by Adam » March 22nd, 2007, 7:08 am
::Oh, plenty of us are all too well aware of those consequences. That doesn't mean we should be condemned to live with them until our spouse dies, though. Nor does it mean that we should merely separate and never try again with another person.
I suppose that I feel that we are bound more tightly by word and duty than by reason and purpose. If we pledge our lives to another and then later find that they are unworthy of it, what is wrong is not merely their lack of worth (they are who they are), but our pledge.
::Jesus's own words aren't clear-cut. You're following Matthew's tradition. But in Mark--and in Paul's reference to Jesus's teachings in First Corinthians--no acceptable reason for divorce is given. Not even adultery.
In my interpretation of Mark 10, the act of separation is a sin. But if Christ says elsewhere that the act of adultery is itself an act of separation, then it is itself the divorce. The trifle of having papers signed only reflects what has already occured; the one who abandons the other, physically, emotionally, or otherwise, has already accomplished the divorce.
As for Paul, I can't recall any mention of remarriage in 1st Corinthians. As I understand him, he lauds celibacy, permits marriage, permits divorce more liberally than Jesus, but denies remarriage, saying that those who's spouse seperates from them are "called to peace," as I understand it, an element of his eschatological Law, that because the end is near there is no cause for either new marriage or remarriage.
::In fact, if an otherwise moral community gets one wrong-headed idea, it can make your life miserable. One Catholic in my family was ostracized by her tight-knit, Irish Catholic community after her divorce. (Let me hasten to add that this was in the 1960's before Vatican II.) Nonetheless, she'd be the first to tell you that staying married just to remain on the right side of your community is a bad idea.
The ostracism does not mean that remaining married in this particular situation was a bad idea. The community should have taken the guilt for sin on it's own hands for not caring for the relationship as it should have.
Marriage is not a bond between a man and a woman. Marriage is a bond between the community and the couple. That is why marriage as it is intended rarely exists at all anymore. The couple who have already committed to one another in heart and mind go forth to the community and ask for recognition and honor, and with it for counsel and support. But no such responsibility is born by the community, and what little sense of the immorality of divorce is left in the community is laid only at the feet of the separated couple, when in fact the party in the marriage who failed to keep their committment was the community, and the great sin of divorce is their own.
"Love is the only art that poorly imitates nature."