In Celebration of Forty Years of Marriage

Forty years ago I stood nervously in All Saints’ Hall and began – “On behalf of my wife and I may I thank you all for coming here to share in this celebration with us.”  And I echo those words here, as it was a delight to share our Wedding Anniversary with so many family and friends. 

If one of our children had come to us at the age of sixteen and announced that they were getting engaged, I might have had something to say about it – blustering on about having your whole life in front of you – you’ve only known each other for five minutes - or various other expressions of doubt and disapproval.  It is therefore all the more credit to our own parents that – whatever they may have thought – they gave no hint of disapproval or doubt when, forty-two years ago, we announced our own engagement. 

Two years later, we were married - and when most of us get married we do so as complete amateurs. We become amateur husbands or wives, amateur painters, plumbers and decorators – in due course amateur fathers and mothers, amateur counsellors, advisors and financiers, and finally - as the circle closes - amateur grandparents with young children once again playing on our knees.  I fully admit to having been an amateur myself throughout, and sometimes not a very good one – On occasion it may seem a miracle that any marriage survives.  But those Classics scholars among you will remember that the word ‘amateur’ has its roots in the Latin word ‘amare’ – to love, and love, as they say ‘conquers everything. ’ We began our marriage in love and now, forty years on, that love has not only continued, but grown into something very special.

Often, when you say to someone ‘we have been married for forty years,’ the response is ‘That’s quite an achievement’, but I don’t regard our forty years together as an achievement. I look upon our years together as a joy.   A joy to have shared my life with the girl I love, a joy to have had three wonderful children, and now the joy of an extended family as they in their turn build their own lives away from home.

So forty years of love and joy, but also forty years of thanks.  Thank you to our parents – so supportive, so generous and so wise. Thank you to our family and friends – so kind, such good company and often so willing to listen.  And thank you to our children and our children’s children – so wonderful in every way. 

But there is one other special thank you to make.  Out of the two or three girls waiting out there for me, and out of all the thousands of boys out there waiting for Linda, how come the two of us met in the first place?   With the odds stacked against us it was in fact this church of All Saints’, and our respective parent’s involvement with its day-to-day life that brought us together.  So my final thank you goes to All Saints’ – to the friends that we have known down the years, to Father Michael and Father Christopher, and to the whole congregation that continue to be so much a part of our lives.  Nothing could have been more appropriate therefore that on the actual day of our Anniversary we were able once again to kneel on the step where we made our commitment to God and to each other and receive a Blessing from Father Michael.  It was a very special day indeed.

Chris and Linda