LAST Saturday we had two weddings at our church in the City.

The ribboned Rolls swept up Lombard Street. The summer warmth held on brilliantly. The afternoon sunshine poured through the high windows and lit the bride's face like a Vermeer as she knelt at the chancel step.

There are two parts of the marriage ceremony that I particularly like: first, when the groom puts the ring on her finger to those six words of one syllable going back to the age of Chaucer, "With this ring I thee wed"; and then in the oak-panelled vestry when they sit and sign the register. But this evocative, memorable signing ceremony will disappear if Government proposals are accepted.

It wants to do away with all written records and instead stash all our data on a central computer. This is a proposal so philistine, destructive and naff that it deserves to be kicked into touch immediately. On the practical level, what if someone wants confirmation of his marriage, but the computer has broken down? Computers have been known to crash. A piece of paper placed in a box and tied up with pink ribbon is far more reliable. But that's only the half of it.

When there happens a momentous event - a birth, marriage or death - we all need help to assimilate the profound and unsettling emotions which we feel at these times. Actually to do something tangible and loaded with meaning, such as signing or procuring the appropriate certificate, marks the occasion, joyful or sad, more directly and humanely than any computer registration ever could.

I remember registering the births of all my children. You had to shift yourself and actually get on the bus and go into town to the Registrar's office, give him the details of your new offspring and sit there while he wrote the certificate. And you come away with something meaningful, tangible. It was even more moving when I went into Leeds Register Office in 1987 to record the death of my father. Believe me, having something to do like that on the very day he died helped me enormously through my grief.

Going back to last Saturday's weddings, I know how much the happy couple delight in receiving the smart printed certificate. When all the signing is finished and the photographer has snapped his last close-up, you hand the bride the certificate - and she gives it to her husband because she ain't got no pockets in her dress. It's a lovely little act, a beautiful small drama. It's part of the sacramental meaning of marriage. Sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual graces: water at the christening, the ring at the wedding and, at our last departing, "earth to earth" at the graveside. Sacraments are the living proof that there's more to life than the mere abstractions of electronic data.

It is typical of New Labour to propose to abolish these old and traditional comforts. It is all part of their relentless "modernisation" process - that is their obsession with removing from national life anything that reminds people of a more elegant and human way of doing things. If we're talking about doing away with anything, I wish we could do away with the destructive process of modernising everything - and now literally from the cradle to the grave.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.