The Rt Rev Bishop David Oakley, Bishop of Northampton gave the following homily at Northampton Cathedral on Saturday 6th September 2025:
Last autumn, a small group of us visited Lisieux and Paris, a diocesan pilgrimage to get to know better some wonderful saints. One of the highlights for me was the visit to Alençon and the shrine of Sts Louis and Zélie Martin. These were the parents of St Therese of Lisieux. Still today in France, couples enjoy two weddings – the civil marriage in the town hall and then the sacramental celebration in the church. Louis and Zélie Martin were married sacramentally during the night on July 13, 1858, at the Notre-Dame d’Alençon church in France. In their regard, they lived out their sacrament within a family life filled with many challenges. They are the first married saints to be canonised as a couple.
There is currently a sculpture exhibition in the chapel where they celebrated the sacrament of matrimony. The first is a block of wood. In the second piece, a couple are emerging from the wood but still quite indistinct. The third piece shows the fully-carved images of Louise and Zélie holding hands.
I was quite excited by all this. At my younger brother’s wedding forty-one years ago now, I had just returned from holiday in the outer Hebrides. Sitting on a cliff, wondering what to preach at the forthcoming wedding, I saw two rocks, shaped and polished by centuries of ocean washing over them. It was an image to my mind, of grace at work in our lives. This idea had clearly captivated the mind of the sculptor in Alençon. And that’s what we are celebrating today here in our Cathedral. The cumulative years of grace washing over each couple, bringing two individuals into a unity of life in the Lord.
The apostle puts this grace into words: ‘Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.’
In a deeply mystical way, and through the sacrament of marriage, a married couple are invited to step into this grace. Laying down your lives for each other in the daily demands of your married life, is the way you deepen your friendship with the Lord, a friendship which endures into eternal life.
Jesus has chosen you for this way of discipleship. The image of the divine sculptor, at work with those rocks off the coast in the Hebrides, and the human sculptor striving to portray the grace of marriage at work in the lives of the first canonised couple, these images express the down-to-earth reality of the way of grace offered within any expression of Christian discipleship. There is a very understandable earthiness about compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience, bearing with one another, and forgiveness. Or to put this another way – authentic sacramental marriage is no movie romcom. And yet there is something fundamentally romantic about the idea of vocation. As we sang earlier, Let us build a house where hands will reach beyond the wood and stone To heal and strengthen, serve and teach, and live the Word they’ve known.
Marriage is a vocation. We tend to use that word in regard to the vocation to the priesthood, the diaconate, the consecrated and religious life. But we need to reflect more deeply on the vocational dynamic within the sacrament of marriage. Like all vocations, the life and witness of marriage begins with a fundamental human dynamic – we are weak, we struggle and we are often unable to rise above our fragilities. And yet, that dynamic we thought about earlier, the reality of grace at work within us, that too is part of our experience. There was a lovely moment in the tour of the home where the Martin family lived before moving to Lisieux after Zélia’s death. She ran a lace-making business in Alençon. When little Therese was about three she was frightened to descend the steep staircase. She would cry out to her mother, “mamma”. In turn, Zèlie would say from her little office on the ground floor, “Therese”. This comforted Therese and she would take another step on the staircase. Therese writes of this in her autobiography, suggesting this experience was a lesson for her in learning how to trust our heavenly Father.
As a married couple, may you always experience that trust and confidence in each other.
