Faith and Family / Sean Gallagher

Father’s reaction to a son’s touchdown is a lesson in self-giving love in marriage

Those of us who are sports fans to any degree have been there. We might have been in a large stadium watching our favorite college or professional team play. Maybe we were in a school gym, parking lot or at a football field for a child’s CYO game. Or we might simply have been sitting on a couch at home following a big game on TV.

Whatever the setting, it’s a natural human reaction to jump up and celebrate when our team makes a big play.

That would have been the natural reaction of Fernando Mendoza, Sr., when he saw his son, Fernando Jr., make a powerful run through multiple would-be tacklers and then dive into the endzone for a touchdown for the Indiana University football team in the fourth quarter of the College Football Championship on January 19 in Miami.

But while IU fans in the stadium and across the country jumped up with joy after the play, Fernando Sr. stayed seated to celebrate his son making a crucial play that led the Hoosiers to a 16-0 record and its first championship.

That’s because his wife Elsa is bound to a wheelchair after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. He wanted to be right by Elsa’s side rejoicing with her when their son achieved success.

In a past interview with ESPN, Fernando Jr. said that it takes a “conscious effort” on the part of his father to stay seated by his mom. The IU Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback went on to note that he “gets emotional” when he thinks about how much he’s learned about love from his parents.

Love in marriage is expressed in lots of ways. But perhaps the most important way, and certainly the most Christlike way, is when husbands and wives make sacrifices in their own lives for the good of their spouse.

Fernando Sr. expressed his love for Elsa by staying in his seat next to her during one of the biggest moments of their son’s life. Millions of people across the country and around the world saw him do it.

Most of the time, when a husband or wife makes sacrifices for their spouse, no one on Earth sees it, maybe not even their spouse. But our Lord sees it. And he sees himself in such self-giving love.

Such self-sacrifice is only possible for us through the grace of God, a share in the life of God, poured into our hearts at our baptism and in the Eucharist. It is renewed in the sacrament of penance when spouses confess their failings in their married relationship.

This grace flows from the heart of one spouse to the other in the sacrament of marriage when they give of themselves to each other.

If spouses are blessed with children, then that grace also flows from God through their relationship to them as they see their mother and father day by day over the years loving each other through many small and sometimes large acts of self-sacrifice.

Fernando Jr. seems to have taken that lesson of love from his parents to heart. It perhaps could be seen in the way that he sacrificed himself for his team in taking so many hits, even in just the one play on which he scored a touchdown.

Self-giving love in marriage isn’t there just for the benefit of the spouses and their children. Every sacrament in the Church is there for the good of all the faithful.

Let all of us, then, give thanks for the grace that God pours into our lives through all marriages in the Church. And let us pray for all spouses and all those preparing for marriage, asking God to strengthen them in the grace of self-giving love. †