The Marrying SeasonWe've had a great year for marriages at St James!
We're not one of those churches where people travel far and wide to be married here. We don't advertise. We don't appear in catalogues! We don't compete with the Elvis Chapel.
The couples we've married here this last 12 or 13 months have all had some connection to the congregation - they were either children in our Sunday School who had grown up and moved elsewhere in the UK and then returned to be married or they were local people who set a date many months ahead and then started attending quite regularly in the months leading up to the wedding service. A few of these local couples have moved on but a number have stuck around. In either case, by the time they arrived at the Chancel steps to make their vows they were people we had come to know quite well.
Weddings in Montreal were sometimes a headache. I remember a lot of demanding strangers. There were even a couple of horror stories where people ended up not being exactly who they presented themselves to be (either to the priest or once - an interesting story I may not relate - to each other).
I once had a fancy Montreal 'wedding coordinator' to deal with. Her existence had never come up in my conversations with the bride and groom.
We were introduced on the evening of the rehearsal at the Church. She flounced over to me and told me (quite politely, actually) to sit down and she'd get around to me in a moment.I remember wanting to murder her.
Needless to say, she ended up sitting down and I got around to her in a moment.
This last weekend we married a couple here at St James' where the groom was the fourth generation of men in his family to be married in our church.
I rather like doing marriages here. They're a lot of fun and a very rewarding form of ministry. We've had nine or ten in a little over a year which, for us, is a lot. I've only got two scheduled (so far) for the remainder of the year - one on the Saturday before Pentecost (with the children being baptised the next day) and another on Hallowe'en.
Knowing the bride at the Hallowe'en wedding quite well, I have no doubt the occasion will be milked for its particular cachet.
4 comments:
Me? I prefer funerals.
I believe Sooz and Ali have hired this high profile co-ordinator...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VKFtRedJxTw
So, RR - do you have to do counseling as we Piskies do? I thought it would be my chance to save people, turns out it is just a pain... (they're going to get married anyway...). I do enjoy the ceremonies, though
The emphasis here is not on what we 'have to do'. It was the same in Canada, mind. There was a 'pastoral institute' in Montreal which put on pre-marriage courses (friday evening and all day saturday, as I remember) where you could send couples wanting to be married. You could make participation in such a course mandatory (which I remember doing, as a relatively 'directive' youngish priest). Such courses were generally inappropriate for people who didn't speak English, though so there were lots of exceptions.
Here in Scotland there's no directive on the subject. Applications for remarriage following a divorce still need to be filed with the bishop and approved by him. Other than that it's up to us.
Here at St James we meet with the couple a few times, I get them to do a little reading (the chapter on 'Love' in 'The Road Less Travelled' generally gets the younger couples a wee bit pissed off and provokes some good conversation about what exactly Love is. I ask a lot of questions in the first interview. I think though that if you asked one of our couples if Fr Rabbit had 'counselled' them they'd sorta go "wha?"?
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