ADAM and Abigail met over a leaky kettle in a cubbyhole off the same staircase at their Cambridge college. Soon they appeared regularly in each other’s rooms, his on the first floor, hers on the fourth. And halfway through their first term they had become an item. Three years on they went their separate ways with their different degrees. But within a year Abigail had got her own flat, and Adam moved in. Seven years on they are desperate to get married but cannot sort out how.<\/p>\n
They are of different faiths – Adam is an Anglican, Abigail is Jewish. And they are facing a chasm that too many religious institutions – Muslim, Christian and Jewish – have yet to bridge. It is the one area in which many of us are limping way behind the multicultural society and its norms by which most of our nominal adherents now live.<\/p>\n
If the ozone layer and our physical climate have changed in the past decade or two, then the culture within which all our religious institutions operate has changed far more dramatically. It is as if the Equator has moved to the North Pole, and in nothing more so than marriage and its great rival, relationships.<\/p>\n
After centuries and millennia of marrying only members of our own faiths, most of us have yet to offer services and ceremonies to the vast numbers of those who are now forging unions across the barriers.<\/p>\n