Marriage Encounter
A marriage can never be too good!

CONTACTS: Joan and Mark Zadroga ♦ (908) 580-1878; Bernadette and Stan Grabowy ♦ (908)-507-3115

For married couples looking for an opportunity to deepen their connection and enhance their communication, Saint James Church offers Marriage Encounter.  Marriage Encounter is a weekend for spouses to be alone together, away from the distractions and tensions of everyday life, to rediscover each other and to focus together on their relationship.  The emphasis of Marriage Encounter is on communication and is designed to give married couples time to share their feelings, hopes, disappointments, joys, and frustrations… and to do so openly and honestly, face-to face, heart-to-heart. The encounter weekend teaches a technique which permits each couple to explore important areas of their relationship in a spirit of love and understanding. By continuing the newly-acquired technique begun on the weekend, husbands and wives continually grow closer together to live more joyful and purposeful lives.

Three Catholic couples and a Catholic priest present the program. Marriage Encounter weekends are held regularly at local motels and retreat houses. 

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. Each one of you must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. — Ephesians 5:25-33