THE SECOND TIME AROUND
Kane, Kevin
CATHOLICS & MARRIAGE -I THE SECOND TINE AROUND On the way to the altar Kevin Kane It was a second marriage-for both the bride and the groom. He was nervous and she was four months pregnant-and...
...Not the church...
...More and more I am finding that my faith in the church provides me with a similar framework...
...It's a blessing, and I think that was what I felt missing...
...My marriage is everything I had hoped for and more...
...Though I had moved to New York City eight years before, and was only getting to Mass four or five times a year there, it still seemed like the natural place for me to begin...
...I want the biggest and the hardest rock I can find to stand upon...
...There was a pipe organ and a Tiffany rosette window over the altar and a long aisle to walk down...
...The Unitarian minister was available and the chapel we chose was beautiful-and small enough that we could overflow it with guests...
...Because that's what got me here...
...We talked...
...The ceremony was sparsely attended-in fact the church was empty...
...The vows were the standard office of marriage from the back of the sacramen-tary...
...The church is very accommodating and kind to its wandering souls, at least on the Upper West Side of Manhattan...
...The priest read from one of Saint Paul's letters to the Corinthians...
...And not our love...
...They had...
...Because it was easy...
...And I want more than we are to be holding this particular marriage together...
...The bride wore a knee-length cotton print and the groom wore a freshly ironed Oxford white...
...The deleterious effect that had on wedding gifts was offset by the rather grand echo that the empty church produced...
...Finally, the priest I talked to back in Connecticut told us we should be married in the parish we were active in, where we lived...
...It is more than we are...
...I was nervous in asking...
...That both participants had made those promises before gave the echo a somewhat appropriate ring...
...I made visits once in a while in the middle of the week...
...And I think that rock is the church that Peter built...
...Nothing to complain about there...
...The one thing it's not is easy...
...Then he blessed the rings...
...It gave a resounding emphasis to the vows and to the priest's final pronouncement...
...I shouldn't have been nervous...
...And we were going to get married again...
...It was scary going back and asking for the church's blessing...
...The party marched out the front door of the church and kept going, ending up at a sidewalk cafe on Upper Broadway where they sat for a post-nuptial breakfast of French toast and iced coffee...
...And it was worth celebrating...
...People who plant mustard seeds and raise mighty things...
...The groom was surprised to find that he was weeping too...
...And pronounced the couple husband and wife...
...Being married, and expecting to bring a child into this world, have taught me a lot...
...There would be the banns of marriage to be announced, and maybe a weekend retreat or two...
...Father Leonard talked to us both one morning, to help us understand what we were doing and that was that...
...The pregnancy was a product of her first union...
...He said he thought it would be the best way to begin reconciliation...
...We could have lied about where we lived...
...Because too often love is shaky, fear is real, words are not enough, and the state is uncertain...
...My wife has no problem with what my faith is and had no problem saying that I was welcome to pass that faith on to our children...
...But there was something I wanted, something that doesn't come from within us...
...All of them seemed like good ones, but mostly it was just that-it would be a bother...
...We didn't need to post banns or study religion...
...Something my conscience told me was missing...
...Something was missing for me though...
...We could write our own vows-we liked the idea of that and we came up with words that sounded somewhat like the ones I'd always heard in the Catholic church...
...Hundreds of years of faith and common prayers and common tradition...
...I find that I don't trust myself as much as I did when I didn't know myself quite as well...
...Unlike the state, the church does not pretend to be our equal or a consensus of ideas...
...The ceremony was meaningful, well-photographed, reverent, emotional-and seemed to take a good hold...
...It is truly a pearl of great price...
...A reverent and inspiring person she was, who gave us good counsel as we set out in married life...
...I continued to drop into Mass occasionally...
...It didn't work out...
...Because I was the one who had decided against a church wedding in the first place...
...After the service, the bridal party {sans the best man) walked down the aisle to a tune of Mendelssohn's, hummed low in three parts, at least one of them off-key...
...Not that our first marriages hadn't worked out well...
...I was going to get right with the church...
...That was easy to do too and he forgave me, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit...
...It's a church made up of people who build on a rock...
...An assistant pastor was the hastily found best man...
...The French toast and the iced coffee tasted particularly good...
...I know that now, having done it...
...But that seemed a bad way to start off a life together...
...We had been married to each other...
...The priest wore a white cassock and a gold-colored stole...
...So I went home and I talked to my wife and we decided...
...Then about five months ago I was riding my bicycle past Holy Trinity on 82nd Street and I got that urge to drop in and say hello...
...That blessing...
...That turned out to be untrue, but we had heard it said and so we of little faith believed it...
...So why were we standing in a dark and empty Catholic church a year-and-a-half later, repeating largely the same vows...
...I didn't even know that's what I was going to do the day I rode up on my bike...
...Sometimes fast and dirty is the best way to make things happen...
...It isn't playtime, it's hard work and the joy from it comes at great cost...
...And something I felt the state couldn't confer...
...Both marriage and faith lean on order, on tradition, and on a belief in something greater than oneself...
...Close enough, I thought at the time...
...I want the church's love, which can be more lasting and more powerful than mine or the state's, because it's a church made up of men and women, but not made by men and women...
...That wedding was mine and my wife's...
...Because love and my commitment may someday prove inadequate...
...Not looking for anything in particular, just trying to keep up a connection...
...We had been joined that first time in a more civil service- watched over by a large crowd of family and friends that would be well-fed and hard-danced before the day was done...
...His mother stood up as the matron of honor...
...The hardest thing I had to do, besides examine my conscience, was to find our civil marriage license...
...And that new name for confession suddenly made more sense to me than it ever had before...
...The bride wept as she spoke vows that she had made once before...
...I feel better now, with the church's blessing, and I think my wife does too-having entered into the same bond of marriage that my grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents before them entered into...
...Sure," I said, and then before I knew it I was telling him "it's been about two years since my last confession...
...The marriage was presided over by the Reverend Monsignor Thomas Leonard...
...He was nervous and she was four months pregnant-and beginning to show, as they walked down the aisle of Holy Trinity Church on 82nd Street in Manhattan to be joined in holy matrimony...
...One thing we did know was that we wanted to be married in Connecticut...
...Before receiving the church's blessing on our marriage, I confessed my sins...
...I was locking my bike to the front gate of the rectory when the pastor, Monsignor Leonard, stuck his head out and asked if he could help me...
...When we were starting to make plans-the first time-I talked to a priest I didn't know, in the parish I had grown up in, about getting married in the church...
...Marriage is a structure for a couple to work within, a firm and a resilient framework to hang your hopes on...
...I mentioned that I was married and that my wife was expecting a child in September...
...And I want to get everything I'm paying for...
...My wife's not a Catholic and has no plans to be...
...The sacraments, I was taught, are outer signs of God's inner working, and the sacrament of marriage, in particular, is a sign of God's love as part of our own...
...And it was like going home...
...Which is what I want to do...
...And he suggested that before he heard my confession, maybe I should talk to my wife about getting our marriage blessed, sacramentalized he called it...
...We found many other reasons not to bother getting married in the church...
...We took those vows in a nonsectarian chapel, officiated over by a divorced Jewish woman who was a Unitarian minister, vested with the power of the state...
...The church I had grown up in before the ecumenical movement was demanding and I have to admit I was intimidated...
...And let me tell you, they were no small sins either, but I have to suppose that Father Leonard had heard worse, because what I had to report didn't seem to faze him a bit...
...Come on in," he offered and I did...
...We had heard that my wife might have to profess to things she didn't believe in...
...Her family isn't affiliated with any particular religion and the thought of explaining to those confirmed agnostics why we were going to be married in a Catholic church made me uneasy...
...An Australian waitress, in the city just for the summer, was pressed into service as the official photographer...
...Then he married us...
...So what was different a year-and-a-half later that sent us to the priest on 82nd Street to have our marriage sacramentalized...
Vol. 123 • September 1996 • No. 15
