A Questionable Marriage

[Image 1. A black and white image of a wedding table. A banner goes across the front saying "Mr & Mrs Kitney." Our family is featured behind the table. From left to Right: Midge 16, James 13, Martyn 41, Hannah 34, Arty 13, and William 15. At the top of is the post title "A Questionable Marriage"]

I mentioned previously that I'm navigating the Church of England’s Canon C4 Faculty (C4.4) as part of the ordination process due to being divorced and remarried, with my current marriage less than three years old. Despite our relationship being nine years old and marked by commitment, honesty, and a deepening love that's beyond what most couples face, tomorrow, I meet my diocese Bishop to discuss my C4 application and my discernment process. The uncertainty about tomorrow sits heavily. It’s hard preparing for a conversation where your life, marriage, and body are all up for interpretation. Every candidate is interviewed by the Bishop, but not all go through C4 Faculty application, and don’t have Canon C4.3 standing ready to evaluate body before vocation. This problem lingers behind the marriage.

C4.3 gives the bishop authority to decide whether any physical or mental “infirmity" prevents someone from ministering. It’s an old mindset that still assumes disability is an obstacle rather than a lived reality. Canon Law stretches back to 1604, and although the C4 amendments were added in 1991, they arrived at a time when disability activists were already challenging society’s actions. Yet the Church chose to reinforce a caution‑shaped framework that treats disabled people as liabilities. Ableism in the Church rarely announces itself; it hides in procedures, assumptions, and the quiet expectation that disabled bodies must justify themselves, reinforced in the recent report on disabled clergy which exposed deep biases structurally embedded by those assessing me.

My health impacted my first marriage. Serious illness and long‑term care place enormous pressure on relationships, something research repeatedly shows. Caring is exhausting. Decline is frightening. Living with deterioration is a daily negotiation. These are realities people rarely name because they expose the vulnerability we all hope to avoid.

Hannah knowingly stepped into our relationship. She read this blog long before we dated. She knew my diagnosis, progression, and future that demands resilience and sacrifice. She still chose to uproot her life in Cornwall, blend our families, the whole me, a marriage where her children would witness my gradual deterioration, and a life where “in sickness and in health” isn’t a distant possibility but a lived reality.

When we planned our wedding, I tried adapting the traditional vow to “in sickness and in ALL health” to avoid the ablest implication that I am the sickness and Hannah as the health. I followed the process. I waited for a response, but received a reminder that unless a movement is behind you, your voice is dismissed. Ultimately, disabled people are only heard when our collective presence becomes too large to ignore.

Vows around sickness and health are meant to be a worst‑case commitment. Most couples hope those words never become reality. They promise to endure something they pray never comes. Statistically, when it does, many marriages don’t survive. That’s not a moral failure, it reflects how hard caring is, how isolating disability is, and how society tries ignoring long‑term illness.

For disabled people, this isn’t hypothetical. It’s life. One Hannah knowingly walked into. I was told I wouldn’t live past 16, 18, 21 and 25. By the time the diagnosis changed to FSHD, the narrative shifted to “you will slowly lose everything.” My first marriage struggled under that weight, among many other things. Hannah knew deterioration was coming, her children would watch it, and the future would be shaped by care, loss, and adaptation. She still loved and married me.

[Imsge 2. From left to right, and top to bottom. Arty is wearing a grey suit and dark denim jeans with a blue tie. James is wearing a grey suit and red tie, William is wearing a grey suit and orange tie. Midge is wearing a green dress. Hannah is wearing an ivory wedding dress. I am wearing a grey suit with a yellow tie. The kids stand behind us, as Hannah and I sit at a table to sign a wedding book. Hannah's bouquet of dried colourful flowers sit centre on the table next to a large candle]

She’s already watched my legs fail, arms weaken, and my independence and activities fade and shrink, but still says “I do” in every action, every day, in ways most people never have to.

Yet this marriage is being questioned. The system focuses on my first marriage, on what went wrong, on what might go wrong again. It slidelines how this marriage is different. It treats us like any other couple, but this is the one time neutrality becomes blindness and the Church needs to see the lived reality. It is painful knowing that the marriage representing me fully through the hardest years of my life is being treated with suspicion.

It's an insult. It undermines Hannah's vows, commitment, and love. It reduces our life together to a risk assessment. I am tired of being read through a lens I did not choose, of having to prove that my life and marriage is not wrong, and of having to fight everything that I do.

Ironically, this is why I am a good ordination candidate. I live a broken life, not in the way the Church fears, but in the deeply human sense the Gospel names. I understand fragility, dependence, loss, and hope, what it means to love and be loved in darkest parts of life, and the people the Church overlooks like me.

Here I am, my marriage, body, story, all held up for examination under a century old Canon that fails to see disabled people as full theological subjects.

I will continue and answer the questions, but I will not pretend the system is neutral. It isn’t. Perhaps naming that truth is the first move toward changing it. Wish me luck or pray for tomorrow's meeting.