potent, and it is the work of Christ. Through the Marriage Sacrament, lived in true sacrifice for the other, Christ pours out Cana's wine upon us, and the whole world. Brent's tender service, his deliberate care, is one of the most incarnate examples of Christ I have ever witnessed. In our coarse, sometimes graceless age where nuptial cynicism is sometimes justifiable, the glory of it sustains and refreshes me every single week.

It is Cana's wine we receive when we marry, in the Sacrament of Marriage, the new wine of sacrificial love, the ancient vintage of Christ. It is decanted within us and must be allowed to expand and breathe through the Holy Spirit.

If allowed to age carefully, to sacramentally preserve and purify, enhancing and maturing us together into the fragrance and flavor, the bouquet of Christ, we will be shocked by our appreciation of the subtlety, delicacy and quality of the vintage.

With the celebrants at Cana we might discover ourselves exclaiming, "Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you [Lord] have kept the good wine until now!"

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Sonja Corbitt is a Catholic speaker, Scripture teacher and study author, and a contributing writer for Catholic Online. She is available to speak on the New Feminism, current events and your preferred theme. Visit her at www.pursuingthesummit.com for information and sample videos.

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