eMatrimony.org

Supporting, Encouraging, and Challenging the WWME Community

  News - International

Couple Power in Indonesia

Fr. Gene Schmitz, S.V.D.

(Excerpted from Spring 1992 Matrimony magazine)

It was very hot that Saturday afternoon, Dec. 8, 1990. We were in the early months of our monsoon season, so we should have been experiencing torrential rains. But instead, we were literally bathed in sparkling sunshine. And that's how it should have been-the weather reflecting the warm joy that was filling our minds and hearts.

After all we were celebrating five marvelous years of Marriage Encounter in the Lembata Deanery (Flores, Indonesia).

Thanking God for the grand results this M. E. family had brought to our neighborhood, we began yet another fresh encounter for couples.

We hadn't felt that confident five years before when we held our first M. E. At that time everyone was quite nervous, wondering how we had the nerve to try this "new thing". Nevertheless eleven couples and two priests were gathered to give it a try.

Indeed that first effort got off to a shaky start as the pioneers realized, even after the introductory talk, that this would be like no other retreat or workshop they had ever attended. They were told by the visiting team, "Don't ask any questions! You can understand this weekend only by experiencing it."

That's exactly how it happened. They were eleven couples not much different from their neighbors. Eleven couples involved in good but busy marriages, facing life's problems and joys in a changing Third World environment. Like most couples, raising their children and working a heavy schedule day after day, they wondered if something wasn't missing from their relationships. The ideas had been picked up from "other worlds" that closeness, togetherness is OK for the first few years of marriage and family living, but that soon wears off. Then all you have to do is fulfill your responsibilities, that's all that can be expected.

As the weekend unfolded and the real encounter began to take place, each couple was so surprised - that they were actually talking to each other. Better still, they were listening, too. Now that's not an ordinary thing in this male dominated society. An elderly man expressed everyone’s feelings: "It's like having a second honeymoon. In just two and a half days we began to rediscover one an- other, to find care, and yes...even love! If only we could have had this encounter ten years ago!" Some began to say, "This is even better than our first coming together as partners in marriage. This is deeper because now we are really getting to know each other and appreciate each other as individuals.

There was so much enthusiasm as a result of this amazing discovery - that first Encounter Weekend. As the days and weeks passed on after that first M.E., the best testimony came from couple’s children. It was a remarkable thing, they said, to see how their parents now had time to be with each other and how they now had time for the children. Now they settled problems not by arguing but by talking. The couples were all a little bit dazed by the experience indeed, a super experience.

But that is all it would have been if it had just stopped there. Here is where the Spirit came in. The Spirit made us realize that we had to keep this thing growing. The first visiting team had come from far away. They could not come to us again and again to continue to lead us through the next stage of integrating M.E. into very real, daily difficult lives.

So without any preparation and more courage than wisdom, two of the original couples and I decided to carry on the process, bridging that first Weekend with the rest of their lives. Much later on Mr. Ignatius Begaju, one of the first leaders in our group, told me, ''Father, luckily our enthusiasm and desire carried the day." So it was that the first encounter wasn't just an isolated event in our past, but it turned out to be the keystone to making M.E. a vital reality in our five parishes on Lembata.

We brought in other couples and prepared further encounters and we found out that ours was not a unique experience. By using the tools of M.E., others soon were discovering God's plan for happiness in marriage is fulfilled in the real "coupleness" of understanding, forgiving and deeply receiving each other.

Many couples came to join new weekend encounters because they saw the very real differences in their neighbors' marriages. Where formerly the husband was more concerned with discipline or accomplishments in the workplace, now he took a real personal interest in the lives of his fellow workers. The wife had seen herself merely as a slave in the family, now she would involve the whole family, the whole neighborhood in some kind of togetherness. The changes seemed to spread from couple to couple, their children, and the neighbors. M.E. became a real family in our midst. I think the most influential changes were brought about by the evident and genuine unselfishness that was demonstrated from encounter to encounter. Some couples said, "Imagine Father, they were willing to give us a whole weekend out of their lives just to help us be happy".

My own involvement with M.E. as a priest has been most enriching-a strong boost to my priestly and missionary life. Seeing how God makes use of other human beings to bring His grace of love, caring love, to others all over our land. That's what we celebrated on the fifth anniversary of M.E. - stability of love in our married couples, grounded in God who is after all "love" in person. The Marriage Encounter Weekends in our parishes continue. Ten to twenty couples a weekend; never mind the time, the distance, the difficulty of travel; Couple Power continues to grow. It works on every level of society. M. E. can transform a good marriage into a great one; an average couple into a more alive couple; an introverted couple into a more outreaching couple. It works in making our parishes a band of loving believers.

(This article is reprinted with permission from Divine Word Missionaries magazine.)

Click here for a printable version (PDF, 12KB)