In good times...and bad

WHEN I WAS A SEMINARIAN, one of my summer assignments was with Father Justin Hoye. He was very intentional and spent significant time helping to prepare me for priestly ministry.

I distinctly remember him sitting down to teach me about his approach to marriage prep. He told me, “Throughout your priesthood, young couples are going to come to you wanting to get married. They are often going to be in love ... giddy with joy ... and over-the-moon excited. Your job as their pastor is to dump cold water on that excitement.”

Marriage is hard. It is no small thing to promise to be faithful to another person while having no idea what the future is going to hold. Some of the giddy-inlove couples have not thought about life beyond the ceremony and honeymoon, but the Church wants them thinking about a lifelong marriage with everything that entails.

They are promising fidelity in good times and in bad. It is easy to daydream about the good times; but the priest is tasked to help the couple contextualize different possibilities for what the bad times might look like. What if the person you are marrying develops an addiction to alcohol or drugs or gambling? What happens in the case of infidelity? Sin does not invalidate a marriage; it just means you are married to a sinner.

The engaged couples who come to Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel are surrounded by families with six, seven or even 10 or more children. When I speak with those engaged couples about what they desire in marriage regarding children, I am often told: “Oh Father, we want a big family. We would like to have as many children as God wants to give us.” And then I must bring up a cold-water question: what if the number of children God gives you is zero?

Infertility is a particularly brutal cross to carry. It isn’t just a one-time disappointment, but a month after month disappointment that can span years of effort, hope and heartache. Infertility and miscarriages happen with greater frequency than is publicly talked about, but their possibility needs to be covered during the period of marriage preparation.

The topics covered in marriage prep vary from the mundane to the extreme. The Church wants to ready the couple so they can be successful in keeping the vows made on their wedding day. I am very grateful for the work that Dino Durando does in directing the Family Life Office for our diocese. He has collaborated with several talented individuals to create a program for couples doing marriage prep called Thrive. Thrive has been a terrific supplement to the work I do when individually meeting with couples in the months leading up to their wedding.

Thrive is great at taking the entire person with their unique individual temperaments into account. It balances the various psychological and spiritual aspects of the human person while proposing a future together where virtue can be cultivated, and authentic joy attained.

Preparing couples for the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony is one of the joys of being a priest. In one of my first meetings with the couple, I will invite them over to the rectory and cook them dinner. I enjoy getting to know them. In my ten years as a priest, I have married about 100 couples. All of them have been unique and a delight in their own way. The giddy joy they possess is contagious, even if my job is to dump cold water all over it.

Father Adam Johnson is pastor at Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Kansas City and director of the diocesan Office of Vocations.