TWENTY-three couples took part in a special Mass at Bateman parish on August 3 to celebrate reaching significant wedding anniversaries this year.
About 300 people gathered for the annual Mass, which had a particular focus on marriage, and the married couples and their families shared dinner in the parish hall at its conclusion.
Each of the couples present, who were celebrating 25, 30, 40, 50, and 55 years of marriage in 2013, were presented with a certificate commemorating their milestone at the end of Mass.
Parish priest of St Thomas More, Fr Philip Perreau, said during National Vocations Awareness Week we are called to remember all vocations, including marriage.
“I must say, looking at them all smiling, I think I’m getting a vocation crisis,” he joked at the start of the Mass.
During his homily, Fr Philip shared several humorous perspectives on marriage.
“It is said that when man admits that he is wrong when he knows he has done wrong, he is a good man,” he said. “But when a man admits he’s wrong though he knows he’s right, he’s a married man.”
Fr Philip went on to assert that couples can struggle sometimes because “they feel that the person they’re living with is not the person they thought they were married to”.
“The other person can feel that sometimes their spouse expects perfection in them,” he said.
“Often, it’s not perfection that we expect from each other in a marriage; often people want their spouse to become like them, to think like them.”
But this, Fr Philip reminded the congregation, is not what spouses commit themselves to when they make their wedding vows.
“When you say that you love someone, it’s about seeing always the good in them, in spite of their failings,” he said.
“It’s about holding them near to your heart. It’s about caring for and respecting them. It’s about seeking their happiness before all else.
“The happiest wife in the world is not the one who marries the best man in the world, but the one who makes the best man of the one she marries.”