Marriage Matters: ‘Sun’ staff writer gets engaged, begins journey toward altar

I drove into downtown with my sister, her husband, their 1-year-old daughter and a good friend of mine. It was a cold, dreary Sunday and most of the jewelry shops on Jewelers’ Row were closed.

In fact, the store where I bought the ring should have been closed, but they had opened that day just for a few hours for a special appointment with a customer.

The customer was leaving as I showed up and they agreed to let me look. I took this as providential, found a diamond and setting I thought Sarah would like and bought it on the spot.

Then, my friend dropped me off at the airport. I boarded the plane with the ring in my pocket, was deposited in Phoenix three hours later and proposed to Sarah when she picked me up at the curb on the north side of terminal four.

She said yes.

So even though I had thought about asking her to marry me for months, the time that elapsed between my deciding to buy a ring and my actually being engaged was no more than six or seven hours.

This was a good thing since I felt very nervous having the ring in my pocket. I think I checked the box 85 times on the flight just to make sure it hadn’t evaporated or anything.

Sacrament preparation

If the manner in which I proposed was spontaneous, I soon found out that preparing for the wedding would be to an even greater degree planned.

I’m not just talking about wedding plans that include finding a reception hall, hiring a band, choosing the menu, buying a dress or getting a photographer. Those are the sorts of plans and preparations almost everyone goes through when getting married.

But if you ask to be married in the Catholic Church, there are a whole host of other preparations, which may seem odd to an outsider. It’s more like sacrament preparation, which, of course, makes sense.

And as any Catholic knows, sacrament preparation tends to involve classes and workbooks.

Putting in the time

To date, Sarah and I have attended seven different classes or meetings totaling about 20 hours. These classes or meetings can be broken into three categories. First, there are the Natural Family Planning courses of which we are taking the full complement.

Then, there was the Love for Life marriage preparation weekend where we heard about communication, sexuality, finances and some Theology of the Body.

Lastly, we spent some time one-on-one with a deacon at our parish. There are still three more NFP classes to go, as well, not counting the ongoing preparation we have as an extension of the classes.

This is all to say that the diocese takes seriously the formation of its affianced members. With divorce among Catholic couples hovering around the 50 percent mark, it’s not too hard to see why.

Beginning journey

In this newspaper, we often report on the various offices and ministries that do good work throughout the diocese. There’s often an understandable distance between the writer and the subject of the article.

For example, my colleague Ambria Hammel has written a couple of great stories on St. Joseph the Worker, the organization that helps find employment for homeless men and women. The pieces she has written are engrossing and tell stories of how St. Joseph the Worker has given these down-and-out people help and hope.

But, that’s a very different thing than if a client of St. Joseph the Worker wrote about his or her own experience.

Likewise, I’ve written a number of articles about Natural Family Planning and the diocesan Office of Marriage and Respect Life Issues.

But, until very recently, I had never sat in an NFP or marriage prep class hosted by the Office of Marriage and Respect Life Issues. Trust me, it’s a very different experience than writing up a brief article advancing an NFP conference or profiling a new marriage prep requirement.

I hope over the course of the next few months, then, to describe what it’s like going through this preparation and these classes, whether they seem helpful, what was most beneficial, perhaps, and what was most difficult as my fiancée and I move toward our July 25 wedding date.

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