Helping Heal the Wounds of Divorce

Dear Friends,

Over the last several Sundays, the readings have dealt with issues of human interaction – in the name of God – or not. Last Sunday, those who considered themselves the bearers of God’s word wanted to reject those whom they thought did not have the right to speak God’s word. The week before, we saw Jesus reject the uselessness of children in the grand scheme of religion. Today, Jesus holds up the ideal of marriages that last. Next week, Jesus will ask us all to be willing to let go of everything in order to follow Him.

Whew! So much to take in and to use as the measure of our own lives. 

But let’s concentrate on today’s Gospel. Jesus is deep in conversation with the Pharisees about divorce. In Jesus’ day, only men could initiate the divorce procedure. The reasons for divorce could be flimsy (e.g. she’s an awful cook) or serious (adultery).

Specifically, in this Gospel, Jesus addressed the implications of divorce as it related to women. For a woman, divorce meant total disgrace in the community, loss of income and loss of children. Divorce was a catch 22: it was socially unacceptable for a woman to be on her own. No respectable man would marry a divorced woman. Marriages in Jesus’ time were arranged between families, so in the event of a divorce, whole families were negatively affected. In short, Jesus was addressing divorce, not as we know it today, but as a situation in which a woman was treated as an unwanted possession. Jesus took his listeners back to Genesis (today’s first reading) and reminded them that God made woman and man to be lasting companions, helpmates and partners.

Today, the divorce process is generated by the man or the woman. We know divorce through the experiences of our children, parents, relatives, neighbors, friends. Maybe our own divorce. No one enters marriage planning on divorce. No one enjoys divorce. It is a devastating experience arising out of human frailty, and its causes are numerous.

At its best, the Church needs to be a community of compassion and acceptance for all its members, including those whose marriages have fallen apart. Believers do not accept that our Church is always at its best in the way it handles marriages that end in divorce, but our belonging to the Church does not dissolve because of that. We believe that God is present to the couple who marries, whether the marriage entered into survives or not. God promises to be with us in our life journey, celebrates our victories and holds us up in our defeats, laughs with us in times of joy and cries with us in our moments of sorrow and sadness.

The Scriptural passages having to do with marital fidelity as the ideal are ultimately set against the background of God’s fidelity to the human community, the fidelity of Christ to us all, even in our most pronounced frailty.

The Church continues to look for ways to help heal the wounds of divorce. Some believers have found its solutions helpful. Others have not. The dialogue necessarily goes on. The promise of God to be with both the whole and the broken goes on. Let us be aware enough of the desire of God to hold all of us close that we hold one another close as well.

~ Sister Joan Sobala