Answering God's Call: Therese and Lucio Caruso

This is the next in our series on Christian vocation.

MARRIAGE AND ORDERS:
COMPLEMENTARY VOCATIONS IN THE PERMANENT DIACONATE

We were in our mid-thirties when we married and we had recently completed graduate degrees in Pastoral Theology, so our understanding of the sacrament of marriage might have been a bit more “mature” than some couples who marry at a younger age.  Each of our adult lives had been given to parish ministry and we both planned to continue in Church ministry, even hoped that some day we could minister together in the same parish.  So from the start, our shared understanding of the vocation of Christian marriage was intimately tied to our life and service in the Catholic Church.

We very much wanted to express and celebrate this vocational understanding in our wedding ceremony and selected the readings, music, prayers, and ritual actions with great care and thought.  For example, to symbolize our following what we believed was God’s will in joining our lives together, we walked down the aisle behind the Paschal Candle.  We also created a marriage covenant which contained our personal vows to one another and a common vow we wanted to make to the Christian community on a large sheet of parchment, beautifully calligraphied by a friend, and carried in the procession and placed on the altar.  After the exchange of vows according to the Church’s ritual formula, we spoke our personal promises to one another, and then together turned to the community and made our pledge to “honor God’s call by freely choosing to live the values of the Gospel in our home, our relationships, and through our ministry and service to the Church.”   We invited the community to pledge their prayers and support to us by signing their names to our covenant.

Later, we framed the covenant and have it hung on our bedroom wall as a daily reminder of our promises and the support we can rely on from the Christian community.  We certainly haven’t lived our vows perfectly, but seeing the covenant daily reminds us of our promises and helps us renew our efforts to live them out.  It also provides a reminder of how God’s grace has sustained us through difficult times.  Just knowing that we are upheld by the prayers of those who signed our covenant is a powerful source of encouragement when we individually feel our weakness; and noting the names who have now gone before us to heaven reinforces the sense of the power of those prayers that surround us.

Several years ago we embarked on another vocational path of service to the Church – that of the permanent diaconate.  The ministry of charity and service, to which a deacon commits his life, seems to be in perfect keeping with the commitment to the Christian community we made on our wedding day.  The blending of the vocations of marriage and orders in the permanent diaconate is still relatively new to the Church, only about 40 years old.  We only knew 2 or 3 couples ourselves who were testing these waters until we entered the formation process for the permanent diaconate. Like most Catholics, we had not been used to seeing both of these sacraments present in one person; in a couple, no less. Growing up, “vocation” was always presented as an either or approach: a man could either marry or enter priesthood/religious life; a woman could either marry or enter religious life.

Those were the choices. This changed when the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s called for the bringing back of the Order of Deacon and allowed already married men to be eligible for the diaconal level of the sacrament of Holy Orders. Forty some years later, we have thousands of married couples with husbands in ordained ministry. The husband who is co-writing this article may be one of them with ordination a year from now and hopes of serving the people of Epiphany parish in the capacity of an ordained and married permanent deacon.

Being able to grow in theological understanding through the classes we have taken, as well as through spiritual direction and the opportunities for retreats we have been given through the diaconate formation has been a great blessing to us individually, as a couple, and in our continued parish/diocesan ministries.  Our understanding of who a deacon is and what he offers the Church has also enlarged and humbled us with regard to this vocational calling.  We see Marriage and Orders flowing from the same self-emptying love that Christ patterned in His own life. Our Catholic faith teaches that marriage and orders are sacraments of service, aimed at the good and salvations of others. If they contribute to personal well being and growth in holiness, it is through service to others that they do so. We pray to be an even stronger sign of Christ’s love for His Church and for the world He so loved.