MARRIAGE
Weddings are beautiful, moving, happy occasions, full of optimism, surrounded by supportive, caring friends and relatives. The pageantry, solemnity, revelry, and joy are powerful tokens of love.
A wedding, though, is brief and fleeting. Our greater concern at Saint Paul's is for the marriage that follows. We always hope and pray for years of steadily deepening love and joy, of happy adventures and exciting discoveries and the satisfactions of successful work. Yet even if better turns to worse, richer to poorer, or health to sickness, a Christian marriage is always a school of growing holiness.
In Holy Matrimony, "the woman and man enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God and the Church, and receive the grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows" (Catechism, Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 861). Secular marriage requires only that the spouses keep contractual promises to one another for as long as both are happy. Christian Matrimony, however, is a vocation to live, as active, committed participants in the life of a parish, a covenantal relationship that reflects the powerful, self-sacrificial love between Christ and his Bride, the Church, under solemn vows to God, until death. It is still a joyful, graced life full of undreamt-of richness. But the joy is God's gift, not a human project to be achieved. For that very reason, it can never be taken away as long as faith endures.
If you feel called to this vocation as committed participants in the life of our parish, a period of discernment, testing, and preparation within our community is essential. Please speak to the Rector to begin this process.
A wedding, though, is brief and fleeting. Our greater concern at Saint Paul's is for the marriage that follows. We always hope and pray for years of steadily deepening love and joy, of happy adventures and exciting discoveries and the satisfactions of successful work. Yet even if better turns to worse, richer to poorer, or health to sickness, a Christian marriage is always a school of growing holiness.
In Holy Matrimony, "the woman and man enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God and the Church, and receive the grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows" (Catechism, Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 861). Secular marriage requires only that the spouses keep contractual promises to one another for as long as both are happy. Christian Matrimony, however, is a vocation to live, as active, committed participants in the life of a parish, a covenantal relationship that reflects the powerful, self-sacrificial love between Christ and his Bride, the Church, under solemn vows to God, until death. It is still a joyful, graced life full of undreamt-of richness. But the joy is God's gift, not a human project to be achieved. For that very reason, it can never be taken away as long as faith endures.
If you feel called to this vocation as committed participants in the life of our parish, a period of discernment, testing, and preparation within our community is essential. Please speak to the Rector to begin this process.