FRANCINE Pirola is amongst the many mums being honoured around the country today.
Given her selfless nature it’s likely some of that thanksgiving will be redirected, first to her own mother Margaret, but then jointly to husband Byron and the five children they have raised together.
Co-authors of the Celebrate Love program, the pair will be in Brisbane in July for Pray2010, presenting keynote addresses and workshops for married couples wanting to deepen their relationship through prayer.
Speaking from Sydney, where she runs the Pastoral and Matrimonial Renewal Centre (PMRC), Francine said the material they’d present aims to help couples expand their repertoire of prayer.
“Many couples who pray together will say the rosary, go to Mass or say Grace but there’s so much more that you can do,” Francine said.
“In some ways the most natural form of prayer is praise and thanks, so when we praise God for the goodness of the spouse, we remind ourselves of their good points rather than their deficiencies.
“It has a very practical impact on the relationship, quite apart from the spiritual graces that also come through praying.
“By helping couples to be equipped to pray, they can go beyond their own pain or limitations and love with greater abandonment,” she said.
Of course Francine doesn’t expect you to take her word for it alone, pointing to some recent American research which shows prayer has a definite positive impact in marriage.
Part of the experiment asked for a group to pray specifically for their spouse, firstly in thanksgiving to God for giving them a spouse, but then also by praying to be a good spouse in return.
“What they found was that couples who prayed regularly were more willing to forgive and reported greater levels of satisfaction and harmony in their marriage, and this was borne out over a number of different types of controls.” she said.
“Unfortunately a lot of couples fall into the trap of keeping score when they’ve been hurt by their spouse, especially if the conflict hasn’t been resolved.
“Once they start on that track, however, resentment starts coming into the relationship and scorekeeping is a natural consequence.
“It starts to erode their sense of blessedness in the relationship and they start to feel like they’re giving more than they’re getting back.
“By introducing and expanding the repertoire of prayer for couples we hope to help facilitate an outcome of building gratitude,” she said.
Francine and Byron’s own relationship is built upon the very strong foundations modelled for them by their respective families.
Byron’s parents were instrumental in bringing the Married Encounter program to Australia in the 1970’s and Francine’s were heavily involved in marriage preparation courses and the Antioch movement.
While they sensed they would be active in church life in some way, Francine had no idea that her future lay in fulltime ministry.
“Having five children and committed to being an at home Mum meant that the professional paid career was easily surrendered for the sake of pursuing this mission,” she said.
“I don’t think my husband and I quite appreciated at the time that it would be potentially such an all-embracing activity but it really does occupy my time.
“I have a full-time position and fitting the job and the family in together is like a jigsaw.
“Byron’s time is obviously more limited because he’s still responsible for supporting the family financially, but I don’t think we anticipated it would be the full time ministry which it has developed into,” she said.
Many a married couple would be grateful the pair heeded the Holy Spirit’s call for there is no doubt “Celebrate Love” helps shore up the foundations of the family unit which the secular world seems indifferent to or takes for granted.
In many of his pastoral statements, particularly Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II often spoke of the ‘domestic church’ being the microcosm of the mother church.
“It’s not a hierarchical structure, it’s not a priest and buildings. It’s a family relationship and that of course is mirrored in the trinity,” she said.
“When we look at the church we see this magnificent tradition of the monastic and celibate traditions over centuries and centuries where there’s a real sense of the practices and spiritual exercises that can help individuals and particularly our committed celibates in developing their spirituality.”
The other area of great interest to Francine is exploring the whole notion of couple’s spirituality, and the challenge that blending two spirituality styles presents.
As she and her husband’s own preferences attest, it is easily possible for a marriage to sustain differences.
“My personal style of prayer tends to be more charismatic whereas my husband is private and reflective.
“He doesn’t go in much for verbalised prayer, whereas with charismatics it tends to be very verbal and a lot of the time we don’t even know what we’re praying because we’re praying in tongues.
“We often make the point that every marriage is a mixed faith marriage in that we’ve all got different spiritualities and it’s not about which is better than the other, it’s about how can we share this richness because our spirituality is so integral to who we are as persons.
“We want to share other aspects of our lives. This also needs to be one that forms part of our shared life together.
“That’s what really excites us about the work we do, because no matter how much ambition couples have for their marriage, God’s ambition eclipses it all.
“If we can tap into that ambition there is so much that couples can be that they cannot even conceive of.”
Francine and Byron will make presentations on prayer for a marital spirituality, prayer that nurtures the marriage relationship, prayer practices for the home and praying through your life journey on Friday, July 9 and Saturday, July 10.
To attend register online at www.pray2010.org.au
