Mission and Marriage
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that in the order of creation, “God who created man out of love also calls him to love-the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love.' Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes.” My husband and I are only fifteen months into our own marriage, and we’re aware that we have barely scratched the surface of the high call that this vocation is. In it though God has shown forth the goodness, His Goodness, over and over, especially in the time that we have spent with the Mercy Mission. We are the program’s first married missionaries.
Our journey to this was a winding road, one only God could have known the end of. I had a keen interest in the Mercy Mission since I first became a parishioner at St. Michael’s in 2022. Having periodically volunteered at Blanchet House and St. Andre Bessette while I was in college, I knew the blessing of being a part of works of mercy focused on ministering to those in need. However, it was a season of growing and receiving that God called me to, guiding Ioane and I from dating to engagement and marriage prep. After we wed in June 2024, I began regularly volunteering at the Lunches by the Water, but was sure that any chance of ever being a Mercy Missionary was long gone—after all it was a program for unmarried men and women. But God worked His mysterious ways, and at the turning of 2024 to 2025 opened the door I believed to be closed. Ioane joined first, which expedited his full reception into the Catholic Church, and now we mission together.
The Mercy Mission Handbook contains the core principles of the Mission and how to live them out, principle 5 states: “We believe that people flourish in the context of a community… The ultimate community is the divine Trinity…We welcome those living on the streets into a community.” We seek to build friendships that communicate God’s love to those we encounter on the streets, but in many ways I have been welcomed into the community that Ioane has already built during his first year of mission. One such occasion was with two friends, one who loves music and the other who loves crosswords. Ioane and I spent a peaceful and sunny afternoon with them on park benches, Ioane playing music with our friend who loves music, and myself chatting about words and nature with our friend who loves crosswords. On the sweetest days this is what it can be to mission; on other days Ioane and I take turns being the one to offer comfort to our friends, or to each other on the days when our friends reject our community.
This is the truth of marriage as we have found it, that marriage is the work of being sent out to evangelize through community, through the support of relationship that seeks to image the ultimate community of the Trinity, and we are being given the opportunity to do this both in our Mercy Mission work, and in life as husband and wife.
~Amanda DeRego