What does ‘vocation’ mean? The word ‘vocation’ has as its root the Latin verb ‘vocare’: to call.  God calls each of us to follow Him on a daily basis but when we speak of ‘discerning a vocation’, we usually mean working out how it is that God wants us to live our adult lives as a whole: not just in what we do, but who we are.  On this page, we explore the vocation – or calling – to married life.

Through the sacrament of marriage, we live that universal call to holiness with particular reference to spouse and children: my marriage is the main way through which, please God, I will reach heaven. It is a calling that mirrors the relationship of Christ and his Church, as Pope Francis wrote in Amoris Laetitia §72: Marriage is a vocation, inasmuch as it is a response to a specific call to experience conjugal love as an imperfect sign of the love between Christ and the Church.  Consequently, the decision to marry and to have a family ought to be the fruit of a process of vocational discernment.  For more about discerning your vocation, please see here.

Living the vocation of Marriage No matter how unlikely this seems in the daily round of domestic chores, daily work, children’s needs and too little sleep, the reality of a sacramental marriage is nothing less than ‘a gift given for the sanctification and salvation of the spouses, since their mutual belonging is a real representation, through the sacramental sign, of the same relationship between Christ and the Church.’ AL72 The joy of sacramental marriage is to be found in the knowledge that it is God who holds us together in His Love. Amidst the messiness and imperfections of family life, we know that it was God who loved us first, and continues to love us, to bless us and to fill our marriage with His grace, so that we might love each other with (a shadow of!) that love.

See our NEWS & EVENTS tab above if you are searching for Marriage Prep in your area.

Your Engagement: a Time of Preparation

Preparation for marriage is a time of great excitement.  It is very easy to get swept along on the tide of wedding planning, with its endless lists to make, menus to select, and colour schemes to choose.  During this time, it is important not to lose sight of the most important aspect of all: you are preparing for much more than a wedding ceremony, you are preparing to enter into a new stage of your life as a married couple. Preparation for marriage can be broadly divided into the practical and the spiritual, although they overlap and work together to ensure that you are as prepared as you can be for this step you are about to take. Excerpts taken from the book ‘Cherishing your Wedding’ by Kerry Urdzik, CTS Publication 2018

The Church’s pastoral care for marriage finds its most visible expression in its care for couples preparing to get married. There are a number of programmes available to couples in England and Wales that complement the required preparation that is the responsibility of clergy to provide before a wedding can go ahead. These programmes usually cover skills such as communication and conflict resolution as well as opportunities to reflect on the meaning of the sacrament and the kind of commitment that marriage embodies. The links on this page feature the main programmes currently available.

Engaged Encounter

Marriage Care

Smartloving Engaged

Guidelines for the Preparation of Couples for Marriage have been produced by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and details can be found at the following link:

Guidelines for Preparation of Couples for Marriage

Marriage Care Counselling

Retrouvaille

The Church’s support for marriage also includes counselling and domestic abuse awareness. Marriage Care offers counselling to couples to help them work through whatever difficulty is proving difficult for them to resolve on their own. Catholics Experiencing Domestic Abuse Resources (CEDAR) points to the compassionate response needed from the Church by victims of domestic abuse, including awareness that couple counselling in these cases is not at all recommended.

CEDAR

GUIDE TO THE ANNULMENT PROCESS

In January 2018 the National Board of Catholic Women (NBCW) published a revised 4th Edition of their Guide to the Annulment Process. First issued in 1998, the Guide seeks to de-mystify the annulment process, making it easier to understand, and hopefully less stressful. The 4th Edition also takes into account Pope Francis’ 2015 Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus, ‘The Gentle Judge, our Lord Jesus, the Shepherd of Souls’.

Divorced and Separated Catholics

Guide to Marriage Nullity

Marriage Secrets of the Forever Couples

January is the peak month for marriage breakdowns, so how do you make sure love lasts a lifetime?  Six happy couples reveal all.

National Marriage Week USA 7-14 February 2019

UK National Marriage Week 13-19 May 2019

Useful link for Baptism resources

A Summary of our Second Year into the Baptism Preparation Project

After two wonderful years of working on the Baptism Preparation project, meeting and training some enthusiastic and willing people in our parishes, the work continues and is no longer a project!   it’s now a beautiful piece of work.  Having prepared the soil, sowed the seed, there is the opportunity to prepare parents for the Sacraments and why not start at the very beginning.  This is a gentle resource to establish a culture of accompaniment of families in their journey of faith.  Please get in touch if you would like to talk further about introducing this in your parish, train a team or simply have a question.  Email anitra.rawlins@cliftondiocese.com or telephone 0117 902 5595 to speak to me, or leave a message and I will call you back.  I really look forward to hearing from you.

A Summary of our First Year into the Baptism Preparation Project

I am thrilled to report that Baptism Preparation teams have been trained and are delivering the formation in our pilot parishes of St Bernadette’s, Whitchurch – Our Lady & St Alphege, Oldfield Park, Bath – St Michael’s, Shepton Mallet and St Mary’s, Glastonbury.  During the course of the year, I have discovered other parishes in our diocese who have already established baptism preparation in their parishes and they are generously sharing their experience to assist the newly-formed teams. The baptism preparation has helped to establish a culture of accompaniment within these pilot parishes and they understand the enriched welcome on offer to their families journeying towards baptism and life in a faith community.  The whole parish is involved in this welcome and is encouraged by this offering.  It has been exciting to draw on the expertise from within these parishes. Our diocese has begun journeying through an implementation of the Bishop’s vision for the next 5-10 years ‘A Future Full of Hope’ and the next three years – Mission, Prayer, Communion – are centred around being the Church we need to be and forming us as evangelising disciples.  The Baptism Preparation formation is a perfect response to evangelising opportunities, particularly in this year of Mission – it is gentle and non-judgmental and gives parents the space for conversation around how they feel about their faith and how this can grow with, and within, a faith community.  It is an affirming process of God’s love for each one of us.  It also allows us to see baptism within a wider context than just preparation for a sacrament and a day, and to see it as preparing for that encounter with Christ and his Church. At the start of the project, the fruits of the project we were hoping for included:

• building on the diocesan family days that have celebrated family in our diocese and drawn families around our bishop
• building on the diocesan vision set out in ‘Called to be a People of Hope’ offering a greater understanding of the needs of the modern family in the life of the church today and a greater understanding of the need to accompany families
• developing a sense of building community in parishes, a good catechesis that deepens the faith and prayer of young families and parents, a good formation of catechists for baptism and encouraging parishes to celebrate family life in their communities
• drawing on and tapping into the wonderful skill and ability, as well as lived experience, of people in our parishes
• celebrating new members to our families and parishes, and new life!

Actually, the fruits are becoming so much more, as we realise how support needs to be shown to families in small ways through opportunities for prayer within the family, opportunities for a deepened faith within the family so that, as a diocese, we are all working towards supporting the mission of the domestic church.  We realise more and more that baptism is a simple beginning and a door pushed ajar to enable us as a Church to walk more closely with the many faces and many shapes of the families in our parishes, our schools and our communities.  This wonderful beginning of a relationship of faith that begins in baptism, and begins with an introduction to a faith community, has brought to our imagination a lifelong accompaniment of the family. We are constantly updating the website which gives support to the initiatives of Marriage & Family Life, gathering resources as well as up-to-date News and Events, and to offer our diocesan community a serious resource for many aspects of Marriage & Family Life. Please feel free to contact me via my email: anitra.rawlins@cliftondiocese.com or Adult Education 0117 902 5595. Just to introduce myself; I’m a wife to Chris and mother to Will, Jack, George and Freya.  I have a background in adult training and catechesis, and excited by a revival in my own faith, I am keen to reach out and share my joy in the Lord with others. Anitra Rawlins

Home is a Holy Place resource

The God of the Pots and Pans Our families are holy ground. Here we experience love in all its joy and sorrow, transcendence and ordinariness, wholeness and mess. Here is our domestic church where God dwells just as surely as He does in any mighty cathedral. St Teresa of Avila said that ‘God is in the pots and pans’ and this is where we can find Him in all the day-to-day work of family life and this is where we find ourselves poured out in love, given away, made holy. As followers of Christ, we are all called to holiness and our family lives are moment-by-moment, daily invitations to love and to be loved in all the repetitive business of human life because there, beneath the surface, is God- Love Himself. Our children usually first learn of love through us, their parents. We are their first teachers and they experience the love of God through our love for them. God is there in our kindness, self-sacrifice, patience, forgiveness, fairness, honesty and perhaps this is the beginning of us as parents, passing our faith to our children. We are attempting to show the Face of God to our children, just as Jesus showed us the Face of the Father through His Incarnation. And maybe this is the most important witness we can give – a faith lived. All those small signs of love; a kiss, a meal, clean clothes, an unkind remark forgiven, done with love and faith. Are these the ‘sacraments’ of our domestic church? Visible signs of grace, of God’s Love. Faith Enough to Share Of course, in order to nurture the gift of faith in our children, we find that our own faith also needs nurturing. It can be tested as we meet the challenges of family life. In my own faith journey, I found myself returning to the Sacraments in a new way, exploring how my faith could inform my day-to-day life. I also discovered that I knew few of the answers to the very challenging questions that my children ask! So, rediscovering the ‘reasons for your hope’ (1 Peter 3:15) became important and life-giving. We do, I think, need to talk about our faith, bringing God into our daily conversations when it is called for. This can be challenging because it often feels as if we cannot clothe our faith with words, God is a Being, our faith a result of encountering Him, a gift. It can also feel as though our own faith is not strong enough, we have so many questions ourselves, we feel far from understanding the mysteries of God. There are no easy answers here, and perhaps if we feel we know all the answers, we probably haven’t understood the question! If we let Him, the Holy Spirit will guide us and sometimes, maybe we are called to live in the mystery of God, letting go of our tight grip and allowing God to be the heart of our families.

 Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take.”                Proverbs 3:5-6

Struggles and Imperfection It is often difficult to see our own home as a holy place or a domestic church – after all, we live there and know how far it is from ideal! Each family has its own story, its own history and its own struggles. We look at other families in church whose children are well-behaved and quiet, whose teenagers still come to Mass, where both parents are there, and so on and wonder where we went astray with our own family, what we did wrong. This is deeply painful but this is also holy ground. It is exactly here in our brokenness, our woundedness and our imperfection that the Lord enters in. Holiness is not in perfection, it is in the struggle. In the Gospels, we see how Jesus is irresistibly drawn to people who have need of Him; the sick, the grieving, the sinners, the lonely and the broken. He is still walking with us today, loving us and meeting us in all our need. Being a Witness

Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”                                Pope Paul VI

Children learn the faith through us as models and witnesses. We do not have to perform amazing feats; just live our everyday family lives with love. Our example is powerful as our children watch how we navigate relationships with loved ones, how we live out our faith, how we do our work, how we connect with the wider community. We hope that our children see us putting into practice what we believe and living in accordance with our beliefs. If we want our children to learn how to incorporate faith into their own lives, we also need to practice the faith explicitly at home.  A routine for prayers at home, talking about God and church teaching, celebrating special liturgical seasons, sharing our own faith stories, having pictures and statues in our homes that reflect our faith are all ways of making God central in our family lives. It is also very helpful if we can spend time with other families, where both parents and children can share experiences of the journey as a Christian family, knowing that we are not alone. Our children develop their own faith journey too, as they are brought more deeply into the life of the church through the Sacraments of Initiation; Baptism, Confession, First Holy Communion and Confirmation. They come to Mass with us, joining with the wider Catholic community at the source and summit of our lives as Catholic Christians. All this sounds very perfect, and therefore unlikely that it will be plain sailing for most families. Each family is unique, with its own ingredients of personalities, beliefs, resources, constraints, struggles and commitment. It is easy to feel inadequate, thinking that we have failed, when things do not go to plan. It is extremely hurtful if, despite our best efforts, our children reject faith and no longer wish to practice. We cannot pass on our faith wholesale to our children; it is a gift that they have to accept as their own. In this, as in all things, we are called to trust in our loving, merciful Father, that He will bring all His children home one day. Questions to think and pray about: In what ways are love and grace present in the everyday life of my family? In what areas do I struggle with my own faith and how would I like to change this? What is stopping me from sharing my faith with my family? What areas of my family life feel broken and difficult? How can I allow God into those areas? Do I have any ideas, tips or experiences that could help others?

The Family at Prayer booklet – available soon!

Teaching our children to pray is an essential part of introducing them to Jesus Christ.

Our Lord gave us prayer so we could communicate with him directly, and getting children comfortable with prayer helps them to understand that God is always close and to grow in consciousness of his presence.

We are all called to holiness, and all to prayer.

The best way to begin guiding our children in prayer is to pray in their presence.

Even before they have learnt to speak, we can invite them to pray with us as best they can.

We can look for opportunities to pray in front of them, just as we would seek out opportunities to teach them about manners or about how to treat each other with kindness.

As well as praying in the morning or before bed, we can encourage them to come to God with all things and at any time and that no request before God is too small. Some children may feel shy about praying out loud and may say they can’t think of anything to pray about.

If this happens, we can pray for something first, and then ask them to finish the prayer.

There are many ways in which we can share the joy of prayer with our children and help them deepen and grow in their experience of prayer; some of these are explored on the adjoining pages.

It is also important that children understand prayer can simply be a conversation with God, one that is held with respect for his unending love and power, but that is spoken in our own words.

Prayer is not complicated and is meant for everyone. An early Christian poet, St Ephraem, wrote, ‘Birds fly, fish swim, people pray’. Human beings are made to pray, because they are made for God.

Here are some resources to help you pray together as a couple:

I Am With You

Marriage Matters 

If your spouse is a non-believer it can be difficult to pray together for your children or yourselves. When we were worried or anxious about our children or any situation we would hold each other’s hands and just quietly sit and think about the situation/problem/needs for a few minutes. As the catholic, I would then just talk/pray aloud about the issue and ask God to enter into the situation and to ease any anxieties and to guide us. Sometimes my husband may add something, sometimes not, but we both felt better by just focusing together on the issue. As the years progressed he would often lead the prayer time, but we always hold each other as we pray, even now after 45 years together. There is something very powerful about being in physical contact as we pray and share together, it brings us great joy, no matter what is happening that day or has already occurred. Why not try it and see for yourself!

A grandchild brings great joy, especially once they start smiling, talking and toddling about. But it is also a time when we can pray for them and their parents. As grandparents we want the very best for our grandchildren and what can be more important than praying for them and their parents each day.

As a Catholic we have a role in passing on our Faith. I am not talking about major practices, but the little things we do daily, probably without truly thinking about as they are so much a part of who we are as a person. For example, the sign of the cross and prayers before and after a meal, always having one’s rosary beads to hand – often beside where you sit. Little things such as these can provoke questions in our grandchildren which we can explain simply according to their age.

Advent is a great time to explain about Jesus by having a Crib on display that can be played with as you talk about the birth of Jesus, or religious Advent Calendars which also focus on the Nativity. Also, having Christmas story books around, or giving them as an Advent present is a great way to open the children to the reason for Christmas. Making a Christingle together is another way. Likewise at Easter you could create together an Easter Garden and maybe let them take it home with them if that’s possible, and again using storybooks to help the child know more about Jesus. If our children are not practicing their faith they may feel unsure about what to say or do so always be gentle in approach, never judgemental.

If they are staying with you, it may be possible to take them with you to Church, even if it’s only your turn for the flower rota or cleaning as this building will provoke many questions from inquisitive young people. Lighting a candle and saying a prayer whilst there, is also something which encourages prayer and leads to further discourse. At Mass, many parishes offer children the Liturgy of the Word so if a grandchild comes with you, you could take them out or encourage them to go on their own, depending on their age.

No matter where they are, whether we see them often, rarely or sadly, in some cases never, it doesn’t mean that we are not thinking about them, so joining a group like the Grandparents Association can be a source of encouragement, prayer and companionship with other grandparents. Meetings happen for between 1 and 2 hours either fortnightly or monthly and can be held either in a church hall or in someone’s home on a rota basis.

Some groups try to meet up with their grandchildren as well in the school holidays and do fun things together, for example a picnic with games or a treasure hunt.

For more information about the Grandparent’s Association contact the Marriage and Family Life Coordinator.

What is dementia?

Dementia Friendly Church Resource Pack

Welcome Me As I Am