Derek Boylen from Perth’s Catholic Marriage Education Service and Luke and Vanessa Van Beek from Catholic Engaged Encounter have their say on the state and significance of marriage.
By Derek Boylen
It’s disturbing to read stories and statistics about committed Catholic couples getting divorced. It makes us question our beliefs about marriage. It can make us question our own marriages.
Where did they go wrong? How do we make sense of such a thing? Isn’t faith supposed to immunise us against such a tragedy? Surely a committed Catholic couple knew what they were undertaking when they first got married? Where was God’s grace? Isn’t the grace of the sacrament supposed to stop such things from happening? Could it happen to me?
From the beginning the Church has always understood that people are born with a deep desire to bond with one another. For many people this becomes a desire to give our lives to another in a lasting, faithful relationship. Despite the current rate of divorce in our community and the prevalence of cohabitation, many thousands of couples still decide to get married each year in Australia.
The Church has always been good at articulating the importance of marriage and the true meaning of marriage. The Church understands that while each person has within them an innate desire to bond with another, a deep understanding of the meaning and importance of marriage is not built into us. This is something learnt. Over recent decades we have become quite adept at articulating this to couples.
Unfortunately, in some areas of the Church it has been felt that this is enough. However, are practised faith and an understanding of the meaning and importance of marriage enough for a couple to be happily married for 60 years? Will it see them through career changes and the unexpected loss of a job? Will it help them at 3am with a colicky baby and the expectation of a full day’s work on the way? Will it help them through the tragic loss of a loved one?
The meaning and importance of a lifelong marriage is not built into us, neither are the skills to maintain such a relationship. The skills to have a lifelong, rewarding marriage have to be learned. Sadly, in today’s day and age couples have fewer role models of how to do this. In fact many couples have had very poor role models and have developed coping skills that are detrimental to a lifelong marriage.
It’s essential in this day and age that we go beyond just telling couples that divorce is not acceptable in the eyes of the Church. We have to go beyond telling them that marriage is a lifelong, loving covenant between a man and a woman. We need to be helping them to develop the real skills, attitudes, knowledge, qualities and behaviours that lead to such a relationship.
It’s not only crucial that we provide this support if we want couples to fulfil the Church’s vision for their future it is crucial for the future of the Church itself. Every successful parish is built upon the family. Healthy, strong marriages and families are the life blood of healthy parishes. Parishes fall apart without a solid foundation of stable families.
Karen (my beautiful wife) made the interesting observation to me that today’s crisis of failing marriages and families may indeed be the same crisis of people leaving the Church. St Paul observes that “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one. This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the Church are one” (Eph 5:31-32).
Essentially, the crisis in the Church and the crisis in marriage is a failure to connect in a deep unifying way. People become disconnected from their spouses and they become disconnected from the Body of Christ in the Church. One of the distinguishing features of the Christian life, a life in Christ, is its unifying nature.
Perhaps the most common metaphor used for the Church indeed the one handed to us by Christ is that of the body. We are called to be one body. The Church fathers throughout history have continued to use this analogy over and over. Where are we first presented with this notion? It is in Genesis. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).
So how do we reconnect people? How do we help them to become resilient to disconnection? We give them the skills and practices which help. In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict reminds us that our Christian hope is more than just informative, it is performative. It is meant to do more than change our understanding; it is meant to change what we do.
On an intuitive level we know this already. It takes more than just knowing that a healthy diet and exercise make a healthy person. You actually have to eat right and exercise. If you want to be smarter you have to do more than just decide to be smarter, you go to the library, read books and enrol in study. Likewise, if you want to be part of the Body of Christ and grow in faith you have to do something. If you want a successful marriage it takes action.
In the case of the Church, participation in the Body of Christ requires scripture (reading and reflecting on the bible), it needs community (belonging and participating), prayer (fostering and nurturing a relationship with God) and service (recognising Christ in others and reaching out).
Married couples also need skills. Too many to list here but these skills would include fidelity, faith, honest and open communication, patience, forgiveness, selflessness, common values, interests and goals, a supportive community and intimacy to name a mere few.
In this day and age it’s not surprising that couples get divorced even the ones who are practising their faith. Society is all pervasive; divorce is common and frequently presented as an option. The rate of divorce in Australia is 48 per cent. However, the question for us as Church is what are we doing to stem the tide? What does it take to have a lifelong, successful marriage? How are we helping couples to develop the skills, understandings, knowledge, behaviours, attitudes and qualities that build lifelong unity?
Derek Boylen is the Director of the Archdiocese of Perth’s Catholic Marriage Education Service.
Five simple steps could make a lifetime
Marriage educators Luke and Vanessa Van Beek urge couples to pay attention by making their
marriages the Number One priority of their lives.
By Luke and Vanessa Van Beek
No faithful married couple wants to be reminded of how delicate their marriage is and how easily it and they can fall apart.
Yet Hoopes’ article is a sobering wake up call that even the most committed married Catholics can experience the devastation of marriage distress and personal suffering.
As a committed Catholic couple, we have at times fallen in to the false sense of security believing that our faith practices alone will somehow insure us against trials of life which are especially manifested in the ups and downs of our marriage. Although blessed by our faith, and church activities, we have had to augment these with other endeavours to keep our marriage alive and life-giving to each other and those around us.
However, as products of our generation (70’s babies), who are both actively involved in our secular careers and broader community, the work-life balance can become skewed and we have come face to face with the fragility of our relationship competing with our personal and professional ambitions.
One of our favourite prayers at our wedding was the nuptial blessing:
“Give them the strength which comes from the gospel so that they may be witnesses of Christ to others. May they live to see their children’s children. And, after a happy old age, grant them fullness of life with the saints in the kingdom of heaven.”
This prayer reminds us of older couples who have been married for fifty or more years. When we see a couple in their 80’s holding hands and helping one another it reminds us of the vows we made.
It reminds us of our goal to also reach old age together, having experienced the difficult times and sharing the joy of the memories of a lifetime together.
Looking back over our 15 year involvement in various marriage education and enrichment programs, we have begun to reflect on some key disciplines which we discovered and enlisted, at times purposefully, to ‘engineer’ a more fulfilling and faithful marriage:
1. Quality Time
Time which adds life to our marriage and family life. The sorts of activities which we know that we and our children will draw strength and a sense of identity from. It could be a weekend away or simply a day at home together planting a vegetable garden or enjoying a long lunch sharing our week’s events.
2. Community
Knowing that we are part of a family and Church community which shares our values and holds the success of our marriage as dear to them, provides us untold support and challenges us to live more passionately.
3. Prayer and Spirituality
Our prayer lives keep us connected to our God, the source of our passion and love. Our marriage is transformed from empty self-centeredness to abundant other-centeredness through our preparedness to quieten our manic lives and accept God’s invitation to draw us to Him and through Him, become more complete, more soulful lovers. Our journey towards God also calls us to be ‘rich in compassion’ and ‘quick to forgive each other’.
4. Renewal
Our marriage needs reflection to identify changing needs and areas of hurt and abandonment. Time invested at marriage retreats, seminars or with marriage-friendly counsellors when needed can assist in identifying and removing obstacles to growth. Renewal is also a time to examine what’s working and affirm the growth in our journey. Our investment in marriage enrichment has taught us many new relationship skills such as our decision making and managing our conflict. These skills have augmented, consolidated and in some cases negated the traits we brought in to our marriage from our formative experiences.
5. Mission
More recently in our marriage, through our involvement with Celebrate Love, we have discovered the importance of making our marriage the mission of our life. According to Byron and Francie Pirola, the program’s authors;
A mission is different to a job or a ministry. Unlike a job, a mission is a way of life that is motivated by deeper values than merely earning a living. While we may put considerable time and energy into a job, when we make something our mission, it becomes the focal point of our attention, the centre of everything else in our life. It doesn’t mean that we don’t do other things, only that these other things take second place to our primary focus: each other.
When we make marriage our mission, our spouse becomes the centre of our life, and everything we do, every choice we make, is evaluated in the context of what will best communicate our love for them. That’s really the mission objective: to convince our spouse that they are deeply loved and valued. The journey of marriage involves constantly letting go of the past to embrace the future: it is a journey into the truth of who one is, the truth of who one’s spouse is, the truth of who one’s children (and extended family) are, the truth of who God is. (Marriage in the Catholic Church FAQ Bishops Committee for Pastoral Life June 2007). Being married is like having a mirror shining back to you – you see both the joy and the pain.
Contact the Van Beeks, the execuutive couple for Catholic Engaged Encounter, on 0418 949 829 or Vannessa.VanBeek@team.telstra.com