One of my French cousins is a priest in Singapore. Recently, he married two friends there. It happened to be on the same day my sister married upstate. He e-mailed to share with us the homily he wrote for them. In it, he spoke of the journey of two pilgrims. . .

“It all starts, they said, when an angel (like Raphael for Tobias and Sarah, cf. Tb 8,5-7a) makes us discover a fellow pilgrim with whom we want to do this journey: journey of learning to grow in love by sharing our lives and opening our hearts to one another, day after day, joy after joy and difficulty after difficulty.”

There is a display at the Museum of Natural History that explains this story for me. It resonates with me in a way that makes courtship, marriage and family-making seem to be an imperative at an evolutionary level. I imagine their steps and matched pace were set in time as a present and perhaps even as a lesson.

Dogspeed..