Christian Marriage Today: The Reality

It's quite a privilege to stand at a chancel rail or altar and watch the couple you've just married walk jauntily down the aisle toward the joy-filled reception that awaits only the completion of the picture-taking. And there I was again, standing, listening to the recessional music and watching the exiting, musing some more about where the church has come in its understanding of marriage, and of how that understanding is so fully embodied in the liturgy I just read. What got to me especially that time was how important the Declaration of Intent now is in all our wedding services --- the "Will you…I will" --- after which alone the ceremonies get under way in earnest.

Today, the foundation of any marriage relationship under Christian auspices is understood to be the informed consent of the couple. Bonds arranged, forged, or coerced by someone else --- parents, tribes, overlords, or whomever --- may be legal, binding, permanent, satisfying, and fruitful, but they simply aren't marriages. When in the marriage service itself I ask my couples to declare publicly their intention "to enter into union with one another," I am also lifting up for all of us to see what transforms just a relationship into a marriage. It isn't what I say or do (e.g. "I pronounce/announce that…"), or what anyone else says or does (e.g., "Who gives this woman to be married…"). It's what the intended themselves do. The couple creates the marriage; except for the legalities, the rest of us are only supportive witnesses.

What a man and a woman join together all on their own, however, that same man and woman can "put asunder" just about anytime they please. And they do. Though it is misleading to keep on purveying the apocalyptic message that half of all marriages will end in divorce, it is certainly true that too many of them will. And one of the big reasons why they will is that we put the whole burden of making it in marriage upon the couples themselves. If it feels good, we seem to be saying to them, do it; and if it doesn't, don't do it any longer.

For all of the re-writing of its liturgies that the church is so fond of doing, traditional meanings still seem to have a way of surviving the best intentions of with-it revisionists to get everything into up-to-date, easy-to-understand language. Thank God we still have these words, for example, invading the otherwise too-precious moments of the exchange of rings: "these rings are the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, signifying to us the union between Christ and his Church." They are not just a sign of the couple's mutual promises to each other, and they are not just a sign of the marriage relation itself. They are a sign of a more perfect union than any we on earth can create, to which our marriages are intended to be a witness.

Pretty heady stuff. For people with pretty strong hearts, full of love not just for their spouses, but for all "to whom love is a stranger." (Sometimes, liturgical re-writes get it right!) I think what this means is that much more is involved in every marriage relationship than only the couple's fulfillment and only the production and nurture of offspring. Intimacy, mutual happiness, and fruitfulness are not ends in themselves. Pauline theology got the idea, but put it very badly. For Paul and a lot of church tradition, the primary purpose of marriage is to contain our lustful preoccupations in this life so that we can go about the proper business of preparing ourselves for the next. Or in other words, according to the (unmarried) saint: Better to marry than to burn. Actually, it is this idea itself that makes me burn. Far better to put it this way, as our current liturgy does: in our marriages, we learn how to become "generous friends" to all of God's creatures.

By this time in the festivities, the ushers were returning to the front pews to begin escorting parents and grandparents out. Before lining up for my picture with my newly married friends, I had just enough time to pay quiet lip service to the thoroughly but exclusively modern notion that marriage is one more of the many voluntary associations that will enhance my couple's quality of life together. I'm glad they came together, not just eagerly, but willingly. What I continue to hope for them is that they also experience the wonder of being in a truly sacramental relationship, one which makes present to others not only their own love, but God's.