Faith Works 5-19-23

Faith Works 5-19-23
Jeff Gill

Renewing your vows on an ongoing basis
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An opportunity I had when just starting out in parish ministry was to do a renewal of vows ceremony before I did my first wedding.

It was a couple celebrating their fortieth anniversary, and wisely as it turns out they chose to do a renewal of vows then, and not wait for a 45 or 50 (he was ill then and died a few years later). At the time my wife and I had been married just over a year and I couldn't imagine forty.

They invited friends and family, we held it in the church after worship, inviting people to stay if they wished, and a fairly full sanctuary watched as they repeated to each other the vows they'd shared just after World War II ended, as they began their married life together.

I've heard of people doing a renewal of vows at Disney or on a golf course; one year I floated the idea of a group renewal of marriage vows on a Sunday in June and we tried it as part of the service, since there were a number of fiftieths coming up anyhow.

And there are people who choose to renew their vows every year on their anniversary, wherever they happen to be when it rolls around (there's an amusing misuse of this idea in the 1945 "Christmas in Connecticut"). It has no legal standing, nor is there any canon law guidance in liturgical traditions around what it means or whether you should. It's a nod to memory, like many of the baptisms done these days in the Jordan River by life-long Christians, who know they are baptized in God's sight, but want to have the full immersion experience there.

Joyce and I spend enough time facilitating ceremonies and programs for other people and institutions that we've never discussed the idea of doing a renewal of vows. To simply repeat the words from that day in 1985 would seem a bit odd.

What I would say about being married not quite forty years (but I can see it just ahead) is that you both are going to be renewing your vows quite often if you're going to make the long haul a committed couple. Maybe long, long ago when George was a farmer from childhood to old age, and Martha was a mother and homemaker beginning to end, the shape of your vows, official and unofficial, printed in the bulletin and unspoken in your mind, would never need to flex. If the times and conditions within which the marriage operates are mostly the same, I guess you just count on the initial vows made and let it go at that.

Today, as people change careers multiple times in their lives, and movement is usual, not strange, the relationship of the marriage to the lived experience will change even if the basic relationship between the two people will not. Couples deal with distance as a common occurrence, not a strange turn of events; we were working in two different states, two homes, when our son was born, and there have been other geographic complications for various stretches. As I say that, I recall funerals I did years ago for elderly church members where family would ask me to say "they never spent a day apart their whole marriage." All I can reply with is "wow."

Renewing is not quite rewriting, but there is a revisioning to be done in most modern marriages, literally: to re-vision, to see anew how the way you thought it would go has gone, and how we proceed, together (even if sometimes apart).

And I'm glad we had the wisdom and vision to put atop our wedding program Browning's line "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been married a while, but not as long as some. Tell him about your enduring relationships at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.