The Anchoress contrasts temporary vows in religious life to a news story title ‘‘Til Death Do Us Part’ Is Dying Out. From the article
Vows like "For as long as we continue to love each other," "For as long as our love shall last" and "Until our time together is over" are increasingly replacing the traditional to-the-grave vow — a switch that some call realistic and others call a recipe for failure.
The Anchoress nails it when she calls this a matrimonial loophole. In fact I would think that a vow such as this would mean that no valid marriage was ever contracted. This would certainly be a rejection of marriage on God’s terms and specifically denies as Jesus says that two become one flesh. This type of vow is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. By having at the start such a temporary and really negative view of marriage it will become even easier to bail when you run into trouble. This form of a "vow" is just catching up to the reality of how marriage is being viewed in our society. The only good thing about it is that it acknowledges a true disposition towards marriage, though this view of marriage is objectively false.
Now I am not sure what the readings used for a wedding Mass are. For me it was a couple weeks shy of 25 years ago that I was married in a Catholic Church and being an atheist at the time I didn’t pay any attention to the readings. If I was the one to pick the readings I would certainly include Luke 9:23 "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." Liturgies have suffered because the idea and reality of sacrifice has largely been lost and the same goes for marriages. The idea of marriage without sacrifice is to have some idealized concept of marriage more suited to Ozzy and Harriet. Marriage is sacrificial because it is a total giving of self to another, not a mechanism for having every need meet to your requirements.
The recipe of marriage is one man and one women both with original sin. The false modern view of marriage argues on a different composition or quantity, but all of the modern views ignore original sin. The only remedy for original sin is grace. The disciples understood the seriousness of Jesus’s teaching on divorce when they replied "it is not expedient to marry." Going into a marriage denying the indissolubility of the marriage bond in a faux vow is the consequence of society’s view of marriage. Long before the advent of same-sex unions and marriages we have been cutting away at the very foundations of marriage. The great scandal is that the majority of Christian churches allow divorce and remarriage without ever determining if a valid marriage ever came into existence. It is sad that so many Bible Christians have abandoned the Bible for a destructive and corrupt view of marriage. Marriage will always be under attack but worse is that the attacks have come from the interior of Christendom. No barbarians at the gate needed to apply.
One of the major problems of how the idea of love has come to mean is that it has become divorced (pun always intended) from the will. St. Thomas Aquinas defined love as "To love is to will the good of another." Love has been confused with an emotional gooey feeling. We can certainly feel the good and positive emotional effects of love, but should never forget that love can still be present without the warm feelings. The problem is that when we fall out of the honeymoon stage is that without a constant warm feeling that we can also consequently stop willing the good of another. That an effect of romantic love is confused with love itself. To say that you have fallen out of love is really to say that you have stopped willing to love. It is no surprise that this syrupy view of love has become so destructive to marriages. One of the most hideous movie lines ever devised was "Love means never having to say your sorry." I can imagine Satan having this quote in a frame done using needlepoint in his office in Hell.
Being the product of a divorced family I know from personal experience the tragedy of this view of marriage on children. I wonder what children of couples that take such phony vows must think? Each day they might wake up wondering if there parents had still "continue to love each other" or whether their parents might be moving on. They must also reason that if their parents can stop loving each other than they also can stop loving them. This is the obvious consequence of divorcing love from the will.
Michelle Malkin notes this comment to the above story (and she is about to have her 12th wedding anniversary).
The commenters at Absinthe and Cookies offer more alternatives. I liked this one:
"Until a ‘home-cooked meal’ means ‘Hot Pockets’…"
20 comments
Sure the Enemy wants to eliminate vows, for to be able to bind with a vow is a great freedom – and He likes to destroy freedom. (Or ought I have said “She”?)
But I express it poorly, and so I resort to a Larger Authority, namely GKC:
I shall begin by asking what marriage is; and the mere question will probably reveal that the act itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a certain kind; that it is not an inquiry or an experiment or an accident; it may probably dawn on us that it is a promise. It can be more fully defined by saying it is a vow.
Many will immediately answer that it is a rash vow. I am content for the moment to reply that all vows are rash vows. I am not now defending but defining vows; I am pointing out that this is a discussion about vows; first, of whether there ought to be vows; and second, of what vows ought to be. Ought a man to break a promise? Ought a man to make a promise? These are philosophic questions; but the philosophic peculiarity of divorce and re-marriage, as compared with free love and no marriage, is that a man breaks and makes a promise at the same moment. It is a highly German philosophy; and recalls the way in which the enemy wishes to celebrate his successful destruction of all treaties by signing some more. If I were breaking a promise, I would do it without promises. But I am very far from minimising the momentous and disputable nature of the vow itself. I shall try to show, in a further article, that this rash and romantic operation is the only furnace from which can come the plain hardware of humanity, the cast-iron resistance of citizenship or the cold steel of common sense; but I am not denying that the furnace is a fire. The vow is a violent and unique thing; though there have been many besides the marriage vow; vows of chivalry, vows of poverty, vows of celibacy, pagan as well as Christian. But modern fashion has rather fallen out of the habit; and men miss the type for the lack of the parallels. The shortest way of putting the problem is to ask whether being free includes being free to bind oneself For the vow is a tryst with oneself.
[GKC The Superstition of Divorce CW4:233]
This is old news. That’s what prenuptial agreements are all about–anticipating the failure of the marriage. They just provide the terms under which both parties can get out of the marriage and prevent loud quarrels at the divorce lawyer’s office.
Excellent post. I wish we would hear more priests saying it from the pulpit. (Oops, was that out loud?)
God bless, Maureen Martin
My favorite new vow is, “As long as you both shall love.” What?
Lynn: “As long as you both shall love”??? Sheesh.
Love is dispensed with upon the first fight over the majority of the blanket.
Folks tell their children when they’re getting a divorce that “Mommy and Daddy just don’t get along anymore” yet, we tell our children on a daily basis to “get along” with each other.
My husband and I bought a second blanket.
One struggle resolved, hundreds more followed… and, God willing, we’ll have hundreds more in the future to resolve well into old age.
I agree, Teresa. What kind of love is based of feelings? Can there be love without the willingness to sacrifice? Thank God for the witness of the marriages in Christ. My cousins has just celebrated their 60th anniversary!
“have celebrated..” (and I’m an English teacher)!
60 years of marriage! Way to go!!
I think, by the way, that there is some sort of papal dispensation regarding misspellings on Catholic blogs… so no worries.
: )
Whew!
I listen to couples that have divorced and they give reasons that I feel are so lame. I think, where is their commitment to this marriage? My gosh, if that’s all it takes to end a marriage, my husband and I would have been finnished years ago. We look at it as, If we can make it through this roller coaster of life, we can make it through anything. Everybody wants to get off before the ride is over, or give the excuse, It wasn’t the ride they thought it was going to be. People are more interested in staying skinny, or having that better paying job than they are in keeping a marriage.
Heh heh, I was one of those weirdos who used a protestant wedding book to come up with our vows (because I didn’t know anything about my Catholic faith at that time). Guess what? I can’t remember what the heck they were either (neither does my husband)! That’s pretty sad. We just celebrated 20 years and have 8 children so I guess we’ve done okay despite that. I will encourage my kids to have traditional wedding vows though – at least they will be able to recall them!
The meaning of marriage
Instead of strengthening the “marriage” or even merely aptly describing the state of “marriage” such a weakening of the vows only serves to hurt one another prior to the couple beginning to start their lives together. For what they’re saying, “I may no…
�til death do us part’ � it is ‘the sticking point’ in my being married for 27+ years. 🙂 Yeah, we made that promise in church so we can’t back out. If we had expected our marriage to be held together by sentiments that you’d find printed on Valentine conversation hearts, we would have been over with before the end of that first summer.
Hello from Poland 😉
Having concrete vows doesn’t stop someone’s pre-disposition. I found even after marriage prepapration that my estranged (ex in the legal terms) wife as a convert to catholicism dumped in her own mind the indissolubility of marriage and decided that if she had had enough she’d make demands that would be impossible for me to meet and she would have a ready made excuse. She also presumed the church’s willingness to grant an anullment.
What needs to be formed is the willingness of the individuals to make that sacrifice and commitment, without that no form of words will act as the glue that binds together a couple. With society the way it is now personal gratification will always take precidence over responsibility, and the constant reinforcing of the romantic notion of love rather than the continuous struggle it is will always undermine the reality. If people are more devoted to themselves, their own happinmess, and their desire to have the romantic rather than the real then more marriages are doomed to fail. I can only see enforcing a vow of life-long commitment as treating the symptom of the problem and not the cause.
Liebe
Jeff Miller hat ein schönes Posting über den Zusammenhang zwischen der Scheidungszahl und der Einstellung…
‘for as long as our love shall last.’
That would be the day about four months after we were married when my husband got up for work (he worked first shift and I worked second) at about 7 am and began talking to me–telling me all these things I had to do when I got up. And I was looking at him… thinking… who the hell are you, and why would I marry someone who was going to wake me up and talk to me? I couldn’t understand a single word he was saying. Then he gets on AIM that night and starts complaining about how I didn’t do anything he told me to do. And I’m like dude… I couldn’t understand anything coming out of your mouth.
There’re moments, maybe even whole hours or days where you want to kill each other, run away from each other, shake sense into the other person or just be left the heck alone. You may not love your spouse every hour of every day… especially not when they’re waking you up after 4 hrs of sleep to give your your day’s marching orders. But that doesn’t mean you jump ship. People who think you do are DOOMED from the start. If you own your house, you fix stuff when it breaks. If you’re renting, you leave it for the next guy or the landlord. Same with marriage. If it breaks, fix it. Don’t “move out.”
An Aesthetic Argument Against “Same Sex Marriage”
Update: For information about the perversion of The Promise™ see Jeff at The Curt Jester’s post entitled Vow Movement. Doesn’t that sound like something having to do with bowels.
At a Unitarian wedding over the weekend the minsiter pronounced the couple married, thare than man and wife. We couldn’t figure out what the objection there could have been either but I guess it was a sexist thing.
I am a sometime feminist who is finding myself more and more curious and open minded when it comes to the potential value of what can seem to be out-dated traditions, so I will wonder here out loud–is there any justification in our post-paternalistic age for a declaration that a man is still a man but a woman is now a wife? I prefer declarations that acknowledge the state change for both members, i.e. “I now declare you husband and wife.” Thoughts?
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