Our first reading today is of pivotal importance in the Bible because it lays out some of the fundamentals of the relationships between human beings, especially in marriage.

The Lord said: “it is not good that the man should be alone”. The focus of the bible is not on the individual but on the person as a social being. All human beings grow, develop, and discover their abilities and self worth through their interaction with other individuals. This is contrary to what our society highlights today, we speak a lot about ‘selfies’, and the individual and we all know too well how difficulty it is to get people to meet together to volunteer together. We must never assume that just because we are amongst people that it follows automatically that there is a sense of belonging. A young first year student in UCD said to me: he passes by thousands of fellow students every day but he felt totally alone in the college. Human beings are social animals. We need others. To feel this need is not a sign of sickness, but of health.

We have become a very self-centred society and that why Pope Francis speaks a lot about reaching out to the most vulnerable in our society. One of the lessons that I learnt during my sickness last year was that I needed other people to survive. On the Late Late show last night a person who had breast cancer spoke about this as well.

So what does God do? He realises that Adam needs someone co-equal. “So He took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh, and brought Eve to Adam”. Some commentators may see this as man’s superiority to woman, it’s the contrary, and it means someone who is co-equal. We can only be friends with someone who is co-equal, someone who can meet our gaze and engage our minds and wills. The relationship between a man and women is the deepest type of relationship. “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife and they become one body”. The complementarity between a man and a woman reaches its peak in marriage.

It’s amazing the commitment what some people put into achieving success in their chosen field. Last Sunday we say the delight and excitement of the European team who beat USA in the Ryder Cup in France. Behind all this, there are thousands of lonely hours of practice on the golf course. One professional spends several hours on Christmas day hitting 300 golf balls.

There are many different types of commitment and not all of them are equally valued by our modern society. One of these is wedding anniversaries, couples do celebrate their anniversaries in different ways, but you will very rarely see this mentioned in the media. If we celebrate it, we recognise it as a value, and this would not be very popular today. This is why we had the World Meeting of Families in Ireland this year because the Church wanted to highlight the importance of married life. We all know that there are many challenges facing married couples in our world today. The story is told of a couple that had stayed together for 50 years. How did you do it? We had an agreement when I would come home and I was angry, she would not talk to me and she would go to her room, and if she was angry I would not talk to her and I would go to the garage. I have to admit that I spent half my life in the garage.It is interesting that in St. Mark’s Gospel Jesus’ teaching on divorce is followed by his order to his disciples to “let the little children come to me”.  In God’s eyes we are all his children and he looks with mercy and love on all of our doings, even when we get things wrong.