This post is provoked by my experience of late in choir. Well, of late and of early, because the experience began last year. And before I even begin, I admit right up front: I know I am naive in the area I am about to declaim on. Child of a pious family (Dad was national president of the Association of Holy Name Societies, as well as founder of our parish Society of St. Vincent de Paul), I entered the convent at 18. Most of my friends were exceptionally devout. (At slumber parties, instead of telling spooky stories, we shared tales of Marian apparitions--which can sometimes be pretty spooky themselves.) So, there you have it. I don't have a clue when it comes to weddings, but lately I am surrounded with talk of invitations and dresses and dancing and, oh, yes, churches. Then there are the people--people older than I--who casually (and this in conversation with a nun, for crying out loud) mention spending the night with their boyfriend or talk about their live-in partner.
Anyway, I am wondering if part of the problem of big blowout weddings is that they are so huge, they eclipse the relationship. No wonder (I mean, aside from the obvious) people live together before the wedding. It is such an enormous undertaking, just logistically it makes sense for people to "anticipate the outcome," so to speak. The wedding itself is seen as so important that the "life" it technically begins gets lost in its shadow. The wedding becomes the ceremonial validation of a relationship--something like a debutante's being "introduced" to society.
It just looks to this admitted outsider as if the wedding ceremony and attendant events (which, at least here in Chi-town, can border on the preposterous) has so eclipsed the marriage as to lose its actual meaning. Are we over-rating weddings? They hardly seem to be about what Canon Law refers to in an outstanding passage as "the matrimonial covenant [this is the heart of a wedding] by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life" (Canon 1055, cited in CCC 1601).
Now, wedding celebrations are a good thing, don't get me wrong. The Bible has a reason for imaging the Kingdom of Heaven as a wedding feast. But when the celebration becomes such a huge undertaking, requiring a year of planning and a significant chunk of income, hasn't it become an end in itself? Kingdom of Heaven wedding feasts are about the union of Christ and Church, bridegroom and bride. But where that has already been anticipated, the whole meaning of the celebration changes, and the image loses its message.
Now it could be that part of the problem is six-month minimum preparation for a Church wedding. Pre-Cana or Engaged Encounter meetings just get squeezed into the wedding planner's list, which gets bigger and bigger.
Actually, I'm kind of in favor of going back to the old Roman approach (before the influence of Germanic custom entered the Church in the matter of marriage): people had a normal civil marriage, the only kind that existed, and after several years, when it was apparent that the marriage was solid, the Church had a way of "recognizing" itself in their marriage, and so it was blessed.
What do you married people out there have to say on this?
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2 comments:
Does that make sense in terms of marital intimacy? The civil marriage, then intimacy, probably a baby or two, then the Church steps in and blesses it? Doesn't that rob the marital union of the grace of the Sacrament from the beginning?
I may not understand the theology of marriage very well, but I think I have a handle on grace, and a sacrament institutes it, right?
The older custom was the norm for Christian marriages until the 8th or 9th century. The grace of the sacrament was still there, because the couple (presuming both were Christian) had minstered the sacrament to each other in their commitment, intended as lifelong. So the "matter" of the sacrament was the same, and the ministers the same, but the "form" was different, marriage being basically the one sacrament that never really fit uniformly into the general "pattern" of the sacraments. In fact, that is probably one reason it took the Church a long, long time to recognize marriage as a sacrament in the sense we understand "sacrament" today. (They always recognized it as a "mystery," as St. Paul calls it in Ephesians--and the word "musterion" in Greek was translated "sacramentum" in Latin, again, way before the term itself was used for our major ritual actions in which the sign itself contains and bestows grace.)
So the grace of the sacrament is not an issue, really. The form is. And my question is whether the form we have inherited may be inhibiting the reception of grace, because couples really don't seem to be properly disposed. If there were no custom of big "Church weddings," would these couples seek a wedding in the Church? Probably many would not--or would do so only to please their parents, not to meet a societal expectation.
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