Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 17

God, the source of life, gives creation the capacity to bring forth life, a gift in which human beings share. As we have seen, procreation is one of the goods of marriage identified by St Augustine. It is celebrated in the church’s liturgy as God is thanked for the ‘gift of sexual love by which husband and wife may delight in each other and share with [God] the joy of creating new life’.²⁶

The creation of male and female and their union in ‘one flesh’ brings the capacity to conceive new life and to receive not only ‘the gift of children’²⁷ but also the responsibility for ‘the care of children’. The intrinsic relationship between sexual union and procreation is one of ‘the causes for which Matrimony was ordained’ in the church’s teaching and it is at least one of the reasons why the non-consummation of a marriage is regarded as grounds for its dissolution in law. The Prayer Book’s liturgy includes a prayer that carefully weaves together the themes of marital mutuality and fruitfulness, asking that the couple may be both ‘fruitful in procreation of children’ and – so that they can provide the environment in which their children will flourish as God wills – faithful in ‘godly love and honesty’.

Nevertheless, since the first of the Reformation liturgies, the marriage services of the Church of England have recognized that not every marriage will produce children. The 1549 rite notes that some women are ‘past childbearing’.²⁸ The Common Worship service allows for the omission of a reference to children being born, and not only for reasons of age. There are other ways than bearing children in which marriages ‘share in the creative purpose of God’.²⁹ Through the adoption of children, the love of husband and wife can embrace a child born of other parents and provide the nurture and care the child needs to flourish. A couple can create an environment of care for those in need and of hospitality to the lonely as they find ‘such fulfilment of their affection that they … reach out in love and concern for others’.³⁰ Theirs is to be a love that overflows to ‘neighbours in need’ and embraces ‘those in distress’.³¹

As ‘a sign of Christ’s love’,³² the love that husband and wife have for each other will not remain closed within the circle of their marriage. It will go out from them to reach others, bringing ‘refreshment and joy to all around them’.³³ Openness to life, not only to enjoying life together but also enabling life in others and bringing the world into fuller life, belongs to the character of marriage because that is the way of God’s love. It is a love that at its truest is never self-contained but always self-giving, always generative of life, good life, in others. ‘The mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other’ does not find its end in their own self-fulfilment but rather in the good it brings to the wider society of families, communities and nations.

For many couples who have married, the desire for the gift of children seems to come from deep within them, sometimes surprising them with its strength. They long for the sexual union of their marriage to bear the fruit of a new life that they can love together, love into fulness of life, love for ever. The strength of this desire can be reflected in the pain experienced by some who find themselves unable to bear children. For other couples the gift of children comes unaccompanied by such intensity of feeling or intention and yet they find themselves receiving the gift of new life with unexpected joy and fulfilling the responsibility that has come to them with untold devotion.

For many couples a pregnancy or the decision to ‘start a family’ is the cause of their marriage. They believe, with the liturgy of the church, that marriage is ‘the foundation of family life in which children are born and nurtured’.³⁴ They want their love – God’s love – to ‘bestow on them … the heritage and gift of children and the grace to bring them up’.³⁵ For others the arrival of children in their relationship will prompt them to choose to be joined in marriage for the good of their children. They believe – again with the liturgy of the church – that marriage will help them ‘to nurture their family with devotion’.³⁶

Tragically, in some circumstances, the gift a couple has been given is a gift they neglect or otherwise abuse with great consequences of harm for their children, for society and for themselves.

Family life has taken many shapes over human history and there are different forms of family life in our own culture and throughout the world where love and care are to be found and where people flourish. Nevertheless, the church sees in marriage the form of human life provided by God for children to receive the secure love, protection and nurture of their parents, and to learn to love. For the strength of the family ‘lies in its capacity to teach us how to love’,³⁷ and that is one of its many gifts to society. Hence, the church promotes the virtues of sustained, committed loving through marriage so that

Each member of the family,

in good times and in bad,

may find strength, companionship and comfort,

and grow to maturity in love.38

While the mutuality of mother and father in marriage brings good to their children, there are families that through various, and sometimes difficult, circumstances have only one active parent. Such families undoubtedly also embody love and care with great strength, and enable children to thrive. Indeed, in Christian tradition Mary, Jesus’ mother, is usually depicted as a lone parent following the death of her husband Joseph.