Catholic Diocese of Spokane, Washington

From the

Official News Magazine of the Diocese of Spokane

(From the Jan. 13, 2005 edition of the Inland Register)

Joan Ambriz (left) and Melissa McNabb minister to young couples preparing for marriage through Engaged Encounter weekends. (IR photo)

When Joan Ambriz and her fiancé, Eddie, attended an Engaged Encounter Weekend, they viewed it as simply one more hoop they had to jump through so that their priest would allow them to marry in the Catholic Church. They never dreamed they would find a jam-packed weekend that would provide them with life-long tools to make their marriage successful. Now, 17 years later, the Ambrizes co-lead the Engaged Encounter program with Tim and Melissa McNabb.

When Eddie and Joan look back on their young-couple attitude toward Engaged Encounter, they laugh at themselves.

“We were planning on blowing the whole thing off,” said Joan. “Eddie brought his tennis racket (to the weekend). We had no idea.”

Engaged Encounter is a weekend retreat for couples preparing to marry in the Catholic Church. According to the official national website, Engaged Encounter is “an intensive weekend of work during which each couple is offered the time and opportunity to question, examine, and deepen their relationship with each other and with God. Couples are challenged to explore their relationship in a much deeper, more honest way than they have been before.” The national Engaged Encounter organization provides materials and guidelines for local programs to follow.

Engaged Encounter is offered in the Spokane Diocese six times per year. Over the course of the weekend, couples hear 14 talks from married couples and priests. Each weekend is led by a junior couple who has been married for just a few years, a senior couple who has been married for at least 10 years, and a priest.

Though the weekend is led by Catholic couples, who do so from a Catholic perspective, it is not limited to Catholic couples. Both Melissa McNabb and Joan Ambriz clearly emphasize that the weekend is open to all couples and that they always try to be very welcoming.

“We have a lot of mixed religion couples and some non-Catholic couples,” said Ambriz.

“We had a deaf couple once and so we had an interpreter and we’ve even had a guy who didn’t speak any English,” McNabb said.

McNabb and Ambriz characterize Engaged Encounter as an opportunity for couples to get away from the busyness of their daily lives, particularly the activity involved with planning a wedding, and focus completely on each other.

“One of our trademark quotes is, ‘A wedding is a day, a marriage is a lifetime,’” said Ambriz. “So many couples come into the retreat and they’re not prepared for a marriage – they’re prepared for a wedding. This is an opportunity for them to focus completely on each other, and a chance for them to refocus and begin to realize how much more there is to this decision they’ve made.”

Melissa McNabb said that the two-and-a-half-day retreat is separated into three blocks, with the content becoming deeper and more involved as the weekend progresses.

Couples are introduced to the weekend in the Communication Block. Right away, the couples learn to “dialogue,” a specific communication tool that involves writing and talking with one another that they will use throughout the rest of the weekend, and ideally throughout their marriages.

The Marriage Relationship Block encourages the couples to step back and evaluate their reasons for pursuing marriage. They evaluate their personal decision-making and talk about how they will handle decision-making as a couple.

Other topics covered in the Marriage Relationship Block include human sexuality, Natural Family Planning and unity.

The final and most intense block of the weekend is the Sacrament Block. During the Sacrament Block, the head couples and a priest help the engaged couples to understand the sacrament of marriage. They try to help the couples see marriage as a vocation given to them by God and encourage them to include God as the third entity in their union.

“We really emphasize that in marriage, the couple is becoming a sacrament, and how the couple becomes a sacrament,” said Ambriz.

At the end of the retreat, the engaged couples are invited to join the local Engaged Encounter community – couples whose ministry is to put on the Engaged Encounter weekends. They also support and nourish one another in their own marriages. The group meets monthly to socialize, ensure that everyone is healthy and happy and practice the skills they teach on the Engaged Encounter retreats.

“(The community) is the glue that holds our marriage together,” said Ambriz. “There’s a strong sense of family. The monthly meetings give us a chance to stay connected and the community kind of holds your marriage accountable.”

“It’s been very life-giving to our marriage and our family,” said McNabb. “It’s a huge part of our social life, too. Our kids are growing up together.”

Members of the community join together to perform the basic tasks to keep the retreats going, as well. There is a registration couple, a finance couple, a supplies couple, a priest coordinator couple and many others. Each couple also signs up to lead two retreats over the course of the year so the burden does not fall on just a few people. But most of the couples do not find leading the retreats to be work.

“It’s a refresher,” said McNabb. “It’s kind of like going on one every time we lead a weekend. It makes our marriages so much stronger.”

Ambriz said that she and her husband see many couples on each retreat with the same attitude they had when they first attended a weekend – just wanting to get it over and move on with the wedding. “But they come out of it saying how powerful and meaningful it was,” she said. “Almost every single time.”

“And that’s what we want – if you can help one couple on a weekend and make their marriage stronger and more viable, then it’s been successful,” she said.

(For more information about the Engaged Encounter weekends or to sign up for a weekend, contact the registration couple, Steve and Stephani Carlton at (509) 327-3385 or email them at spokaneee@msn.com. To find out how to get involved in the Engaged Encounter community, contact Tim and Melissa McNabb at (509) 464-1148 or Eddie and Joan Ambriz at (509) 466-7657.)