Keeping Promises

M asked me about being married in the church. I knew, not only that they’d been married before, but also met their new partner before being divorced. It was a kind of request, surprisingly, that I'd never had before. ‘But did the new relationship cause the end of the marriage?’ the priest I talked it through with asked me: ‘Can they assure you it didn’t?’ I put this to M and they were honest enough to say they couldn’t be definite that the marriage wouldn’t have carried on had they not met the new partner. It’s all very uncertain, though I was happier having some kind of objective criteria rather than just relying on what I felt.

If you’re a Roman Catholic, or a certain kind of Anglican, there is no question: you can only get married in church once. If you’re (some sorts of) Orthodox, again, you get three goes at it after which you are deemed to be taking the mickey, but a subsequent marriage omits some of the celebratory ceremonies of a first. Anglican churches are left to work out their own approach, provided it is consistent with the House of Bishops’ guidance, which includes the caveat about the new relationship not being a direct cause of the marriage ending. Again, I very much want something more than my own judgement to go on. Who am I to wade into the complexities of human relationships?

The House of Bishops’ guidance advises the priest to make sure that celebrating a subsequent marriage does not ‘undermine the Church’s teaching’ that marriage is for life, but given our apparently limited enthusiasm for our own teaching I think of it more basically. If the core of all sacraments is about promises, your approach, be it ever so gentle and pastoral, has to speak to the integrity of promises, of which the promises couples make, and which God promises to help them keep, is only one. Society has an interest in promises being kept, because we all rely on trusting that most people will do their best to keep their promises, most of the time.

And yet we know (frail beings that we are) we break other promises. We take part in the sacrament of reconciliation and promise God we won’t do this or that, and it is very likely that we will. Does breaking a promise preclude us from making another one? Or does the public, communal nature of the matrimonial promise make a difference?