There are several praises about which to be thankful today. That Dana said, "Yes," is the first and greatest. (So as not to create unnecessary suspense, the second is that I'm gainfully employed - praise the Lord indeed. The third must remain unspoken and it's not yet an assured thing.)
I love how life doesn't do what we expect it to do. I expected to be deliriously happy, and I am. I expected to feel like I'd reached this decision only after giving due consideration to every angle, and I have. I expected to feel both doubt and confidence, and I do. What I didn't expect was to feel so deeply humbled.
It's a strange thing. I feel like I've got so much more understanding than when I first married, but I still feel more like the fool of Proverbs fame than ever. Solomon talked about the wise man, the evil man and the foolish man. The foolish man was more naive than evil, and that's how I feel today.
The cliche artist in me rushes to rejoice I've found the trailhead to wisdom, but the bruised 45 year-old man in me looks at scripture and history and the great cloud of witnesses who have believed before me and mutters something about shutting up and getting on with it.
The Lord has blessed me with the love of a precious woman who treasures the same things I do, in a completely different way than I ever could. I love her joyfully and thankfully and look forward to a life of many mistakes as we start all over again from the middle.
Thank you Lord Jesus.
Thank you, my friends, for supporting me over the years. You made a rich difference.
Showing posts with label Divorce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Divorce. Show all posts
11 October, 2009
28 September, 2008
Why We Divorce
Salvo Mag started up a conversation between me and my son. The magazine is excellent for that. If any of you need such fodder, I HIGHLY recommend it. I even agree with it quite often.
Anyway, Salvo blamed the rising and already astronomical divorce rate on something. I'll let you read it for yourself to find out what. I'm going to give you the rant I went on over it. The conversation was pretty awkward, because I'm one of those statistics, but I never let a little awkwardness stop me. I argued that everyone's wrong about the reasons behind the crazy divorce rates.
The Left Wing often says the divorce rates went up as soon as women were no longer forced by economic necessity to survive in empty, unfulfilling and even abusive marriages. They have a fascinating data point, and one for which I have respect. The divorce rate in any society increases and decreases in lockstep with the degree to which women are treated like chattel. As women become freer, the divorce rate increases. With this data, they point out the essential inequality of the deal women get in marriage. Women, they assert, immediately realize how much better off they are alone when the option becomes viable for them.
The Right Wing usually says all us divorcees just lacked commitment. The romantic excitement went away, and things got hard, and we all caved and ran away looking for greener pastures. They point to the hippy generation's free love mindset and the Boomer's self-obsession and find all the explanation they could possibly want. The "Greatest Generation" died and left America in the hands of a bunch of selfish cowards. When the marital going got tough, we walked away.
Bzzzt.
It seems to me both arguments are paper thin on the surface. The lefties cannot possibly imagine women are better off alone. Raising kids is the most fulfilling experience life offers us in our 30's and 40's, but doing it as a single parent is devastating. There's still good and joy in it, but the workload kills you a little bit every day. And financially, the single life is stupid. To be single financially is to have no backup plan, and to pay double for most of the resources in your life. (Housing, food, utilities, etc. could all be split with a spouse.) The idea that women are freer just because there's not anyone committed to facing life with them is silly.
The righties could possibly be more insulting, but I don't know how. Everyone who says divorcees lack commitment has simply tattooed on their forehead that they've never been divorced. Again, I don't know any Christian who got bored and decided to spice things up by starting over fresh with a new face. Pretty much when your "answer" on any subject is that everyone's lazy, you're missing something key. I just wish evangelical Christians wouldn't miss this one from the rooftops with their bibles held high over their heads, because millions of broken souls have no way to take their self-righteous accusations helpfully. They just turn away, every bit as lost and broken as they were before Jesus' self-appointed representative stepped in to "help."
Still, we all need an explanation for the hockey stick that describes divorce rates from 1960 until the present.
The explanation is simple. None of us knows how to stay married any more.
It's a skills thing. Our parents used to be involved in helping us judge the quality of our prospective spouses, and after we'd chosen someone to wear our ring, they were "present" enough in our lives to help us navigate a course through those critical first rollercoaster humps.
Who's involved now?
Our parents used to live a couple blocks away from their Mom and Dad. Now we live a couple states away. The extended family used to be the only family there was. Now, it's almost weird to stay in touch with Mom and Dad, much less to lean on them for help and advice. Moms and Dads used to watch "that son-in-law of theirs" and if things got iffy, they got mad. Not any more. These days we keep everything to ourselves, and our parents never hear about our problems, even if they can see them.
And we are hopelessly awkward at fighting. Spouses used to know how to have a good fight and a good forgive. These days the fights are too intense and the forgiveness is too shallow. Consequently, we don't know how to complain to each other. If you cannot complain without starting a too-strong, too-permanent fight, then you won't complain. And if you don't complain, things that could be changed fester. We panic at every conflict.
And that's caused because we don't know about the rhythms of relationship.
We're told that the emotion in a marriage follows a steep downward curve and bottoms out by about year 10 of marriage. If you ask many kids today to draw the trajectory of romantic love in marriage, you'll get something that looks like the current housing market - it starts high and spends the next 50 years in the toilet.
But that picture is not true. Instead, romantic love starts high, dips low, bounces back a little less high, dips a little less low, and through this process eventually settles somewhere in the middle of the scale. No one taught us that. No one taught us it was so simple, so when the first huge dip came we poured heart and soul into getting the fight resolved and the love restored. And when we "won" and everything was back where it should be, we relaxed - only to find ourselves speeding into another dip. We wore ourselves out trying to fight every dip and depression, when all we had to do was trust each other and exercise courtesy, honesty, and forgiveness.
Our generation KNOWS that you need a personal trainer to lose weight or learn tennis. Anything that requires actual skill requires meaningful training. No one tries to become a good tennis player without finding a good coach to give them the basics.
So what do we think? Marriage is easy?!?!
Marriage requires no skill?
Anyone can have a successful marriage if they are willing to be enslaved and if they have enough commitment?
When my wife and I were struggling through those first years of marriage, we had no training and no support. I don't think we were unique in that. We had another couple going through the same stuff we were, but we couldn't really talk to them. Church leadership didn't care to be involved, and our families were so distant as to be no influence at all.
We were guessing!
The real question is how we guessed right for 16 years given all the ballast we were carrying. But we were Americans, and we were smart, and we were successful at so many things. And it looked like things were working for so long, and we made it through so many high waters together. We sweated out days and months and years of low times, and we made it. Up until the last year of our marriage, we were proud of how we'd faced everything together.
But every struggle took its toll.
Go ahead and lecture me about not being committed. What? Do you think I haven't played that mp3 in my head? You can be as committed to tennis as you want. If you lack training, you'll injure yourself while learning nothing so much as to hate the game.
All our successes taught us to hate the marriage.
It takes a village to make a marriage. Look back on history, and you're fooling yourself if you think you see greater commitment in 1950. You're fooling yourself if you think you see women who wanted to be free, but couldn't find a way out. Look back on a world that lacked the isolating entertainment of the television, though, and I think you're onto something. Those kids HAD to play with each other, and they learned profitable conflict. There was nothing else. Look back on a world that expected parents to be involved in their adult children's lives. You can see the last vestiges of that world played out in the sitcoms that made the mother-in-law a villain. Mother-in-law jokes aren't funny any more, because there's no more friction there. The mother-in-law is half a state away, and the young couple has her visitation rights carefully controlled.
Nobody meddles any more, and it's costing us dearly.
We need help.
Anyway, Salvo blamed the rising and already astronomical divorce rate on something. I'll let you read it for yourself to find out what. I'm going to give you the rant I went on over it. The conversation was pretty awkward, because I'm one of those statistics, but I never let a little awkwardness stop me. I argued that everyone's wrong about the reasons behind the crazy divorce rates.
The Left Wing often says the divorce rates went up as soon as women were no longer forced by economic necessity to survive in empty, unfulfilling and even abusive marriages. They have a fascinating data point, and one for which I have respect. The divorce rate in any society increases and decreases in lockstep with the degree to which women are treated like chattel. As women become freer, the divorce rate increases. With this data, they point out the essential inequality of the deal women get in marriage. Women, they assert, immediately realize how much better off they are alone when the option becomes viable for them.
The Right Wing usually says all us divorcees just lacked commitment. The romantic excitement went away, and things got hard, and we all caved and ran away looking for greener pastures. They point to the hippy generation's free love mindset and the Boomer's self-obsession and find all the explanation they could possibly want. The "Greatest Generation" died and left America in the hands of a bunch of selfish cowards. When the marital going got tough, we walked away.
Bzzzt.
It seems to me both arguments are paper thin on the surface. The lefties cannot possibly imagine women are better off alone. Raising kids is the most fulfilling experience life offers us in our 30's and 40's, but doing it as a single parent is devastating. There's still good and joy in it, but the workload kills you a little bit every day. And financially, the single life is stupid. To be single financially is to have no backup plan, and to pay double for most of the resources in your life. (Housing, food, utilities, etc. could all be split with a spouse.) The idea that women are freer just because there's not anyone committed to facing life with them is silly.
The righties could possibly be more insulting, but I don't know how. Everyone who says divorcees lack commitment has simply tattooed on their forehead that they've never been divorced. Again, I don't know any Christian who got bored and decided to spice things up by starting over fresh with a new face. Pretty much when your "answer" on any subject is that everyone's lazy, you're missing something key. I just wish evangelical Christians wouldn't miss this one from the rooftops with their bibles held high over their heads, because millions of broken souls have no way to take their self-righteous accusations helpfully. They just turn away, every bit as lost and broken as they were before Jesus' self-appointed representative stepped in to "help."
Still, we all need an explanation for the hockey stick that describes divorce rates from 1960 until the present.
The explanation is simple. None of us knows how to stay married any more.
It's a skills thing. Our parents used to be involved in helping us judge the quality of our prospective spouses, and after we'd chosen someone to wear our ring, they were "present" enough in our lives to help us navigate a course through those critical first rollercoaster humps.
Who's involved now?
Our parents used to live a couple blocks away from their Mom and Dad. Now we live a couple states away. The extended family used to be the only family there was. Now, it's almost weird to stay in touch with Mom and Dad, much less to lean on them for help and advice. Moms and Dads used to watch "that son-in-law of theirs" and if things got iffy, they got mad. Not any more. These days we keep everything to ourselves, and our parents never hear about our problems, even if they can see them.
And we are hopelessly awkward at fighting. Spouses used to know how to have a good fight and a good forgive. These days the fights are too intense and the forgiveness is too shallow. Consequently, we don't know how to complain to each other. If you cannot complain without starting a too-strong, too-permanent fight, then you won't complain. And if you don't complain, things that could be changed fester. We panic at every conflict.
And that's caused because we don't know about the rhythms of relationship.
We're told that the emotion in a marriage follows a steep downward curve and bottoms out by about year 10 of marriage. If you ask many kids today to draw the trajectory of romantic love in marriage, you'll get something that looks like the current housing market - it starts high and spends the next 50 years in the toilet.
But that picture is not true. Instead, romantic love starts high, dips low, bounces back a little less high, dips a little less low, and through this process eventually settles somewhere in the middle of the scale. No one taught us that. No one taught us it was so simple, so when the first huge dip came we poured heart and soul into getting the fight resolved and the love restored. And when we "won" and everything was back where it should be, we relaxed - only to find ourselves speeding into another dip. We wore ourselves out trying to fight every dip and depression, when all we had to do was trust each other and exercise courtesy, honesty, and forgiveness.
Our generation KNOWS that you need a personal trainer to lose weight or learn tennis. Anything that requires actual skill requires meaningful training. No one tries to become a good tennis player without finding a good coach to give them the basics.
So what do we think? Marriage is easy?!?!
Marriage requires no skill?
Anyone can have a successful marriage if they are willing to be enslaved and if they have enough commitment?
When my wife and I were struggling through those first years of marriage, we had no training and no support. I don't think we were unique in that. We had another couple going through the same stuff we were, but we couldn't really talk to them. Church leadership didn't care to be involved, and our families were so distant as to be no influence at all.
We were guessing!
The real question is how we guessed right for 16 years given all the ballast we were carrying. But we were Americans, and we were smart, and we were successful at so many things. And it looked like things were working for so long, and we made it through so many high waters together. We sweated out days and months and years of low times, and we made it. Up until the last year of our marriage, we were proud of how we'd faced everything together.
But every struggle took its toll.
Go ahead and lecture me about not being committed. What? Do you think I haven't played that mp3 in my head? You can be as committed to tennis as you want. If you lack training, you'll injure yourself while learning nothing so much as to hate the game.
All our successes taught us to hate the marriage.
It takes a village to make a marriage. Look back on history, and you're fooling yourself if you think you see greater commitment in 1950. You're fooling yourself if you think you see women who wanted to be free, but couldn't find a way out. Look back on a world that lacked the isolating entertainment of the television, though, and I think you're onto something. Those kids HAD to play with each other, and they learned profitable conflict. There was nothing else. Look back on a world that expected parents to be involved in their adult children's lives. You can see the last vestiges of that world played out in the sitcoms that made the mother-in-law a villain. Mother-in-law jokes aren't funny any more, because there's no more friction there. The mother-in-law is half a state away, and the young couple has her visitation rights carefully controlled.
Nobody meddles any more, and it's costing us dearly.
We need help.
16 June, 2008
That Sinking Feeling
Wow. Unanimity. What's that?!
:-)
I'm actually a little surprised that everyone agrees that "the answers" are not all in scripture. It's as if I'd figured out that the Earth is round ... yesterday. Being me, I'd let everyone know of my discovery by making some bold statement about how I was willing to sail past the sunset, confident that I'd return alive. Everyone else would look up from their newspapers and say, "Yeah. It'd be fun to sail past China and under the two great capes, Horn and Good Hope. Enjoy your trip!"
Fortunately, here in blog land, none of you could see my jaw drop. :-)
Well, and I'm still not used to people agreeing with me about much of anything. :-D
I was raised amongst three groups of Christians, all of whom shared basic doctrines and some theological differences, but all of whom were unanimously committed to scripture as the sole, final, absolute, complete, sufficient source for every question of life. Any question more complex than how to get to Arby's could be answered directly, completely and unambiguously from scripture.
Did I mention that my denominational background is, "Damentalist?"
And did I explain that Damentalism is what's left after you take the fun out of fundamentalism?
My Damentalist elders would have had a scriptural answer to my question, "How could I know not to marry a girl in 10 days." They'd have pulled something out of the scriptures (no, not those other places) about many counselors making for safe plans and the Lord not being the author of confusion and haste making waste (some of them would occasionally confuse Ben Franklin with Solomon), and assure me (and themselves) that had I only been firmly grounded in scripture I'd not have made a Gordian Tangle of my life.
Here's the problem, though. The kid sitting next to me would spend 12 years engaged to some poor woman, marry her, and divorce in two years, and they've have found every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did. And some other joker would call responsibly on a young lady, court her for 6 months, be engaged for 12 months and 3 days, and marry her with her father's blessing and muddle his life, and they'd have every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did.
The common factor is that their understanding of scripture's perfect guidance is clearest after-the-fact. They're like gypsies gazing into their crystal ball pronouncing the future as dim, until the dust settles and the weeping's begun. And suddenly, their wisdom doesn't taste like honey in my mouth any more. I just wish it were sweet in my belly.
So, as I look at the possibility that wisdom is something we learn, more like riding a bicycle than being born again, it resonates well against my experience. You all obviously agree with that intuition, and I think scripture would support us together.
But...
Have you thought about the tremendous burden and responsibility that puts on us all?
Hey! Being a Damentalist was easy. As long as I could not think of any scripture to stop me, or at least could plausibly explain it away, I could charge forward with my life like a rhonicerous on the scent of tasty daisies. I could examine the scriptures with an open heart, and whatever it they did not proscribe was fair game.
For example.
I could look at David snatching up Abigail and think 10 days was a LONGGGGG courtship. I could even be proud and thankful that I didn't have to collect the foreskins of 200 Cajuns as a dowry for Michal (and I didn't have to worry about the whole dying while trying thing, either. Those Cajuns can be mighty opinionated about their foreskins, I've heard.) I could even look at a handful of brothers maturing beyond the message of John the Baptist the very first time they heard Christ presented by Paul, and figure it was a wise thing to follow a man who brought a higher gospel.
The bible is full of stories of short courtships, immediate changes of doctrine, and droppings of everything to follow the leading of God.
Haste is commended by scripture over and over and over, if you're looking for that sort of thing. And my personality is always looking for a good reason to make haste. Always. Always. I'll even settle for silence on the subject that just lets me make my haste with a low-humming conscience. It doesn't strictly have to "quiet" for me.
But if the scripture is silent on some things, then I need to be cautious. I need to seek wisdom. I need to be sure I'm not being an idiot. Or simple. Or even a fool. If the scripture proscribes only those things that might show me to be evil, but leaves unmentioned some things that might show me to be simple or a fool, then I need to grow up.
It's a shame to have to learn that at 44, but I'm afraid I'll learn it again at 54, and again at 64. If the Lord is kind to burn this lesson into my memory through the fires of self-imposed experience, then maybe I'll only have to learn it this one last (major) time.
And I'll lay one more responsibility at my feet, and this one may fall at yours, too. As the church, as one of the three that agree on Earth (thank you, Missy!), I have a responsibility to those I see being foolish as I was foolish. I have a responsibility to turn my hard-earned wisdom into their narrow escape. And when I say responsibility, I mean that the church needs her holders of wisdom to step forward for those who need them. I mean that the Lord needs those who have received wisdom at His hands to pass it along to His sheep. I mean that He might hold us responsible for hiding our experiences from each other.
Perhaps the only purpose for my life is to serve as an example to others (http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html) but I think maybe that's a pretty important thing.
:-)
I'm actually a little surprised that everyone agrees that "the answers" are not all in scripture. It's as if I'd figured out that the Earth is round ... yesterday. Being me, I'd let everyone know of my discovery by making some bold statement about how I was willing to sail past the sunset, confident that I'd return alive. Everyone else would look up from their newspapers and say, "Yeah. It'd be fun to sail past China and under the two great capes, Horn and Good Hope. Enjoy your trip!"
Fortunately, here in blog land, none of you could see my jaw drop. :-)
Well, and I'm still not used to people agreeing with me about much of anything. :-D
I was raised amongst three groups of Christians, all of whom shared basic doctrines and some theological differences, but all of whom were unanimously committed to scripture as the sole, final, absolute, complete, sufficient source for every question of life. Any question more complex than how to get to Arby's could be answered directly, completely and unambiguously from scripture.
Did I mention that my denominational background is, "Damentalist?"
And did I explain that Damentalism is what's left after you take the fun out of fundamentalism?
My Damentalist elders would have had a scriptural answer to my question, "How could I know not to marry a girl in 10 days." They'd have pulled something out of the scriptures (no, not those other places) about many counselors making for safe plans and the Lord not being the author of confusion and haste making waste (some of them would occasionally confuse Ben Franklin with Solomon), and assure me (and themselves) that had I only been firmly grounded in scripture I'd not have made a Gordian Tangle of my life.
Here's the problem, though. The kid sitting next to me would spend 12 years engaged to some poor woman, marry her, and divorce in two years, and they've have found every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did. And some other joker would call responsibly on a young lady, court her for 6 months, be engaged for 12 months and 3 days, and marry her with her father's blessing and muddle his life, and they'd have every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did.
The common factor is that their understanding of scripture's perfect guidance is clearest after-the-fact. They're like gypsies gazing into their crystal ball pronouncing the future as dim, until the dust settles and the weeping's begun. And suddenly, their wisdom doesn't taste like honey in my mouth any more. I just wish it were sweet in my belly.
So, as I look at the possibility that wisdom is something we learn, more like riding a bicycle than being born again, it resonates well against my experience. You all obviously agree with that intuition, and I think scripture would support us together.
But...
Have you thought about the tremendous burden and responsibility that puts on us all?
Hey! Being a Damentalist was easy. As long as I could not think of any scripture to stop me, or at least could plausibly explain it away, I could charge forward with my life like a rhonicerous on the scent of tasty daisies. I could examine the scriptures with an open heart, and whatever it they did not proscribe was fair game.
For example.
I could look at David snatching up Abigail and think 10 days was a LONGGGGG courtship. I could even be proud and thankful that I didn't have to collect the foreskins of 200 Cajuns as a dowry for Michal (and I didn't have to worry about the whole dying while trying thing, either. Those Cajuns can be mighty opinionated about their foreskins, I've heard.) I could even look at a handful of brothers maturing beyond the message of John the Baptist the very first time they heard Christ presented by Paul, and figure it was a wise thing to follow a man who brought a higher gospel.
The bible is full of stories of short courtships, immediate changes of doctrine, and droppings of everything to follow the leading of God.
Haste is commended by scripture over and over and over, if you're looking for that sort of thing. And my personality is always looking for a good reason to make haste. Always. Always. I'll even settle for silence on the subject that just lets me make my haste with a low-humming conscience. It doesn't strictly have to "quiet" for me.
But if the scripture is silent on some things, then I need to be cautious. I need to seek wisdom. I need to be sure I'm not being an idiot. Or simple. Or even a fool. If the scripture proscribes only those things that might show me to be evil, but leaves unmentioned some things that might show me to be simple or a fool, then I need to grow up.
It's a shame to have to learn that at 44, but I'm afraid I'll learn it again at 54, and again at 64. If the Lord is kind to burn this lesson into my memory through the fires of self-imposed experience, then maybe I'll only have to learn it this one last (major) time.
And I'll lay one more responsibility at my feet, and this one may fall at yours, too. As the church, as one of the three that agree on Earth (thank you, Missy!), I have a responsibility to those I see being foolish as I was foolish. I have a responsibility to turn my hard-earned wisdom into their narrow escape. And when I say responsibility, I mean that the church needs her holders of wisdom to step forward for those who need them. I mean that the Lord needs those who have received wisdom at His hands to pass it along to His sheep. I mean that He might hold us responsible for hiding our experiences from each other.
Perhaps the only purpose for my life is to serve as an example to others (http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html) but I think maybe that's a pretty important thing.
28 November, 2007
Current Ruminations on Divorce in the Christian's Life
I asked a few weeks ago what everyone thought about this crazy idea I'd heard that maybe God might allow divorce for causes other than adultery. I said I would go away and think about it and come back.
Here's the "come back" part.
It will be a year or two before I'm fully comfortable with any position after such a major change in perspective, but I'll tell you where I am today and that I'm surprisingly enough, pretty comfortable with it. In this post, I'm not going to go into a lot of explanation regarding the scriptural digging that brought me here. If the whim strikes me, or someone asks, I might put together such a tour de doubt. We'll see.
Anyway, here's the score. I do not stand behind the accuracy of these opinions yet, but I throw them out for thinking out loud purposes.
From my earliest age, marriage was presented to me as a sacred union, in the sacramental sense. The bonding of two people in marriage was a spiritually "creative" event. Where there were two people before, now there were almost three. There were the first two people, and there was this third person who was the combined spirits of those two people. God saw them as one person, and that mingling of spirits happened before God as much as on Earth. Their union became a conduit for the grace of God into their lives and into the world, and its maintenance as much a sacred requirement as the Lord's Supper or baptism.
At the same time, marriage was presented to me as a profound spiritual failure for anyone who might have a call of God on their life. This was never explicitly stated, but it always seemed to be written between the lines. Paul thought it was better if I abode alone. The person who marries will have tribulation, and will have split allegiances. Jesus found those who eunuched themselves to be rare and highly gifted people. Some had the gift of singleness, and the rest succumbed to putting out the fire of selfish sexual or emotional desire by marriage, even at the detriment of the kingdom.
As frequently observed here and elsewhere, I am a little hard on myself at times. I doubt anyone ever actually put these burdens on me, but that they tried to present a balanced message. I probably heard the burdens much more strongly than they were intended. Still, I believe I was hearing an actual implied "ideal" behind the pragmatic "balance" that was being presented. I believe the unrealistic ideal of celibacy was mentioned, and the second best ideal was a high spiritualization of marriage.
Let me file away the thoughts on celibacy for a minute, and concentrate only on the elevation of marriage to a sacrament.
Adam says he will become one flesh with his wife. Nowhere in the Old Testament does anyone go beyond this simple description of marriage. It is not until Paul says in 1 Cor 6 that being joined to a harlot is a joining of a body dedicated to Christ with sin that the definition of marriage begins to get a little sticky, especially when that passage is linked to "be not yoked unequally." But even then, Paul never says anything about the spirits of the believer and the harlot having been joined. The joining is human, not sacramental.
At some point some man decided he could gain power by making marriage and its act a matter of direct spiritual concern. Some priest came up with the idea that marriage should be handled with the same gloves as new birth, baptism and the Lord's Supper - namely priestly gloves.
This was not a blessing to anyone.
Instead, as I look at scripture I am come to see marriage as a contractual relationship. I don't see any other contractual relationship in scripture that parallel's marriage, either. Marriage towers above every other contract I can think of. In almost every other part of life, we are told to let our Yes be Yes, and our No be No, and that everything more than this is sin. In marriage, we see conditions and penalties like in no other binding agreement. The partners must provide shelter, food and the duties of marriage to each other, or the marriage is justly made null - even when the wife is merely a freed slave. If a man marries a slave and he later abandons her, she goes out from the marriage a free woman. She goes into the marriage in bondage and leaves the marriage a freed woman without paying the price of a slave's release. (Exodus 21:7-11)
Per Moses, the three duties of marriage listed above are contractual obligations binding upon both parties. And God played by those rules. He provided for Israel, and betrothed Himself to her. In Israel the betrothal period was no cooling off period before the marriage, but the true and binding beginning of the marriage, even though it was a period of chastity. So God was fully, if yet chastely, married to Israel when He divorced her. She had violated the duties of marriage, and God justly cast her from Himself. God expressed regret for her decision, but no remorse for His own action. And He did not consider Himself to have hindered His right to be fully and desirably married in the future.
If marriage is a spiritual sacrament, extending into the heavenly realm, then such freedom in divorce is not available to humanity. If marriage is a contract with valid binding/freeing conditions, then freedom equal to God's is available to us. When our contractual expectations are violated, we have a right to require the breach be remedied in some appropriate way. When no other way is appropriate, then divorce is a fully allowed option. God used it.
But Jesus changed the rules. Or rather, Jesus' words to the rabbis have been interpreted as a changing of the rules. Jesus seems to say that there are no longer three contractual obligations in marriage, but only one. The man need no longer provide food and shelter to the woman or even sex, as long as he refrains from fornication.
Given the perceived tightening of the rules by Jesus, I have always maintained that divorce is legal in all conditions where it is desirable, but remarriage is only allowed when one spouse has committed adultery, and then only for the victimized spouse. Hence, I have always felt personally justified and free to remarry (except for the celibacy discussion which I am defering until the end.)
This has been a hard place for me. I have friends who initiated divorces because of abuse, and I could not have blessed their remarriages. Then again, as ladies who had already had children and who had been abused in marriage, not one of them ever had a desire to remarry so my silence was a moot point. It was an awkward thing for me, even if not really for them.
If Jesus truly ramped up the requirements of marriage, then I must stand by His words. Those women should not divorce, but could. If they did divorce, though, they could not remarry without committing adultery. This passed every test of doctrine, but failed the ultimate test of all doctrines - does it leave the donkey in the pit until the end of the Sabbath? (Luke 14:5) Any time a doctrine hurts someone honestly doing everything in his or her power to please God from a true heart, the doctrine is wrong. It's just a matter of figuring out how and why.
Then I read the argument about which I asked my question of everyone. The argument stands on its own two feet, but the proof to me is that it allows me to pull donkeys out of pits on Sabbath days. It allows me to bless the honest remarriages of honest women who are brave enough to try again. (Please remember that for my own case, I had been given my "get out of pit free" card already.)
The argument is simply this. Jesus was asked by the rabbis whether ambiguous term "duties of marriage" meant any of the hundreds of legitimate duties of marriage, or whether it specifically meant fornication. Jesus answered strongly that divorce is separating something that God put together (flesh), and that it was only permitted for fornication. The argument was that the rabbis did not ask about divorce for lack of food and shelter because those were obvious points. Divorce simply was allowed in those cases. The point up for debate was what the ambiguous term, "duties of marriage," meant. Therefore, Jesus also did not state the obvious, but only answered the point up for debate. "Duties of marriage" could not be made the legitimate cause of a divorce except in case of fornication. (And "fornication" is "porneia" in Greek, which includes things we hardly call fornication these days. Divorce for pornography addiction is legitimate even by the tightest interpretation of Christ's words.)
The argument delved into other Greek which I am not going to do here, but it was persuasive.
More importantly to me, the argument aligns with the things I see in 1 Cor 7, and other such places. It aligns with the donkey stuck in the pit. It aligns with marriage being a joining of flesh on earth, as opposed to spirits in heaven. It even aligns with marriage as a flesh and blood type of the marriage of the Bridegroom to His church, because He divorced the fornicating bride and married one whom He had made pure.
So divorce for true and continuous violation of any of the three contractual obligations is authorized by God, and a remarriage afterward is pure.
But this brings me back to the discussion of celibacy.
I have believed for the last 4 years that I could be freely and cleanly remarried, but I've not believed it in my heart. For the last 30+ years, my gut has believed that marriage is the lesser path. The scripture says some people are given the gift of singleness and some people are not. Full Stop. So if remarriage was a lesser path the first time around, then how empty must it be the second time?
Only that's not what the scripture says. And I did not realize it until recently.
Paul actually says refering to marriage:
1 Cor 7:7
For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.
Every man has his proper gift, and to labor to exercise a gift that is not properly mine is a recipe for a misery God does not have planned for me. There is no honor to God in living outside of the gift He's properly intended for me, even if such self-denial seems spiritual as an act of "will worship."
I have made this last little argument briefly and in the first person, because I'm the only person I know who has struggled with it. It's awkward talking in the third person when I don't know anyone else to whom it might apply, so there you have it.
I hope no one thinks prematurely that they have found answers in these thoughts, because they are not yet safe to be leaned upon. They are not yet proven in any way. But if they have helped anyone in their personal sifting of the scriptures for wisdom, then I'll be quite happy.
May the Lord grant us wisdom.
Here's the "come back" part.
It will be a year or two before I'm fully comfortable with any position after such a major change in perspective, but I'll tell you where I am today and that I'm surprisingly enough, pretty comfortable with it. In this post, I'm not going to go into a lot of explanation regarding the scriptural digging that brought me here. If the whim strikes me, or someone asks, I might put together such a tour de doubt. We'll see.
Anyway, here's the score. I do not stand behind the accuracy of these opinions yet, but I throw them out for thinking out loud purposes.
From my earliest age, marriage was presented to me as a sacred union, in the sacramental sense. The bonding of two people in marriage was a spiritually "creative" event. Where there were two people before, now there were almost three. There were the first two people, and there was this third person who was the combined spirits of those two people. God saw them as one person, and that mingling of spirits happened before God as much as on Earth. Their union became a conduit for the grace of God into their lives and into the world, and its maintenance as much a sacred requirement as the Lord's Supper or baptism.
At the same time, marriage was presented to me as a profound spiritual failure for anyone who might have a call of God on their life. This was never explicitly stated, but it always seemed to be written between the lines. Paul thought it was better if I abode alone. The person who marries will have tribulation, and will have split allegiances. Jesus found those who eunuched themselves to be rare and highly gifted people. Some had the gift of singleness, and the rest succumbed to putting out the fire of selfish sexual or emotional desire by marriage, even at the detriment of the kingdom.
As frequently observed here and elsewhere, I am a little hard on myself at times. I doubt anyone ever actually put these burdens on me, but that they tried to present a balanced message. I probably heard the burdens much more strongly than they were intended. Still, I believe I was hearing an actual implied "ideal" behind the pragmatic "balance" that was being presented. I believe the unrealistic ideal of celibacy was mentioned, and the second best ideal was a high spiritualization of marriage.
Let me file away the thoughts on celibacy for a minute, and concentrate only on the elevation of marriage to a sacrament.
Adam says he will become one flesh with his wife. Nowhere in the Old Testament does anyone go beyond this simple description of marriage. It is not until Paul says in 1 Cor 6 that being joined to a harlot is a joining of a body dedicated to Christ with sin that the definition of marriage begins to get a little sticky, especially when that passage is linked to "be not yoked unequally." But even then, Paul never says anything about the spirits of the believer and the harlot having been joined. The joining is human, not sacramental.
At some point some man decided he could gain power by making marriage and its act a matter of direct spiritual concern. Some priest came up with the idea that marriage should be handled with the same gloves as new birth, baptism and the Lord's Supper - namely priestly gloves.
This was not a blessing to anyone.
Instead, as I look at scripture I am come to see marriage as a contractual relationship. I don't see any other contractual relationship in scripture that parallel's marriage, either. Marriage towers above every other contract I can think of. In almost every other part of life, we are told to let our Yes be Yes, and our No be No, and that everything more than this is sin. In marriage, we see conditions and penalties like in no other binding agreement. The partners must provide shelter, food and the duties of marriage to each other, or the marriage is justly made null - even when the wife is merely a freed slave. If a man marries a slave and he later abandons her, she goes out from the marriage a free woman. She goes into the marriage in bondage and leaves the marriage a freed woman without paying the price of a slave's release. (Exodus 21:7-11)
Per Moses, the three duties of marriage listed above are contractual obligations binding upon both parties. And God played by those rules. He provided for Israel, and betrothed Himself to her. In Israel the betrothal period was no cooling off period before the marriage, but the true and binding beginning of the marriage, even though it was a period of chastity. So God was fully, if yet chastely, married to Israel when He divorced her. She had violated the duties of marriage, and God justly cast her from Himself. God expressed regret for her decision, but no remorse for His own action. And He did not consider Himself to have hindered His right to be fully and desirably married in the future.
If marriage is a spiritual sacrament, extending into the heavenly realm, then such freedom in divorce is not available to humanity. If marriage is a contract with valid binding/freeing conditions, then freedom equal to God's is available to us. When our contractual expectations are violated, we have a right to require the breach be remedied in some appropriate way. When no other way is appropriate, then divorce is a fully allowed option. God used it.
But Jesus changed the rules. Or rather, Jesus' words to the rabbis have been interpreted as a changing of the rules. Jesus seems to say that there are no longer three contractual obligations in marriage, but only one. The man need no longer provide food and shelter to the woman or even sex, as long as he refrains from fornication.
Given the perceived tightening of the rules by Jesus, I have always maintained that divorce is legal in all conditions where it is desirable, but remarriage is only allowed when one spouse has committed adultery, and then only for the victimized spouse. Hence, I have always felt personally justified and free to remarry (except for the celibacy discussion which I am defering until the end.)
This has been a hard place for me. I have friends who initiated divorces because of abuse, and I could not have blessed their remarriages. Then again, as ladies who had already had children and who had been abused in marriage, not one of them ever had a desire to remarry so my silence was a moot point. It was an awkward thing for me, even if not really for them.
If Jesus truly ramped up the requirements of marriage, then I must stand by His words. Those women should not divorce, but could. If they did divorce, though, they could not remarry without committing adultery. This passed every test of doctrine, but failed the ultimate test of all doctrines - does it leave the donkey in the pit until the end of the Sabbath? (Luke 14:5) Any time a doctrine hurts someone honestly doing everything in his or her power to please God from a true heart, the doctrine is wrong. It's just a matter of figuring out how and why.
Then I read the argument about which I asked my question of everyone. The argument stands on its own two feet, but the proof to me is that it allows me to pull donkeys out of pits on Sabbath days. It allows me to bless the honest remarriages of honest women who are brave enough to try again. (Please remember that for my own case, I had been given my "get out of pit free" card already.)
The argument is simply this. Jesus was asked by the rabbis whether ambiguous term "duties of marriage" meant any of the hundreds of legitimate duties of marriage, or whether it specifically meant fornication. Jesus answered strongly that divorce is separating something that God put together (flesh), and that it was only permitted for fornication. The argument was that the rabbis did not ask about divorce for lack of food and shelter because those were obvious points. Divorce simply was allowed in those cases. The point up for debate was what the ambiguous term, "duties of marriage," meant. Therefore, Jesus also did not state the obvious, but only answered the point up for debate. "Duties of marriage" could not be made the legitimate cause of a divorce except in case of fornication. (And "fornication" is "porneia" in Greek, which includes things we hardly call fornication these days. Divorce for pornography addiction is legitimate even by the tightest interpretation of Christ's words.)
The argument delved into other Greek which I am not going to do here, but it was persuasive.
More importantly to me, the argument aligns with the things I see in 1 Cor 7, and other such places. It aligns with the donkey stuck in the pit. It aligns with marriage being a joining of flesh on earth, as opposed to spirits in heaven. It even aligns with marriage as a flesh and blood type of the marriage of the Bridegroom to His church, because He divorced the fornicating bride and married one whom He had made pure.
So divorce for true and continuous violation of any of the three contractual obligations is authorized by God, and a remarriage afterward is pure.
But this brings me back to the discussion of celibacy.
I have believed for the last 4 years that I could be freely and cleanly remarried, but I've not believed it in my heart. For the last 30+ years, my gut has believed that marriage is the lesser path. The scripture says some people are given the gift of singleness and some people are not. Full Stop. So if remarriage was a lesser path the first time around, then how empty must it be the second time?
Only that's not what the scripture says. And I did not realize it until recently.
Paul actually says refering to marriage:
1 Cor 7:7
For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.
Every man has his proper gift, and to labor to exercise a gift that is not properly mine is a recipe for a misery God does not have planned for me. There is no honor to God in living outside of the gift He's properly intended for me, even if such self-denial seems spiritual as an act of "will worship."
I have made this last little argument briefly and in the first person, because I'm the only person I know who has struggled with it. It's awkward talking in the third person when I don't know anyone else to whom it might apply, so there you have it.
I hope no one thinks prematurely that they have found answers in these thoughts, because they are not yet safe to be leaned upon. They are not yet proven in any way. But if they have helped anyone in their personal sifting of the scriptures for wisdom, then I'll be quite happy.
May the Lord grant us wisdom.
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