In August 1992, my wife and I exchanged rings. This August, 33 years later, I realize what else we gave each other that day: the cross.
Our cross was small that day, and easy to carry. But it grew and grew over the years with every hardship, every fight, every new challenge, every sin, and every failure.
Now, 33 years later, I see it more clearly than ever: The wedding ring and the cross of marriage go together. You can’t have one without the other.
Now that I think of it, my parents learned this lesson first.
I remember that I was away at college — the last of my siblings to leave the home — when I got a disturbing phone call. Dad had packed his things and loaded the car. Our parents’ last act as a couple was to tell their children that their marriage was over.
Only it wasn’t their last act. When we all came home for the next holiday, it turned out Dad had never left, and they stayed together for decades, up until my dad cared constantly for Mom as she died of ALS.
What happened? Apparently, my dad was all set to leave when the water main broke in our house and flooded our one-story home. My mom and dad spent all night and the next days fixing the problem. Then, my dad unpacked his car and stayed.
I had prayed for my parents’ marriage for the first time in my life that night.
God answered my prayer the way he so often does: By sending a cross.
Most of us start out thinking of marriage as a shelter from the storms of life, a place of solace and comfort in a hostile world. That’s what it is, too — sometimes. We also tend to assume, when the storms come, Christ’s role is to stop storms for us. He does that, too.
But we forget that if Jesus is the master of storms, then he isn’t just the one who stops them: He is the one who sends them. The Book of Job describes how this happens: God allows tragedy to befall Job, and when Job asks why, God answers — from a storm.
It is the same for all of us. Marriage isn’t a shelter, it’s a crucible. Marriage helps by hurting.
That’s how all sacraments work.
An old U2 song includes the lyric, “Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.” It could be about the sacraments.
Think of each one: The blood of Christ washes us in baptism; the pierced body of Christ nourishes us in the Eucharist; our own sins become doorways for Jesus to enter our hearts in confession.
The sacrament of marriage works the same way, only the suffering Christ is there in our marriage.
We have faced many ugly things — dozens of “water main breaks”: our sins against each other and our sins against our children; their sins against each other and their sins against us; our bad decisions that have changed the trajectory of our family’s lives; the physical, mental, and spiritual sicknesses that have compromised us from within.
The grace of the sacrament of marriage has taken all of these ugly things and made something beautiful out of them.
At the end of our lives as a married couple, only two things will remain: Our ring and our cross.
In Kristin Lavransdatter, a Nobel-prize winning historical fiction trilogy by Catholic convert Sigrid Undset, readers witness the death of a woman whose married life has been filled with ugliness — pride, anger, sin, and suffering.
When she dies, alone, as a widow, she realizes she owns nothing anymore but a cross and her wedding ring. She looks at the ring and cries.
“She felt as if she had never before fully understood what it signified: the life to which this ring had married her, over which she had complained and grumbled, raged and rebelled. And yet she had loved it so, rejoicing over it, with both the bad and the good, so that there was not a single day she would have given back to God.”
That’s what April and I have learned after 33 years of marriage. The cross and the wedding ring go together. And even if some of it has been ugly, all of it has been beautiful — because the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ makes beauty out of ugly things.
