Celebrating Marriage
World Marriage Day, sponsored by Worldwide Marriage
Encounter, is observed in the
A committed, permanent, faithful relationship of husband and wife is the root of a family. It strengthens all the members of a family,
provides best for the needs of children, and causes the church of the home to be an effective sign of Christ in the world.
And in a country where divorce seems to be everywhere, we need to celebrate those marriages and learn from them.
What do we learn?
Marriage is a personal commitment to another person. It is a unique relationship that involves two people at the depth of their beings. It involves a promise to share one’s life with another in all its most intimate aspects. The promise of the marriage covenant is to the fullness of faithfulness and to a continually increasing trust and intimacy with one another. It is meant to be an attentiveness to faithful loving that grows through the years. Loving one another is a daily decision – simple, and challenging. Growing in faithful love takes risk, effort and selflessness. This type of commitment involves openness, involvement, quality time, willingness to bend, eagerness to listen to the portion of the truth one’s partner holds, and faith in his or her goodness. This fidelity is never stagnant. By daily lifting each other up in faithful love the partners in a Christian marriage generate intimacy, affirmation, appreciation, co-parenting, and steadfast friendship.
Marriage can only begin and continue to grow as a mutual commitment. In the beginning, the middle and then end of this process we call marriage – and throughout all the stages in between – it takes TWO to make it work. The success and growth of a marriage depends on both partners. No one person can make up for the responsibility the other neglects.
Marriage is a covenant. “Covenant,” a biblical term, describes God’s unlimited love and faithful kindness. In the marriage covenant a couple makes a commitment to bestow on each other the gift of themselves with a love and dedication that is beyond calculation and measurement. They commit themselves to each other unconditionally, believing their love can survive the many changes and even failures that await their common life. In the covenant their own sense of personal love and commitment is enhanced by the recollection that they are strengthened by the enduring love of God.
The marital
commitment is exclusive and permanent. A couple chooses each other, “dying”
to all other possibilities of marriage and sexual intimacy, in order to “rise”
to a unique bond of faithful, lasting trust and love that has the power,
through the grace of God, to transform and make holy the totality of their
lives. It is the exclusivity and permanence of this commitment that frees the
couple to give of themselves without reservation. Partners can dare to love
without limit in the present, because they believe in the mutual and lasting
fidelity of one another in whatever the future holds.
Marriage is a commitment to an intimate partnership of life and love. A couples pledges to be partners who are equal in regards to personal dignity and human rights. As partners they make mutual decisions, and agree on a distribution of tasks that is based not on gender stereotype, but on what is fair and right.
Marriage is a partnership that is not only lifelong, but life giving. It embraces all aspects of marital life. A couple commits themselves to nourish each other’s lives through all the diverse stages of their journey together, and where children are involved, the ever-changing stages of parenting.
Marriage is also a partnership of love. A couple commits themselves to a life marked by a love that makes them willing to put themselves out for one another. Over a lifetime, this relationship will go through periods of imbalance – periods of life, death and resurrection and as such offer many opportunities for growth. Often when marriages are experiencing times of distress, it is only a sign that it is time to pass into a new stage…a new degree of intimacy.
Marriage involves a lifetime of growing towards one another. God’s gift of sexuality allows us the capacity to grow in intimate loving. Couples may be tempted at times to choose a life of superficial connection. If they choose a deeper intimacy God’s grace promises to help them stretch beyond their previous range of openness and self-giving to new depths of intimacy in their love relationship.
We give thanks for the thousands of couples in Southeast Alaska who, through their faithful marriages, are signs to the larger community as they witness to God’s saving presence in the world.