Some of you have commented to me privately that I’ve been on a blog holiday for way too long now. When I started this blog, I had a personal goal of posting a minimum of once every calendar month. It should be evident by looking at the archives that I haven’t met my goal for the last three calendar months, and short of posting today, I’ll fail for a fourth. Clearly, the pressure is on.

As usual, my lack of posting is an indicator of my busy personal life, and this time is no exception. I certainly have a lot to talk about, but for the sake of finishing a post in the next twelve hours, I’ll get straight to the point:

I’m getting married again!

Kathryn and I started discussing marriage more than half a year ago. However, to understand where I’m going for the next couple paragraphs, I need to give you more background than that. During the same time, we’d also been discussing our faith, both of us being Catholic, and our desire to attend mass together on a regular basis. This led us on a journey to find a parish that made us feel at home spiritually. The journey started just after Thanksgiving, and it had some low points that really could be the topic of another post much longer than this one. However, long story short, after attending mass at several different parishes in the Valley, we finally discovered our new home on New Year’s Day, when we attended mass for the Solemnity of Mary.

Once we began attending mass on Sundays, a couple opportunities quickly began to avail themselves to us. The first opportunity was an announcement that the parish was offering adult confirmation classes. For reasons I won’t elaborate right now, I missed receiving this particular sacrament as a child. However, I wasn’t willing to miss the opportunity again, so I signed up immediately, and I’ve already attended several sessions in preparation for receiving the sacrament later this spring. The second opportunity was an announcement that the parish was having a wedding seminar for couples interested in marrying at our church.

Prior to that point, we’d already talked about how wonderful it would be to marry in the Church, but we had one not-so-small problem standing in our way: my previous marriage. The Church doesn’t recognize civil divorces, so in order to marry in the Church, it would first have to grant an annulment of my first marriage. This was a complication Kathryn and I had already discussed, and we had certainly considered that it might be a lot easier just to have a civil wedding, even though it might put us outside of communion with the Church. In any event, we attended the seminar to get as much information as we could. We heard from the pastor, the business manager, and the wedding coordinator of our parish, who discussed every aspect of a Church wedding, including the diocesan requirements for marriage preparation counseling, the parish’s specific requirements, and the liturgical and ritual elements of the wedding day itself. In short, we really, really liked what we heard. By the time we left the seminar, the idea of a civil wedding had come completely off the table. We were prepared to make whatever effort was necessary for a Catholic wedding.

However, there still remained the issue of my previous marriage. The Church has its own fully established legal system, and an annulment has to be granted through one of its tribunals in much the same way a civil divorce must be granted by a state court. While there are only two parties to a civil divorce case, in the view of the Church, the bond itself must also be defended, substantially raising the burden of the petitioner. Some annulment cases take years to be resolved. To begin my case, I made an appointment to meet the pastor of our parish personally. I felt that the first meeting with him should be outside of the context of the marriage preparation, so as much as I would have valued Kathryn’s support, I thought it would be better to go alone. It’d be an understatement to say the conversation wasn’t easy for me. My first marriage wasn’t blessed by the Church; as a Catholic, I should have received dispensation for a civil wedding, but I didn’t. I know it’s a cliché for a Catholic to talk about guilt, but I did feel an overwhelming amount of guilt in asking the Church to undo a marriage that its rules told me I never should have entered in the first place. However, the pastor was very compassionate about the matter, and even had a sense of humor about it, when appropriate. Ironically, the fact that I hadn’t asked for dispensation was itself the grounds for annulment — it’s called “lack of canonical form” — so the rule I broke ended up making the process easier. The pastor took all my information, and a couple weeks later, I returned to his office to sign the prepared petition. Less than three weeks after that, he informed me the Church had granted my annulment. Kathryn and I were overjoyed.

We’d been waiting until the annulment was granted before we spread the good news about our plans to anyone outside our immediate families. Now that we’ve gotten over the big hurdle, there are still a lot of little ones that remain, but we can jump them together. Sufficient marriage preparation is required for a wedding in the Church, with six months considered a minimum. Because we found out about my annulment just as Holy Week was beginning, we haven’t had a chance to meet with the pastor recently. However, we’ve continued preparing on our own by attending a retreat for marrying couples this past weekend, fulfilling one of the diocesan requirements. Actually, because of our age and the fact I’ve been married before, the pastor recommended we attend a particular retreat especially for remarrying couples. The retreat was an all-day seminar, broken into four parts: theology of marriage, personality, sexuality and family blending, and finance. Overall, Kathryn and I both thought the seminar was worthwhile. If nothing else, it caused the two of us to open a dialogue on some topics we hadn’t previously discussed. At the end, there was an exercise where couples practiced praying together. It may sound a bit corny, but in truth, it was a beautiful moment and a great end to the day.

I didn’t do any preparation or counseling for my first marriage, so I’ve been trying to keep an open mind about the various requirements of the Church. So far, that’s worked pretty well for me. In reality, six months isn’t all that long to prepare for a bond that endures a lifetime. Our preparation should be complete by mid-summer, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to get married in Phoenix in the August heat. However, if we take a few extra weeks to focus of the details of the big day itself, we’ll be ready just in time for an early fall wedding.