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Archbishop makes headlines in National Marriage Week launch |
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National Marriage Week was launched on Monday in the Palace of Westminster with an inspiring array of speakers including Mr Ian Duncan Smith MP, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, Anastasia de Waal of Civitas and author, Anne Atkins.
The Archbishop made headlines the next day as he spoke out about the value of marriage: “Thank you very much for the invitation to be here this morning. One of the phrases that a slightly younger generation than mine likes to use a lot - I have a nineteen year old daughter - is 'get a life'. And you might be surprised to hear that I do occasionally hear that from the younger members of my family. 'Get a life' is said to people who are clearly meshed into narrow, boring, obsessive, forms of life. People who have no horizons beyond their immediate concerns, their immediate hobbies, they are pedants; they are bores. And it occurred to me thinking about this morning, that all of that presupposes that people have quite a vivid idea of what real life is like; it's a life of discovery, it's a life of surprises, it's a life where you don't quite know what's going to come to you, but you go forward with some degree of expectation that you are going to be enlarged and challenged and enriched.
“As I thought about that, I thought well actually, that's not a bad slogan for a National Marriage Week: 'Get A Life'. Because when we're talking about the marriage relationship, we're talking about a relationship, which constantly unfolds over time, which allows you to build on difficult experience, to work through it, to move, to mature. It allows you to have a story to tell about yourself, a story that is not just about how I wanted this, and I got that, but a story about how I discovered and moved through time to something more like the humanity that I'm capable of. Get a life, have a story, move and grow because - to abuse yet another popular phrase - marriage is for life, not just for Christmas. Marriage is for life; and that doesn't just mean life-long, important as that is. It means for life; that is for an enhanced kind of human experience. We're supposed to be, I gather, celebrating commitment in National Marriage Week, and it seems to me that commitment is essentially about 'getting a life'. Marriage is a relationship in which my commitment to somebody else, my risky, high risk, commitment to someone else, is matched and met by their risky commitment to me….” |
