The Ordinary Practice of Love

A Reflection on marriage, holy habits, and the quiet practice of delight

Late last week, in the middle of one of those days when I was rushing around the parish office trying to make several things happen at once, I had two unexpected encounters. Neither was scheduled. Neither lasted particularly long. Neither seemed, at first, especially consequential. And yet, by the end of the day, I had become convinced that both were somehow providential, two interruptions that turned out to be far more important than whatever it was I had been rushing to accomplish.

The first happened while I was fighting with the parish copier, which, as anyone who has ever worked in a church office knows, is itself an exercise in Christian patience.

As I moved back and forth between my office and the copier, I noticed a man standing outside St. Michael Chapel. I have known him for years, though we see one another rarely these days as he spends months of the year at his home out of state. It was only a few years ago that I had the privilege of burying his husband in a small family cemetery in South Georgia. He had stopped by the church that afternoon to leave a donation, but someone was already in the chapel. A police officer, apparently on his lunch break, had found his way into that little sacred space and was sitting there quietly, alone.

I told him that it was perfectly all right to go in and leave his donation.

“No, Father,” he said. “I’ve learned that sometimes I have to be patient in order for them to get what they need.”

I laughed and said something that I am sure I thought was witty at the time, although I cannot remember it now. What I do remember is what he said next. He told me that he was retired. He had nowhere he needed to be. He could wait. And perhaps that officer needed those few minutes alone more than he needed to get on with his afternoon.

There was something remarkably holy about that.

He did not know what was happening in that officer’s life. Neither did I. Maybe nothing was wrong at all. Maybe he simply wanted a quiet place to eat his lunch. But this man had learned somewhere along the way that love sometimes looks like noticing what another person might need and quietly surrendering your own preference so that they can have it.

Then, not twenty minutes later, there was a knock on my office door.

Standing there was another man I know, someone whom, a little less than a year ago, I had the privilege of marrying to his wonderful wife. We talked for a while. I asked about their marriage, their children, their grandchildren, all the ordinary things you ask when someone unexpectedly appears at your door.

And then he said something I have been thinking about ever since.

He told me that this marriage has given him a glimpse into the Kingdom of God.

He had been married before. He had loved his first wife, built a life with her, raised daughters with her, and eventually grieved her death. But looking back, he said that so much of marriage in those earlier years had necessarily been about survival. There were children to raise, bills to pay, careers to manage, schedules to coordinate, places everyone needed to be, and an endless procession of responsibilities that constitute the work of building a family.

But this marriage, later in life, has taught him something different.

His children are grown. His grandchildren are growing. And now, as he put it, he wants to use whatever time he has left to show his children and grandchildren what it looks like simply to delight in another person.

And the curious thing, he said, is that the delight is almost never found in the grand gestures.

It is not in the vacations he can now afford in retirement or fancy dinners or gifts. It is the glass of wine they share on the back deck—she opens the bottle and pours the glasses, he sets the chairs up in the right place on the deck. It is watching the sunset together while they discuss and  worry about their family and friends. It is learning which small irritation simply does not need to become an argument. It is the brush of a hand while sitting beside one another at their grandchild’s softball game.

Somewhere along the way, he told me, he had learned something about God from being married again. That he thinks this is what God intended for his children all along—a commitment to love and service rather than a performance of love and steadfastness.

I found both of these men extraordinarily profound, perhaps because without intending to do so, within the span of an hour they had given me two different glimpses of the same truth.

Love is not primarily a feeling. Love is a practice.

Our culture tends to tell stories about marriage through extraordinary moments. There is the first date, the proposal, the wedding, the honeymoon, the anniversaries, the vacations, the births, the great celebrations, and sometimes the great crises. Those are the photographs we frame and the stories we tell.

But almost none of a marriage actually happens there.

Marriage happens on Tuesday.

It happens over coffee before work and dishes after dinner. It happens in calendars and grocery lists and carpools. It happens in hospital waiting rooms and mortgage payments. It happens when one person is tired and the other is not. It happens when someone has to apologize first. It happens when you discover that the thing you were absolutely certain needed to be said does not, in fact, need to be said at all.

And occasionally it happens with a glass of wine on the back porch, when you suddenly realize that the person sitting beside you has become old with you, and that this ordinary evening is itself an extraordinary gift.

This should not be entirely foreign to us as Christians because Christianity is built upon precisely this sort of repetition.

We pray prayers we have prayed before. We hear Scriptures we have heard before. We confess our sins again. We exchange the Peace again. We come to the same Table again. We stretch out our hands again. We receive the same bread and the same cup, and we hear once more that these ordinary things somehow bear to us the extraordinary grace of God.

The Church has never taught that repetition makes something meaningless. Quite the opposite. We believe that faithful repetition can make something holy.

That is what a holy habit is.

We do not gather for Eucharist because every Sunday will produce an unprecedented spiritual experience. We gather because returning to the Table forms us. We practice gratitude until, by grace, we become more grateful. We practice confession until we become more honest about ourselves. We practice forgiveness until mercy becomes a little more instinctive. We practice receiving grace until perhaps we become a little more capable of giving it.

And marriage, at its best, does something remarkably similar.

The holiness of Christian marriage does not consist in two particularly holy people managing to remain perpetually enchanted with one another. It consists in two imperfect people making promises and then practicing those promises over and over again.

Patience becomes holy because it has been practiced.

Forgiveness becomes holy because it has been practiced.

Tenderness becomes holy because it has been practiced.

Delight becomes holy because it has been practiced.

And perhaps that is why the vows of marriage are so much less romantic than we sometimes imagine them to be. The Church does not ask whether two people feel sufficiently in love. It asks whether they will have and hold one another, for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish.

Those are not descriptions of feelings. They are promises about practices.

And like every Christian vocation, marriage is formed in the keeping of them.

Of course, not everyone is called to marriage. Some marriages end. Some promises are broken. Some relationships become places where love cannot flourish, and no theology of covenant should ever be twisted into an excuse for cruelty, abuse, or harm. Marriage is not the only school in which God teaches us how to love.

But the lesson belongs to all of us.

Because those two men who interrupted my afternoon were really teaching me the same thing.

One had learned to stand quietly outside a chapel because perhaps a stranger needed the room more than he did.

The other had learned that a hand brushing against another hand at a softball game could contain within it an entire lifetime of gratitude.

Neither act would make a particularly compelling movie.

Both, I think, look remarkably like the Kingdom of God.

Perhaps holiness is less often found in the grand gesture than in doing some small act of love for the ten-thousandth time, when nobody is watching and nobody is keeping score.

Perhaps the great work of Christian life is learning to pay attention long enough to discover what the person beside us needs, and becoming free enough to delight in giving it.

And perhaps this is why we need holy habits in the first place.

Because we become what we practice.

We practice prayer so that eventually we might become prayerful. We practice generosity so that eventually we might become generous. We practice forgiveness so that eventually we might become merciful. We practice Eucharist so that eventually our lives might become eucharistic: taken, blessed, broken, and given for the life of the world.

And those who are called to marriage practice loving one particular person, day after day, year after year, through the spectacular and the painfully mundane, trusting that somewhere in all that repetition God is doing something neither of them could accomplish alone.

Maybe that is one of the great gifts marriage can offer the Church and the world: not the fantasy of perfect romance, but a living witness that love can be practiced.

A glass of wine.

A sunset.

A hand at a softball game.

A few extra minutes outside a chapel because somebody else might need them.

Small things, perhaps. But the Kingdom of God has always had a peculiar habit of hiding in small things.

Pax et Bonum!

Fr. Ben