Wedding in the Garden

The Young Lord Declan and Lady Minster were married twice. The first occasion was a mildly pagan handfasting ceremony some time before the civil marriage I took part in – just to do a reading. They have always regarded the first event, which of course had no legal status at all, as their ‘real wedding’.

Since the news came out of what the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did in a garden with the Archbishop of Canterbury, my priest friend Cara at Emwood has already had two couples ask whether they can do what they did, which they can’t; or at least that can’t be their ‘real wedding’. I carry no great brief for Justin Welby, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be him in that situation. The Area Dean of Paddington posted on Fr Thesis’s blog a very severe and definite account of why what the Primate had done was dreadful, but I can’t see very many couples we might deal with being able to grasp what he’s on about and why this event has opened a very smelly can of worms. In fact, I doubt most modern people will even be able to see the worms. At root what we have here is a clash between the individualism which characterises the modern world and the inclusive, objective account of human identity embedded in Christian thinking.

Why shouldn’t a couple devise their own vows? In fact, it became clear as a result of a discussion on LiberFaciorum that many people think they do, and that led me to recall a radio comedy where an Anglican vicar character described exactly that happening. Isn’t it all about the couple, and their happiness, and what they mean to each other?

Theologically, the couple are indeed 'the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony' in a Christian marriage, i.e. they do it to each other. But that doesn't mean they can do and say anything they like, any more than as the minister of baptism or communion I can make up my own ceremonies; when I do those, I speak for the whole Christian Church across the globe and two thousand years. I can only do what the Church does, or my acts have no real meaning. If I do something else, it's not the sacrament, and the Church has done hundreds of years of thinking about how far I can stretch the boundaries of one of these acts before it stops being what it is supposed to be - a human event that expresses and enacts the saving work of God in time.

Just as you can't make up your own vows in an Anglican wedding, you can't have a 'private wedding' in the sense that nobody else apart from a clergyperson is there. The whole human community is involved in a couple vowing to serve, honour and be faithful to each other, which why the witnesses are present: they don't just have a legal function, but a theological one too. They represent humanity.

Finally, when the couple use the words that millions of people have used before them, and will use afterwards, they are becoming part of something bigger than they are - the whole history of the human race, and (in Christian terms) of God's interaction with it, written into their specific relationship. When in the Orthodox marriage rite the couple are called 'the king and queen of all creation' it isn't just a nice phrase, it means what they are doing has an eternal and cosmic significance, way beyond themselves. Ultimately, your individual identity, even your identity as two individuals, is less important than what you are becoming, recipients and ministers of divine grace through being married.

I suspect that for most modern people, an individually-tailored marriage sounds more meaningful because it’s about the couple; in Christian understanding, the words that everyone says, and the things that everyone does, are more meaningful because it’s about the divine story, because our small human identities, struggles and joys are assumed into the great framing narrative of creation: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Can we really expect anyone outside to grasp this?

Perhaps there’s something in them that still responds, though. Although Christianity bolts us into the story of the Christ, every religion points individuals to something bigger, connects them to something beyond themselves: it would be a poor religion that did not. For pagans it means the pattern of the seasons, the rhythm of the earth, the soaring cycle of the heavens. Lord Declan and Lady Minster couldn’t bring any of that into their civil ceremony, not even a reference to its being Imbolc that day; so their more individual handfasting was in fact a more inclusive, collective event too (and it wasn’t something they did alone, either). It was, maybe, a bit closer to the Christian than they imagined.