Michelle and Toby Wedding Homily
St Canice Church, Sandy Bay, Tasmania
January 3, 2009
January 3, 2009
Personal delight
Performing this wedding ceremony for Michelle and Toby is not a pastoral duty for me as a priest but a personal delight. It’s my great honour to be invited here to witness the fulfillment of Michelle and Toby’s dreams to become one in marriage before the altar of God and before their loved ones.
Of course, it’s always a delight for me to travel for free! Thanks for paying my airfare!
Thank you for bringing us all here on this beautiful island of Tasmania. This is my second time here in Tassie and until now I’m still hoping to see a Tasmanian Devil whirling around and devouring everything like in cartoons.
Thank you for providing me a nice accommodation through the hospitality of Fr Michael Tate, your parish priest. On my first night at the presbytery I saw the glimpse of heaven because when I looked outside the window I saw McDonald’s just across the road!
Thank you for your warm welcome and friendship when I visited you in two occasions in Sydney.
Could I also take this opportunity to thank you for flying to the Philippines to attend my thanksgiving Mass just after I was ordained priest in 2006.
Design for eternity
So today, dear friends, 3rd day of year 2009, in this beautiful church of St. Canice, today will be marked as the most remembered day in the lives of Michelle and Toby as they enter to a permanent, exclusive and sacred union through the Sacrament of Matrimony.
Today is not only my first wedding for year 2009 but it’s also my first time to celebrate a wedding of two actors. And I already feel like a Hollywood celebrity here!
Michelle and Toby, you are dressed beautifully today, just like those fairytales we learned in school where the next line after the wedding was always, ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ And we hope today you will be just as happy tomorrow as today.
You are dressed so beautifully today for this sacred union and next day like all of us, you will dress more casually, but the wedding vows you are proclaiming publicly in a few moments, will become part of you for the rest of your lives.
Your wedding ceremony lasts only for an hour, but its effect, its sacramental grace is designed by God for you until your last breath.
First Meeting
It was in 2003 when Michelle and Toby first met at “drama school” at NIDA in Sydney. It was in a class where their friendship started which later on flourished into a loving relationship, and this brought us here today.
In Toby’s own words he said, “We spent a lot of time together in class, and I will always remember those moments in Voice where we would all stand in a circle doing vocal exercises and she would catch me looking at her and we would share a smile. By mid way through first year, the situation had become unbearable. I had to tell her how I felt about her or I would regret it for the rest of my life.”
Here’s what Michelle said in my exclusive interview, “At first we were just colleagues and friends, but then we discovered that we shared many interests, had the same sense of humour and I discovered that he was a loving, kind, giving and intelligent person…Toby is my college sweetheart”
The School of Marriage
Michelle and Toby, you first met each other at “drama school” where you learned together the art of acting and singing. Starting today whether you like it or not you are going back to school again together, not at “drama school,” this time to the “school of Marriage.”
At drama school you became familiar to the important role of a Stage Director. Stage Director ensures the quality and completeness of theatre production and to lead the whole team to achieve their artistic vision for it. Stage Director occupies different places of authority and responsibility, but his or her main job as Director is of course to give direction.
Michelle and Toby at the “school of Marriage” you need a Good Director. There will be moments in your lives as husband and wife when you need to seek guidance and advice. The script lines your Good Director asks you to memorize and live out starting today is all about love, unconditional love. The Good Lord, your Good Director, showed His sacrificial love until the last drop of his blood on the Cross. He said to his followers and now to you, “love as I have loved you.” Let His Love, let His Holy Scripture be your constant light and inspiration.
GPS
Michelle and Toby you will begin your journey today as married couple. Every life’s journey has its ups and downs, you will pass winding roads and you will climb high slopes and deep valleys. So you will need to carry with you a GPS. But this GPS doesn’t stand for Global Positioning System, rather this GPS stands for us Christians as God Providing Security.
Allow Jesus to guide you and direct you. Jesus will be your GPS – God Providing Security personified, anytime and anywhere, with Him you will never get lost.
I am sure you are both excited to work hard for the welfare of your marriage and for your future children. But always remember the best security that you can provide to each other is God. Only God and not material things, who can provide you love, joy and peace. Only God and not popularity, who can bring you unity, faithfulness, understanding and all the good things you dream about for each other. Take advantage of the tools the Church gives us: namely the sacraments. Like your own parents, live a good sacramental life, go to Mass every Sunday and set the example for your future children.
Michelle and Toby it is our deepest prayer for you today that through the grace of God, through the Holy Spirit, you will fulfill God’s divine plan for every husband and wife according to the beautiful of words of Jesus today: “So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must divide.”
