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? 

Living in Fallibility and Indeterminacy

The question will now be whether the shaky and open-ended compromise statement the College of Bishops is recommending to the Synod on human sexuality and equal marriage or its absence will get through it: you will remember that the last time they proposed something of this kind, it failed, and I am not at all sure the Synod will be in any more a mood to compromise this time. I refrained from making any comment a couple of days ago when the main points of the bishops' report were leaked because I wanted to see something more than the headlines, and read some of the reasoning.

Of course - lest it go without remark - at the very core of this report is a gaping inconsistency. The bishops apologise to LBGTQ+ people and 'welcome same-sex couples unreservedly and joyfully'. It will immediately be asked how, if they continue to regard same-sex relations as sinful, they can possibly say this, and, if they don't, what reason they can have for not treating homosexual individuals the same as everyone else. People are not stupid: they can see that question is unanswered.

The reason is, as the bishops say repeatedly, they cannot reach a consensus and the line they are proposing to Synod is the most radical one they can agree on. Frustrating though it may be, this humility and recognition of reality is somewhat refreshing. 'We are pursuing unity and not imposing it', they plead, and when you remember that once upon a time the Bench of Bishops was baying for Anglo-Catholic priests to be imprisoned because they put candlesticks on their altars, you can see how far we have come. 

I would be happy to bless a same-sex couple along the lines the bishops propose, though I can't see any turning up to ask me to anytime soon. Why would they? I have (as I've said before) an inkling why God might want the Church only to marry people of different sexes, but the report doesn't give any reason beyond the fact that the bishops can't agree, and that's not likely to make anyone feel very welcome and accepted. The bishops are right to say that more theological work is needed: my own position has itself arisen from asking what the sacrament of matrimony actually means, what it implies to pronounce a blessing, how sexual differentiation might reflect what God wants for human beings. I am delighted that the bishops even recognise these questions as ones that need to be asked; I am encouraged that they approach the task with seriousness. I do wonder whether the gigantic areas of theological work they identify at the end of the report are a bit ambitious. Perhaps it aims at more systematic organisation of thought than we need, and maybe we just need to ask Why does the Church marry people, and what is happening when it does so? Oh, and come up with an answer that makes sense. When I say what I think my impression is that people blink and have no idea what I mean.

Tying the (Tangled) Knot

‘It’s Paul from the Bishop’s Registry,’ said the phone message, ‘Please get back to me before 4.30, it’s a bit urgent’. I saw the message at 4.21. For a Surrogate for Oaths, a call from the Registry is a little like a police car pulling into the drive - you automatically assume you’ve done something wrong. In fact the call concerned a forthcoming wedding for which I needed to adminster an oath, and it would all turn out more complex than usual.

Liam and Rianne wanted to get married at Ellington, in the eastern part of the diocese. They come from a Traveller background; Travellers typically marry younger than has ever been the custom in mainstream English culture (except for medieval nobility), let alone now, and that applied in this case. Rianne was 17, and therein lay their problem: the minimum marriage age in England and wales has been raised to 18 to counteract forced marriages, and nobody was quite sure when it would come in. Their parish priest suggested they wait, but they were adamant they didn’t want to, and that left only a couple of days for the wedding to take place.

Nothing about it was straightforward. A little while before the couple were due to see me, I flicked through the guidance notes and suddenly remembered that, as a minor, Rianne needed to have permission to marry from her parents or guardians. The guidance notes give no instructions as to the form or wording for this. I knew Rianne had no relationship with her father, but Marian their priest had already met her mother, so I hurriedly phoned and asked Liam to make sure his prospective mother-in-law wrote and signed a note to this effect. It turned out to be scribbled on a sheet torn from a pad, which I trimmed so that when I sent it to the Registry it didn’t look quite so dodgy. Rianne had no relationship with her father, and last year changed her name by deed-poll so the name on her passport, issued before the change, was now different from her legal name. when she and Liam arrived – they’d come into the church as Toddler Praise was finishing so they were treated to that! – they discovered that they’d forgotten the deed poll certificate so had to drive ‘home’ to get it. while they were gone I looked at Liam’s driving licence and realised the address was somewhere in Sussex, neither Ellington nor wherever it was they’d just gone which they’d assured me was only ten minutes away. So what was their connection with Ellington? Marian had told me they lived there. When they got back they told me they were all staying with Rianne’s brother, but their actual home was in Ellington. I would have to send all the stuff off to London and trust that, if any question was raised, Marian had something to prove it was true.

Liam is actually a Christian who goes to a ‘gypsy church’ – these tend to be pretty serious, and he gibbed a bit about swearing the oath, but in the end did so. So all was well, and I sent them off to Ellington (via Rianne’s brother’s house) to get married. I assembled all the bits of paper, rather more than I usually put together, and posted it all off to the Registry. If I get another call on Monday, my heart will beat uneasily!

A Superfluity of Supply

A simple enough post: a book. It's the new register book in which we are encouraged to record marriage services that take place in the church, now we are not legally registering marriages but following the new, slightly involved process of downloading a 'Marriage Document', filling it out and then posting it off to the Registry once the service is completed. Note that in recent years the Registry had been issuing much, much thinner register books with spaces for, I think, twenty weddings so they stood some chance of seeing them again within the lifetimes of the peoples whose names were recorded there. The new book is a handsome volume and our sacristan went to collect it from the Cathedral bookshop a couple of days ago and it will take a century to fill it. I suppose that's an expression of confidence. 

True Stories

Nancy sent me a three-page letter describing how her marriage to Martin came to an end. He-did-this-I-did-that, etc. etc. It's the usual sort of sad tale of the destruction of a relationship through nobody acting wilfully or carelessly, but gradually drawing away and damaging each other until the trust is impossible to repair. 

I wondered what to say. The catalogue of mutual disappointments doesn't actually help me: there is a truth here I can't really access. To her credit Nancy doesn't say it was all Martin's fault, but she clearly feels she has done what she must do, what her heart compels her to do, even while she hates herself for doing it. Perhaps she hopes that by admitting to guilt I will tell her it's all OK.

I remember how Jesus could meet someone and see the thing they needed to hear, could sum up who they were in a single sentence, or even a story which bore only an oblique, but nevertheless as it turned out exact, relationship to what they were on about. Those three pages of events and reactions are not, really, the story of what happened to Nancy and Martin: they are not the single line that God would say, and I can't deduce from them his perfect, merciful summary of the sad fourteen months they describe. So I merely say that that is what he could do, and because he could, because he understands who Nancy and Martin are better than they do themselves - let alone each other - that is why he is able to forgive. That's where forgiveness comes from.