“Today you two received all the graces you’ll ever need to get through anything in your marriage.”
These are the words told to me by a friend on my wedding day and, despite the busyness and emotion of the day, I distinctly remember them. At the time, I know I didn’t understand what she meant, and, had I understood, I doubt I would have believed them. I was a lapsed Catholic then, limping my way back to the Church, and not quite sure yet what to take as Truth. But I seem to have remembered those words, and stored them up, and pondered them somewhere deep in my heart.
The words have come up many times in my marriage of twenty-two years, when my husband and I have come up against some difficulty that we couldn’t imagine every surmounting. Like when our young teenagers seemed to be drifting away from us. Or when we seemed to be drifting away from each other, and couldn’t envision every being able to find our way back.
We did though, thanks to prayer and hard, hard work, but mostly thanks to those graces that we received on our wedding day. We have called on them many times in twenty-two years, and they have not failed us yet.
And this is just one of twelve beautiful promises of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque between 1673 and 1675 (there are lots of places to learn about these promises, but an entertaining way is to check out the “Anything Gude” episode on the Sacred Heart):
“I will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.”
I apply this promise to my marriage confidently and constantly. But there’s another one of the twelve promises that stands out to me, at least as a wife:
“Lukewarm souls shall become fervent.”
This is a good promise for me to remember in my marriage; we’ve certainly had our times of tepidity, whether it was because we were exhausted from parenting little ones, cooped up in quarantine, or just because we’ve been together for twenty-five years.
But God never leaves us lukewarm, neither in our faith, nor our vocation to marriage; He is always ready to fan the flames of our love for our spouse and rekindle our compassion and kindness and cheer. As we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus this month, I’m calling upon that promise in particular: that God will warm my heart when it becomes tepid, increase my thoughtfulness when I become thoughtless, and fan the flame to make me more fervent in my love.
