I can’t believe I’m typing this. Thirty years ago today I married a pretty English woman named Marianne Lacey.
And let this sink in…we’re still together.
Because we’d tied the knot just six months after meeting each other, many of our friends said it wouldn’t last—”Marry in haste and repent at leisure” was the commonly voiced opinion.
My wife and I have had three decades together and sure, some it has been spent repenting, but that’s the nature of any long-term relationship.
We spent the first half of our marriage travelling the world as photo-journalists—I’d write the stories and my wife would take the photographs.
Highlights include diving with Cousteau in Fiji, mountaineering in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, enjoying a Devonshire tea with Sir Edmund Hillary at his home in Auckland, sailing yachts around Tahiti, the Seychelles, and Tonga, driving from Chicago to LA on Route 66, and attending a Papal Mass held by John Paul II at the Vatican.
However, although we loved the globe-trotting and rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers, the best to come out of our marriage is undoubtedly the two beautiful miracles who call us Mum and Dad.
Our little family is a constant source of pleasure and pain, but it’s also the most fulfilling element of our lives. We whinge and moan about the untidy bedrooms, the homework pushback, and the sibling rivalry, but wouldn’t trade all the travel in the world to miss the first days at school, the Easter egg hunts, and the cuddles on the sofa while watching trash TV.
Study after study confirms the importance of the family to mental and physical wellbeing, economic wellbeing, and in establishing social values.
According to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, presented to his Holiness Pope John Paul II in 2005, the family is the “Vital cell of Society” (Chapter Five).
Paragraph 209: The importance and centrality of the family with regard to the person and society is repeatedly underlined by Sacred Scripture. “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). From the texts that narrate the creation of man (cf. Gen 1:26-28, 2:7-24) there emerges how—in God’s plan—the couple constitutes “the first form of communion between persons”[458].
Eve is created like Adam as the one who, in her otherness, completes him (cf. Gen 2:18) in order to form with him “one flesh” (Gen 2:24; cf. Mt 19:5-6)[459]. At the same time, both are involved in the work of procreation, which makes them co-workers with the Creator: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gen 1:28). The family is presented, in the Creator’s plan, as “the primary place of ‘humanisation‘ for the person and society” and the “cradle of life and love”[460].
The chapter goes on to state that it is in the family that children learn their first and most important lessons of practical wisdom, and that the church considers the family as, the first natural society.
Further, it views the family as centrally important to the person.
“It is in this cradle of life and love that people are born and grow; when a child is conceived, society receives the gift of a new person who is called “from the innermost depths of self to communion with others and to the giving of self to others.”
The transformative power of the family was only too evident to anyone who attended Life, Marriage and Family Sunday, at St Mary’s Cathedral last week (see our cover story). How life affirming it was to see happy couples praying together, some who had been married for more than sixty years!
And yet, it is important that we remain steadfast in our Catholic commitment to cherish family, especially at a time when (as Dorin’s cartoon humorously depicts this week) our birth rate has fallen to a record low of 1.5 babies per woman.
On a slightly more positive note, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, the crude divorce rate has been trending downward since the 1990s. So, there’s reason to hope.
In the meantime, I’m off to buy a big bunch of flowers.
Someone is waiting for me.