Fairy-Tale Ending a Product of Love, Perseverance

Published January 27, 1983. Not long ago, I read the address by the Most Reverend and Retired Honorable Robert Runcie at the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer of Great Britain. Perhaps it would be well to review the address in behalf of the royal couple and all others recently married. It goes as follows:

Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made: the prince and the princess on their wedding day. But fairy tales usually end at this point with the single phrase, “They lived happily ever after.” This may be because fairy stories regard marriage as anticlimactic after the romance of courtship.

This is not the Christian view. Our faith sees the wedding day not as the place of arrival but the place where the adventure really begins.

There is an ancient Christian tradition that every bride and groom on their wedding day are regarded as a royal couple. To this day, in the marriage ceremonies of the Eastern Orthodox Church, crowns are held over the man and the woman to express the conviction that, as husband and wife, they are kings and queens of creation. As it says of humankind in the Bible, “Thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands.”

On a wedding day it is made clear that God does not intend us to be puppets but chooses to work through us and especially through our marriages, to create the future of his world.

Marriage is first of all a new creation of the partners themselves. As husband and wife live out their vows, loving and cherishing one another, sharing life’s splendors and miseries, achievements and setbacks, they will be transformed in the process. A good marriage is a life, as the poet Edwin Muir says:

Where each asks from each

What each most wants to give

And each awakes in each

What else would never be

But any marriage which is turned in upon itself, in which the bride and groom simply gaze obsessively at one another, goes sour after time. A marriage which really works is one which works for others. Marriage has both a private face and a public importance. If we solved all our economic problems and failed to build loving families, it would profit us nothing, because the family is the place where the future is created good and full of love—or deformed.

Those who are married live happily ever after the wedding day if they persevere in the real adventure, which is the royal task of creating each other and creating a more loving world. This is true of every man and woman undertaking marriage. It must be especially true of this marriage in which are placed so many hopes.

Much of the world is in the grip of hopelessness. Many people seem to have surrendered to fatalism about the so-called inevitabilities of life: cruelty, injustice, poverty, bigotry, and war. Some have accepted a cynical view of marriage itself.

But “royal couples” on their wedding day stand for the truth that we help to shape this world and are not just it victims. All of us are given to power to make the future more in God’s image and to be “kings and queens” of love.

This is our prayer for Charles and Diana. May the burden we lay on them be matched by the love with which we support them in the years to come. However long they live, may they always know when they pledged themselves to each other before the altar of God they were surrounded and supported not by mere spectators but by the sincere affection and the active prayers of millions of friends.

Thanks be to God.

I know there are rumors that the royal newlyweds are having their differences. But theirs are probably no more serious than those encountered by other recently married couples. The major difference is that the confrontations of the Prince and the Princess receive worldwide attention in the media and press. The rest of us are allowed the privilege to experience ours in private.

Thanks be to God that Prince Charles and Lady Diana are humble.