DENIS Nolan remembers when he first laid eyes on his wife Sandra.
He was a guest at a wedding and Sandra was a bridesmaid.
“She was just magnificent, the most attractive girl I’d ever laid eyes on,” he said.
The couple wedded five months later at Holy Family Church in Indooroopilly on November 14, 1970.
In the years following, they produced three children and seven grandchildren.
Mr Nolan said the Church had always played an important role in their lives, especially their local Darra Jindalee parish.
The couple had been close to the late parish priest Fr Dan Carroll.
They celebrated 52 years of marriage this year at the Golden Wedding Anniversary Mass at St Stephen’s Cathedral last Saturday.
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge celebrated the Mass, with Vicar of Clergy Fr Dan Ryan concelebrating.
In his homily, Archbishop Coleridge said often when people spoke of young married couples, they said one or the other spouses caught the other’s eye.
“But that’s not enough because to survive the long haul beyond the initial enchantment, it really isn’t a matter of the eye, it’s a matter of the ear,” he said.
“In other words, it’s all about listening …”
The Gospel was the passage on the Wise and Foolish Builders (Matthew 7:24-27).
“Every one then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock … And every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.”
Archbishop Coleridge said listening was not just hearing, because listening led to action.
“Here today, we celebrate the journey through many years – 50, 60 and perhaps more – of people on the journey that we call marriage,” he said.
“That means through thick and thin, and there’s a lot of both, they have managed to listen to each other.
“Not just to hear each other – ‘Here she goes again’, ‘Here he goes again’; there’s always that – but really listening to each other’s words.”
The Archbishop said often those words were unspoken and the listening was with the “ears of the heart”.
He said couples who had been able to listen, in so doing, listened to the voice of Christ.
“That means you become a prophetic sign, a sign that speaks of God, in a world that finds it incredibly difficult to listen, really listen; it can hear everything, but not listen.”
Archbishop Coleridge entrusted the couples at the Mass to Our Lady of Listening, a title of the French, to lead the couples in listening “as they have down through the years, more and more deeply”.
With her help, listening to the voice of Christ, he said the couples would continue to build their house not on sand, but on rock.
