Читать книгу Growing Together - Andrew Body - Страница 8

How to use this book

Don’t read it from cover to cover

The King’s advice to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is the usual way to read books:

Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.

However, this book is different. It would be good to begin at the beginning, with the introductory chapter ‘Affection, lust and love’, and it would be good to end with the final chapter, called ‘Ingredients of the wedding cake’, which is different because it is a practical guide to ways in which you can plan your wedding service. But what you do in the middle is entirely up to you. The chapters are arranged alphabetically, and not in any order of importance. You can read them in any order you prefer.

Read it one chapter at a time

This book takes a dozen topics and approaches them in three ways:

what attitudes and prejudices we may have inherited from our upbringing and past;

what our present experience has to tell us;

what hopes and fears we have as we look into the future.

Questions are provided to get you thinking and talking. Some of them will be irrelevant to you – others may occupy you for a long time.

Read it separately and then together

Like some dishes in restaurants, this is ‘for two people’. To get the most out of it, each of you needs to read a chapter, and then share the things it has raised for you. Compare notes on your individual answers to the questions and see how much you think the same way. Even deciding in which order to take the chapters could provoke some interesting discussions! If you have talked long and hard about the particular subject, you can feel good that you have done so. If another part of what is written here opens up ideas you have not had the opportunity to share, then that must be a good thing as well.

Read it slowly

The purpose of the book is to help you think – so give yourselves plenty of time. Read the text of the chapter before tackling the questions and don’t miss out questions just because they are difficult! They might just be the most important for you to think about.

Use it as part of your formal marriage preparation

Ideally, if you are getting married in church, you will be offered some kind of marriage preparation. It may be that you have been given this book by whoever is undertaking that with you, whether as an individual couple or as part of a group of couples undertaking the Growing Together course now available. In that case, you may have the chance to share some of the issues that the book has raised with someone else, and you can discuss how best that can be done. But it is most unlikely that you will have twelve sessions to share it all in detail. Much of what you talk about as a result of reading this will remain between just the two of you.

If your marriage preparation follows some other pattern, then what you get from this book will provide useful material to add to the discussion, whether it is just as a couple with the minister or other person, or whether you are part of a group.

Come back to the book from time to time

You will be sharing your hopes and fears for the future. Maybe not every year, but from time to time, as your anniversary approaches, revisit particularly the questions about ‘Where are you going?’ – and see how far you have got on your journey together.