Sep 16 – Memorial for Sts. Cornelius, Pope and Martyr; and Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr
St. Cornelius (d. 253) was elected after a year-and-a-half period, during which persecutions were so bad that papal ascension was a quick death sentence. He worked to maintain unity in a time of schism and apostasy. He called a synod of bishops to confirm him as rightful pontiff, as opposed to the anti-pope Novatian. Cornelius was eventually exiled by Roman authorities to punish Christians in general, who were said to have provoked the gods to send plague against Rome.
St. Cyprian (190-258) was baptised when he was 56. By the time he was bishop, he had been a Christian for only 3 years! When the Roman emperor Decius persecuted Christians, Cyprian lived in hiding, covertly ministering to his flock; his enemies condemned him for being a coward and not standing up for his faith. He supported St. Cornelius against the anti-pope Novatian. He too was exiled and martyred when Decius’ successor continued with persecution of Christians.
- Patron Saint Index
1 Cor 12:31–13:13
Lk 7:31-35
Love is always patient and kind…there are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.
I have heard this passage read at more weddings than I can count — two people in love, and Paul’s words washing over the room like music. There is a quiet irony in that, because Paul did not write this chapter for two people in love. He wrote it for a church at war with itself.
Chapter 13 sits wedged between two chapters about spiritual gifts, and about a congregation ranking itself by them — who prophesied, who spoke in tongues, who had knowledge. The Corinthians had turned the body of Christ into a competition of envy, boasting and factions. Into that rivalry, Paul drops this chapter as a correction, not a serenade — you can have every gift on the list and, without love, you are a noisy gong. You gain nothing.
That changes how I read every line. “Love is patient, love is kind” was not written for a couple who chose each other, but for people stuck with each other — people who competed, kept score, and wounded one another while sitting in the same pews. Paul is describing how to survive church, the office, any room where love is announced easily and lived with difficulty.
I know this not as theory. I know it as scar tissue.
My first union ended after nine and a half years. I hesitate even to call it a marriage because in time, both the state and the Church agreed it was not one — I received a civil and a church annulment. Those decrees said formally what I had lived privately — something essential was never truly there. Only one side ever really tried. I tried until I was spent, and when there was nothing left to pour, I walked out.
What happened next taught me more about this chapter than the union itself. I was abused for leaving, spoken against — and, what still astonishes me, some of the loudest voices belonged to so-called religious people, keeping meticulous records of my wrongs, some real, most invented. The whispering campaign had its signature line: “There is something about Gerard, but I won’t say…” — the ellipsis doing the assassin’s work while the speaker kept clean hands. It is the cruellest slander, because there is nothing specific enough to refute. Corinth, I learned, is not an ancient city. It has a modern congregation.
My parents had prepared me without knowing it. They taught me never to retaliate; if you are correct and know it, there should be silent pride. Outwardly, I managed it; inwardly, I was boiling. Silence can restrain the tongue while the record of wrongs grows longer in the heart. I was keeping the file even as I refused to read from it aloud.
The healing came where I did not plan it. After I remarried, my wife and I travelled to Lourdes, where I heard a homily that I will carry for life. The priest preached on “Thou shalt not kill” — and opened it wide. The commandment covers not only the body, but the name — to spread malicious content, to assassinate a reputation, is to kill a person in the minds of others. There, in that strange way, I got my peace — not because the slander was undone, but because God Himself had named it, and Heaven had it on record. I could finally close my file, because the Father was keeping His own.
That is what ‘keeps no record of wrongs’ came to mean for me. Not amnesia. It means I surrender the ledger to the only Judge with the full facts and stop carrying the boiling weight of it myself.
But let me be honest about what forgiveness has and has not meant, because many are crushed by a counterfeit version of this chapter. I still see some of those people — in church, socially. Life goes on, and our paths still cross. I politely acknowledge them or offer a polite ‘Hi’, and keep walking. I see no need for friendship with someone who tarnished my reputation, and I no longer believe that makes me a poor Christian. Forgiveness is commanded; friendship is not. The record is shredded; the door is simply no longer open in the same way. I can wish them well before God — sincerely — from a polite distance. That, too, I learned at Lourdes — peace and proximity are different things.
Eighteen months after the annulment, I stood in church and married my wife. This time I did not hear “love is patient, love is kind” as music. I heard it as a vow with teeth. I knew exactly what those verbs would cost, and I said ‘yes’ anyway — and so did she. We have been learning it ever since — in ICU corridors this June, in a crowded household, in the thousand unrecorded acts of an ordinary week.
Then came another turn I did not plan. After I remarried, I went to law school — a banker, studying law later in life — and of all subjects, my best was Family Law. The irony was not lost on me. If I had ever practiced, I sense it would have been exactly that: sitting with people at the most fractured moments of their lives. But I never practiced, and the gift sat, seemingly, on a shelf.
Except, it did not stay there. Family Law found me. People come to me, discreetly, to ask about divorce and separation — first colleagues, then ex-colleagues reaching back across the years, then friends of friends arriving with an introduction and a marriage quietly coming apart in their hands. I cannot fully explain why. My best theory is objectivity: I am legally trained but do not practice, so I have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. When everyone around them has an angle, a man with no angle becomes the safest room in the building. And perhaps broken roads recognize each other — something in how I listen tells them I am not speaking from a balcony. I have stood where they stand. I know what it costs to try until you are spent, what it costs to leave, and what people will say afterward.
So, I never answer quickly. I pray earnestly first, and then, more often than not, I do not preach — I walk them through the arithmetic. Divorce is not just the splitting of one home into two; it is the division of families, and the costs compound in ways no one prices in at the start. My line, said more times than I expected: divorce is only for the very rich or the very poor — everyone in between suffers. The rich can absorb it; the poor have little left to divide; everyone in between discovers that the income which strained to hold one household cannot possibly hold two.
And the money is only the tip of the iceberg. Then comes the absent father, the absent mother. I have seen two parents so consumed with coordinating timings for a child’s activity that both missed it — and my wife and I, who fight our own diaries to show up for our own children, have quietly stepped in for someone else’s. This chapter saw it coming — when love stops bearing all things, someone smaller ends up carrying what falls.
So, I now sit at every point of this chapter. I have heard it read in hope, lived inside a union where only one person was carrying it, been slandered by people who preach it, healed at Lourdes by the God who enforces it, and given, undeserved, a second chance to live it truly. If there is any authority in what I say in those hushed conversations, it is not merely legal training. It is that I speak as a man who was shown mercy.
Then Paul lifts my eyes. Prophecies will cease; knowledge will pass away; we know in part and see in a mirror, dimly. Those who spread hate about me saw dimly too — that is between them and the Father, and I leave it there. But love — patient, kind, unglamorous, the love my parents modelled in silence and my wife pours out daily — is the one thing we do now that survives into eternity unchanged. Faith will become sight. Hope will be fulfilled. Love will simply keep going.
So perhaps the wedding readers are not wrong after all — only early. This chapter belongs less to the ceremony than to everything after it: the unions that were never what they seemed, the slander survived, the peace found in a French grotto, the second vows spoken with open eyes. The greatest of these is love — not the greatest feeling, but the greatest life. It was withheld from me once and handed back in abundance. And I have been shown it since, across two generations, on one shared plot of land, so that my children can watch it too — and so that those who find their way to me might glimpse, past the arithmetic, the more excellent way.
(Today’s OXYGEN by Gerard Francis)
Prayer: Father, is there any file I am still secretly keeping that Lourdes already taught me to surrender? Forgiveness is a journey. Please help all of us in this journey.
Thanksgiving: Thank You for helping us trust that polite peace, honestly kept, is obedience enough — leaving the rest to the Father who sees in secret.
OXYGEN 
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