eMatrimony.org

Supporting, Encouraging, and Challenging the WWME Community

  News

eMatrimony Newsletter - January 1, 2008

Dear Lovers,

It is with great joy that we introduce the new eMatrimony! This has long been a dream of ours, and we are happy to see the endeavor coming to fruition at the beginning of our 40th anniversary year. We are very grateful to Jon & Hilary Olson for accepting this mission - it is so important for our WWME family to stay informed and connected.

Jon & Hilary were encountered in 2002 and are a presenting team couple in the Austin/Central Texas area of Section 10. They have been married for 23 years and have a teenage son, Jeffrey. Jon is an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Hilary is a research scientist at the University of Texas and also the Director of Communications for their parish, St. John Neumann. Jon & Hilary have published their local area WWME newsletter for five years.

We hope you will like the new format and the topics presented. Many of you may remember fondly the issues of Matrimony Magazine that used to arrive in our mailbox - we hope that this new publication will bring back some of the feelings of excitement we enjoyed in reading and sharing the articles. Please feel free to forward it to your friends. We hope to build our e-mail database in order to reach as much of the WWME "e-community" as we can. We also invite you to submit your stories, your presentations and your thoughts to Jon & Hilary for future issues at ematrimonyed@gmail.com.

We wish you all a blessed New Year. As part of our family, you are in our thoughts and prayers constantly. We are so grateful for your dialogue and for the care you take in loving one another each day. It is because of priests and couples like you that our world is being changed!

We love you,
Tony & Cathy Witczak and Fr. Emile Frische
United States Secretariat Team

Oprah Show Spotlights Good Marriages

Chicago, IL - When Oprah Winfrey hosted a Worldwide Marriage Encounter couple on her show she said, "This is something you can do!" as she let her audience of millions see that couples can have great marriages and can communicate every day in a loving way.

Alton & Patricia Hassell from Texas were guests on Oprah's show, whose theme was Married Couples and Love Stories. The couple explained that they have been writing love letters to each other every day for over 27 years. "It's something we will always do," said Patricia.

Alton explained that they found the concept for the love letters when they attended a Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekend. "At first it was hard to write every day, but then it became more and more natural," Alton said. So natural in fact, that they have over 105 pounds of notebooks containing love letters collected over the years.

Read more...

40th Anniversary - WWME Convention

Do the memories and the impact of your Marriage Encounter Weekend need a little CPR? Has the modern world, with all its demands on your time, caused the shine and sparkle of that wonderful weekend to fade? Remember the weekend you spent rekindling your love for your spouse and learning new ways to keep that love a priority and how good you felt? You can feel that good again, or better.

Start making plans now to join in Worldwide Marriage Encounter's 40th Anniversary, celebrated at the WWME 2008 International Family Convention, held in southern California at the Ontario Convention Center, June 27-29, 2008. We plan to celebrate the 40 years God has blessed our Movement and proclaim our gratitude for God's great love for His people. Our hope is that you will come away rejuvenated once again like you were after your Weekend and continue the mission of WWME to renew the church.

Make it a family vacation to remember and visit some of the world famous fun-filled attractions near the convention center in beautiful southern California on your way to or from the convention. Don't miss out! Take time for some Celebration, Proclamation & Rejuvenation!

For more information on the convention please go to:
http://convention.wwme.org/

We're not Weird, We're ME Kids!
by Adam Ganucheau

It's disheartening for me, as a young Catholic, to hear that 50% of marriages end in divorce. I've been blessed to grow up in an environment that encourages and fosters healthy marriages and relationships. I've been blessed to be an M.E. kid.

My parents have been active in Marriage Encounter since I can remember. It was perfectly normal for me to have my parents go on a weekend; staying at friends' houses was exciting and fun for my brothers and me. When my parents would give pulpit talks, my brothers and I would cut up and laugh when our parents mentioned us. Come to think of it, it doesn't surprise me now that they stopped bringing us to pulpit talks after a while.

It never really fazed my brothers and me to grow up in a M.E. house. We got the chance to meet great couples and their cool kids. It never really occurred to me that my parents' involvement was actually strengthening their marriage and our family life. Now that we are older (I'm 21), we appreciate "the good ole days" a little bit more. My brother Jeff and I will fondly remember the time when we felt "encountered." I was 10 and Jeff was 8; we had missed Mass on that Sunday morning, so the couple we stayed with decided that we would go to the closing Mass of the weekend. Jeff and I sat in the back and watched, and to our surprise, during Communion the couples all went up together hand in hand. We were afraid that we wouldn't be allowed to receive Communion if we went up by ourselves, so with hushed giggles we walked down the aisle together, occasionally holding hands. Our parents had to hold in their laughs as they watched their two sons follow the matrimonial crowd.

Jeff and I can be considered "dorks" or "strange." He downloaded "There's a New World Somewhere" and put it on a CD for his girlfriend. We try our best to explain the "I love you" wave as we sing that famous song. At a recent Steubenville conference of 1,300 Catholic teens, we took pictures of doing the "I love you" wave and singing "There's a New World Somewhere." Our girlfriends, and I'm sure a few others, thought we were weird. But we're not weird. We're M.E. kids.

Section 1 and 2 Convention
Earthen Vessels Enrichment
by David & Christine Baldiga

On the weekend of October 12-14,2007, Section 1 & 2 participated in a joint convention / enrichment based on the Earthen Vessels program. One hundred sacraments came together in Albany, NY to experience this spirit-filled weekend. The weekend focused on answering the question "Is Jesus in Your Marriage?" Fr. Thomas Griffith, SVD, led the enrichment with presenters Fr. Emile Frische, Fr. Larry Brault, John & Sheila Aubin and Jim & Nancy Rizzi.



The Earthen Vessels program reminded us that we have many of the same needs and feelings as Jesus did as he went through the Pascal Mystery. Earthen Vessels gave us a new opportunity to bring Jesus into our dialogue and, in doing so, enhance our dialogue.

Our convention began with a "hands" prayer service on Friday night. We were blessed to have in our midst the Most Reverend Howard J. Hubbard, D.D., Bishop of Albany. The Bishop affirmed our ministry and prayed that we continue our work to renew the Sacrament of Marriage in our Church.

After an intense Saturday session, the attendees enjoyed socializing and dancing to tunes to please all. We concluded our weekend with Mass and a mission given by our US Secretariat Team, Tony & Cathy Witczak and Fr. Emile Frische. The couples and priests were also given a challenge to pray and dialogue for the 250 days leading up to the 40th anniversary Worldwide Marriage Encounter convention to be held in California in June 2008. The money raised through this challenge will go towards bringing the Pan-African Secretariat team to the Convention.

Mission Statement
As an online publication of Worldwide Marriage Encounter, eMatrimony serves as a resource to support, encourage and challenge couples, priests and religious to live the values of the WWME experience and grow stronger in their efforts to renew the church and change the world.