By Fr Tony Gaskin

Last year Fr Adrian Towers, who looks after the further education of the clergy suggested that we should attend a course entitled “For richer, for poorer,” and no! It was not about money. It was to be about marriage. And that is why some of us found ourselves at Ushaw College last October. It was a course with a difference not just because we had married people lecturing us, but we also had the benefit of married clergy.

On the Tuesday we heard from Elizabeth Davies and David Thomas of the Bethany family institute. You can contact them at www.bethanyfamilyinstitute.com. Elizabeth used a game show format with questions like, “We asked 100 families, what puts pressure on your marriage “and asked us to guess which were the favourite answers. We were wrong, they top answers were not about Money and Sex, but about long working hours, health, and happiness. Elizabeth spoke of her work helping families know that they are holy. Holiness, she said, should not be a vague and pious thing. David is a lively American. He and his wife , Karen, have fostered over 70 children. They have seven of their own and have recently adopted two daughters. He began by stating that marriage was a relationship of opposites and that even genetically no cell in a man’s body could be like any in a woman’s. He reminded us vigorously that the Trinity was the source of all relationship. God is Trinity and Trinity is the greatest meaning behind everything we do.

On Wednesday Sr. Helen Costigane lectured on the moral on pastoral approaches to people who have been divorced and remarried. We discussed what is sometimes known as the “internal forum solution.” The Church’s teaching both encourages people to take a full part in the life of the church and yet seems to prevent this happening by insistence on the rules.

Fr. Tully, our own favourite canon lawyer spoke to us on marriage preparation. This was much more than completing the pre-marriage form. Marriage is a natural right and our approach if asked to get involved should begin with a welcome. It is important to spend some time with each of the couple individually, not only to check that consent is freely given, but because this may be the first or only time that they could discuss their feelings in confidence and know the support of the church’s minister. He asked us if we gave wedding presents and encouraged us to do so.

In the afternoon Pauline and Peter Lavery, a local married couple shared the way they helped with the preparation of marriages in their local deanery. They hold a five or six week series of meetings for groups of engaged couples. Usually, those taking part in these courses, moved from reluctance and even hostility to excitement and friendship. Pauline emphasised that there was so much negativity about marriage. Why was this course not called “to love and cherish”? The successes they saw were they thought due to a “culture of marriage” in their parish. In such parishes anniversaries are celebrated publicly, there are frequent mentions of marriage in the liturgy and other events, which made people feel that marriage was special.

On Friday Fr. Philip Gillespie a Liverpool priest and professor of Liturgy at Ushaw, led us on a romp through the liturgy of marriage. He showed how the church had developed its practice from Roman and Jewish customs and how the councils had encouraged using local traditions. The Roman tradition of formalising the betrothal seemed to suggest that we could also do something today about recognising that there are stages in getting married. The Irish custom of beginning a wedding with two candles lit, and then both lighting a third was a way of showing two becoming one and uniting the marriage to the Trinity. The lack of mention of the Holy Spirit in our present marriage rite was mentioned and not for the first time. The particular gift of this course was to remind us we all long to be able to help make family life the place where people know they are special and holy.