Clearness, engagement, and marriage
Robin Mohr’s recent comment brought to mind a question that has been with me in recent years: does anyone wait for the results of a clearness process before deciding that they are getting married? Given the number of happy marriages with which I am acquainted that seem not to have done so, is it necessary? Have we ever, as a Society, had this as a practice?
From what I’ve seen, such discipline would seem to be a thing of legend. And then I consider a couple who called off their wedding plans twice before finally (after ten years, I believe, and on the third attempt) getting clearness to marry. It was hard for them, but I believe they both consider it to have been appropriate to wait.
My own perspective on marriage (and on membership) is that it’s a formalization – a public recognition of a pre-existing condition. (We marry none; it is the Lord’s work.
) I didn’t apply to become a member of my Meeting until I was already an active participant in all the ways I understood to be expected of a member. Similarly, I’m likely to wait to suggest to a partner that we explore marriage until I see that the relationship is one that I want to affirm and embrace, and for which I want to call on the support of all the forces of the universe.
Now, lest you think that’s stark hyperbole, I’ll admit to having come mighty close to that point in the past. I made a veiled reference to it in this post, where I describe my breakup with Andrea in the summer of 2005. I had been literally about to ask what it would mean for us to consider getting married, and we both began to speak at once. When I deferred to her, she said she’d been thinking about breaking up – not in the “so let’s talk about it” way, but in the “and I’ve decided” way. My question became irrelevant to the conversation, but I was holding it with this sense in mind – I had seen our relationship transformed over the previous few weeks, and was excited about embracing that new vitality. My standards and expectations have shifted since, partly in that I now hope for such vitality and bliss to exist through at least the first several months of the relationship, but I believe this is attainable (in some as-yet unidentified relationship).
So, what does all this have to do with clearness for marriage? Well, I value the clearness process, and I’m certain that any marriage I ask a Meeting to take under its care will go through a clearness process first. I can imagine, also, that I might ask my intended to join me in submitting our relationship to the discernment of our Meeting before getting to the point of telling people that we’re getting hitched. It’s not that I’m suggesting we’d keep such exciting news from our close friends and family, but that we might couch it in different terms – rather than saying, “we’re engaged,” we might say, “we’re exploring the question of whether we might be married.”
And of course, none of these are hard-and-fast rules. Any relationship that I could hope to embrace so fully would be one in which we follow the leadings of the Spirit, not of speculative rule-making.
December 12th, 2007 at 05:33
I doubt most couples would have the discipline to postpone or call off a wedding on the results of a clearness committee. But then I doubt most marriage clearness committees would flat-out say “no” except on procedural grounds.
It’s a tough call. Most people I’ve known who were getting into bad relationships were extremely defensive about the situation. If a friend or relative suggested their new partner wasn’t a good match they’d turn on that friend, often ending the friendship. I’ve been to weddings where every thinking person knew this was a bad idea. What do you do? Sometimes it’s worth risking the friendship, but sometimes maybe it’s important to stay close so you’ll be there to help pick up the pieces when the melt-down happens.
A clearness committee is not a friendship, however, and shouldn’t be confused with one. If I saw what I saw as a bad match in the making I’d need to share that concern with the couple, both together and individually. It would be a lack of integrity to have to say to one of the divorcees five years later that I never thought they had much of a chance. I’m not sure strong concerns need to prevent the marriage, I’d just want to be on record as having them and to signal that I’d be willing to be a sounding board after the marriage ceremony.
I think a good clearness committee will ask the kind of questions that the couple has avoided asking one another. As an example, maybe they’ve avoided talking about the possibility, timing, origin and number of children. It’s not that there’s a right answer (or even a permanent one) and it’s not a question that will affect the committee’s final decision but it does help the couple become more clear to one another.
My condolences for getting the breakup speech just when you were about to broach the commitment speech. Youch! I guess it was just time for you two to figure out where this was going. Still sucks.
For what it’s worth, I couldn’t even get the meeting I’d been attending for ten years to participate in a clearness committee. Too much trouble, apparently. Quakers are so incredibly stupid sometimes. Fortunately my fiancee’s meeting was welcoming and did a good job.
December 12th, 2007 at 10:14
Thanks, Martin!
To be clear, that breakup was in July of ‘05, and we have remained close friends. It was, indeed, time for us to figure out where that was going, and I’m glad that it’s gone where it has.
December 12th, 2007 at 16:02
Interesting. As my friends are starting to get serious, I’ve always wondered as a friend, what can I say when I think it’s a horrible match? The clearness committee sounds like a great safeguard for this. Of course the couples who won’t want to listen won’t. But at least they are open to holding themselves up to analysis.
Of course, hopefully if I ever want to get married, everyone will come up to my future Mr. Right, “Dude, you’re the luckiest man in the world!” and he’ll say, “Believe me, I know!”
December 12th, 2007 at 16:53
As I understand it, the earliest purpose of clearness committees was to establish that a couple proposing marriage was indeed clear to proceed, as in they hadn’t made any conflicting commitments, that any children from an earlier marriage had been provided for appropriately, and that the couple’s parents didn’t object. The marriage counseling that is more common today is a modern innovation. It is still not the meeting’s responsibility to decide who should marry whom.
My own complicated story involves a meeting that couldn’t agree on the definition of marriage, to put it mildly. Our clearness committee and the meeting came to the decision that we were free to be married and they were happy for us but that they could not take our union under their care. We were married in the manner of Friends, in the meetinghouse where we met, but we had to hire a minister to sign our paperwork. My bitterness lasted several years, and is probably still not entirely resolved.
My experience in serving on several marriage clearness committees for my current meeting is that we have seen our role, much as Martin said above, to be sure that the couple has considered the whole range of topics, to open the discussion for them if they hadn’t before, and to offer support that they are not the first couple to struggle with whatever they are struggling with.
I think the whole point of engagement is that we announce that we are considering getting married. Otherwise, we’d just get married right away and be done with it.
December 12th, 2007 at 22:36
(Wow, Robin. I almost said, “That’s unbelievable,” except that I wholly believe you and am not surprised since something not too unlike that happened to us. But it is Bizarro in a similar sense as our Bizarro incident. I mean, now many young adult committed Quakers ask for a meeting to marry them? AND aren’t living together beforehand!? I’ve since noticed that the particular [larger, urban] meeting that refused to even have clearness with us has a penchant for marrying gay/lesbian couples, so maybe that was one strike against us. So anyway I’m so, so sorry and I don’t blame you for feeling bitter about that. That’s just so weird.)
I really only wanted to say, on clearess, that my/our experience was that the clearness committee was largely a rubber-stamping body, even though the experience itself was profitable. Martin and I were/are disappointed that the Oversight Committee for our marriage couldn’t give a hoot how we’re doing now and not a soul from either overlapping committee ever calls or emails us even though we made our expectations clear to them before our marriage. (Namely, that they’d contact us once in a blue moon to make sure our marriage was not on the rocks or anything.) Again, Bizarro. I must admit that while I don’t feel bitter about that, I do feel hurt and still a little sad about it since we’ve gone through some tough times and could’ve used some support. I think these tough times provide an ideal opportunity for marriage overseers to step up. It’s a real shame that most Quaker meetings don’t make use of these really neat opportunities for building deeper friendships and stronger communities. It’s something that’s a real strength of Quakerism but which I’ve seen totally underutilized, to say the least.
We struggled with whether to wait for the results of the committee too, whether or not to be “good little Quakers.” But we also fully realized that the very meeting who we were going through clearness with has previously cleared another individual in our meeting for multiple [bad] marriages…marriages that seemed obviously doomed from the beginning and which were very hasty. Not too surprisingly, they resulted in bitter divorces. So I don’t think either of us expected negative results, yet we wanted to be committed to the process. As Robin said, we didn’t have any obvious impediments (as in other marriage commitments, kids, etc.) anyway. I’m very interested in hearing how others treated their clearness for marriage.
December 13th, 2007 at 03:29
I found the clearness process extremely valuable when we got married. It enabled us to discuss any concerns we had with the process of marriage itself, ask for advice on particular issues that would arise out of our marriage (Family dramas and so on) and provided a framework in which we were comfortable expressing the reasons we wanted to marry. We were sure before we went through this but it provided a safety net of examining it a little more closely with the help of people whose wisdom we trusted. Articulating things for other people helped me to solidify the things in my own mind.
I just saw it as a quaker version of pre-marriage stuff ANY church does.
The other thing was that as we marry in the care of the meeting it’s important for the meeting to check that my non-quaker husband wasn’t a quaker-hating nutjob who’d crush my involvement with the meeting, lock me in an attic and raise my children in some strange cult without my permission. Because it’s more than just using the building. You’re pretty much marrying into the society if it’s to take responsibility for heloing you to uphold your marriage.
December 13th, 2007 at 06:21
Our meeting has always put a great deal of thought into its clearness committees for marriage, and although they have not always gone through swimmingly, I believe that they have basically come to the right decisions at the time that they are convened.
I grew up in our meeting, and my parents still attend and are very active. At the time, my husband to be (who was attending an Episcopalian church) had started attending on a semi-regular basis (his daughter, who was about 8 or 9 at the time, voluntarily chose to attend meeting with me, rather than church with him, so he decided that he wanted to worship with his family), but it was not at all a slam dunk that he would continue to come to meeting, or be anymore of a Quaker than a “trailing spouse.” So when we announced our intention to marry, and asked to do it under the care of the meeting, the committee that they convened for us was very carefully thought out–it included one married couple who were active in the meeting, and two people whose spouses did not attend meeting. For some reason, they didn’t put anyone on who had had a second marriage. Our committee met with us for two full sessions, and then met with my soon-to-be stepdaughter as well. I felt they did a really thorough job, and it remains one of the highlights of my time at my meeting.
It’s been 11 years since we were married, and I confess that our meeting is only just now getting around to taking seriously the advice that it continue to be involved in the marriages that are under its care. But we are starting to do that, now, and it is very nice.
We’ve had couples come that we haven’t found clear–that is always sad when it happens, but it is usually for the right reason. We’ve also had couples that we found clear who later broke up. I don’t think we can be mind-readers–people change, lives change. We can only do what the Spirit guides us to do at a given time, and if we discern incorrectly, we go back and try again.
A few years ago, our meeting prepared a minute on covenant relationships–it was a difficult minute to pass, and did involve one quite vocal attender who was not easy with the concept of homosexuality to leave the meeting. But we did pass the minute, although it punted on the subject of “marriage”, talking instead about “all loving relationships under our care,” or some wording like that. As I recall, it was less about us not being able to come to unity, and more about the fact that since same-sex marriage wasn’t a legal option, the meeting felt inclined not to push the envelope. In hindsight, I find myself a bit disappointed that we didn’t try harder to set a more inclusive tone–maybe we were too complacent. I think there is now a small movement afoot to re-open this minute to discussion based on that wording, but I’m not sure where that stands.
Mia
December 14th, 2007 at 07:30
I once participated in a marriage clearness committee for two people who had been living together for a long while, who owned a house together, and had a child together! They were also badly matched as their previous and subsequent histories showed. We took the marriage under our care not because we approved or thought it was a good relationship but because it belonged to us, already.
But what’s a clearness committee to do except to help people become clear for themselves about something. It is not a seal of approval, although it does make a decision about whether the meeting should take the relationship under its care.
And I do think that a meeting can say that it will not take a relationship under its care (for example, two Catholics who live 500 miles away but have read about the marriage practice of Friends and find it charming), but “taking under the care” is the key to me. The clearness committee is the beginning (or perhaps even a later, although early, stage) of the meeting caring for the relationship–even if it is not a “good” or functional relationship.
These are, in fact, the relationships most in need of our care and, so long as those in them remain open to that care, we should not be deciding not to be bothered because we don’t “approve.”
We do not think, at least I hope we do not, that a person with emotional problems should be excluded from membership or fellowship solely on that basis. Everyone, I have heard it said, who comes to a meeting has something for us and we have something for them–even if they do not stay. Nor do we, I believe, refuse to take a relationship under our care solely because it is actually or potentially dysfunctional.
A weighty Friend once ministered that we are like single celled organisms on the forest floor. They eat the leaves and such they find without knowing, understanding or caring that they are part of something very much larger than themselves.
We love and care for one another even though we do not, sometimes, see the sense of it, even though we, sometimes, are not really attracted to (in fact, when we are repulsed by) one another or approve (in fact, when we disapprove) of what one another are are up to. We don’t know why we should we just know that something larger than we are as individuals leads us to do that.
A clearness committee is just one form that loving takes and in the case of a marriage is the beginning of a meeting’s commitment to the relationship–a commitment that should last as long as the relationship remains committed to the meeting and to the care of the meeting for which it has asked.
Keep eating the leaves, keep eating the leaves.
December 14th, 2007 at 13:18
Actually, one of the members of my and Joel’s marriage clearness committee is still in regular touch with us, and has supported us through some tough times. (One of the others is dead, and we’ve lost touch with a third.)
December 15th, 2007 at 16:52
I am serving on Ministry and Counsel in a relatively large meeting. About a year ago a couple of Friends including one from our meeting asked both their meetings to convene clearness committees for marriage. We heard from the couple after the process that the other meeting’s approach was more diligent than ours. In connecting with the conveners at that meeting, we learned they had sought to improve their process after a number of marriages under their care failed.
We began to ask some of the questions referred to in these posts – what is the role of the Meeting in the clearness process, what does it mean to hold couples and individuals “under our care” who have been married in our meeting in the past (even those who have moved away), and how deeply do we delve into possible issues the couple might face?
The clearness process can in the best of cases form a shared intimacy which deepens the ongoing spiritual relationship within the couple, between the couple and the members of the committee, and between the couple and the meeting as a whole. This forms an “engagement” of the couple with the meeting which is the foundation of the ongoing commitment of the meeting to the couple.
When members of a Friends Meeting engage in a clearness process with and then take a couple “under our care,” we should be making a corporate commitment to not only the spiritual connection the couple has with each other, but the spiritual connection the meeting develops and maintains with the couple. All of these relationships are based on mutuality, rather than uni-directional. Both require a two-way relationship, one that encourages the Meeting and the couple to become engaged with one another through the life of the Meeting.
Since I am single, I have only have had the privilege of serving on a few clearness committees for marriage. However, the marriages of those couples are very dear and tender to me. I would like to think that I remember their anniversaries and remember their spiritual relationship as I hold the meeting and its members in the Light, but after a number of years it is more likely that these F(f)riends’ special place in my heart can be crowded by others who have grown dear through sharing loss, raising children, meeting work, and the ongoing worship and social life of the Meeting.
We are currently thinking about what we could do to support and give ongoing sustenance to those who have been married under our meeting’s care. It sounds from these posts that other meetings likewise do not have formal, organized outreach to couples, but rely on the energy of individuals to maintain the connection. We also need to ask how the couples continue to deepen their relationship with the meeting and how these mutual efforts can continue to deepen the spiritual lives of all involved as well as the meeting. We must do this work of love together.
December 17th, 2007 at 07:50
In terms of what meetings can do to support the couples under their care, I highly recommend the Couples Enrichment program that FGC has as part of their traveling ministries program. My husband and I did a weekend with this program, and it was hands down the best thing we have done for ourselves. At our Yearly Meeting’s summer sessions this past year, a fortuitous meeting of three other couples from that weekend led us to have a reunion, in which we did similar dialogues to those we had done at the weekend. This in turn led some of us from our meeting to speak of bringing the program closer to home for us, either by way of hosting a weekend for our region, or through an ongoing couples’ group.
January 5th, 2008 at 02:45
I feel like a marriage being officially sanctioned, whether by the meeting or the government, really means nothing. It is between the two people and God. If they are sincerely committed to one another, then it doesn’t matter whether they go through a cerimony, swear oaths til death do us part, get a certificate, etc.
January 5th, 2008 at 08:18
@Tony: I absolutely agree that the marriage itself is God’s business, rather than that of the State or the Church; I believe this is why many Quakers say, “we marry none; it is the Lord’s work.” I don’t think this renders official sanctions meaningless. As I see it, the process undertaken by a Meeting with respect to a marriage is to discern whether the couple is married already and, if so, whether the Meeting is led to take care of that marriage.