An abbreviated and revised version of an article which appeared originally in The Tablet (3 August 1991, pp. 935-937) under the title, ‘Looking beyond Failure: Life after Divorce’. Some of the ideas expressed owe much to two articles in the 1990/5 issue of Concilium on ‘Coping with Failure’: Dietmar Mieth, The Ethic of Failure and Beginning Again: A forgotten perspective in theological ethics, pp. 45-57; and Elisabeth Bleske, Failure in the Lifelong Project of Fidelity, pp. 105-116.
The death-resurrection paradigm is central to Christian living. Hence, it must colour a Christian approach to morality. Moral theology needs to be sensitive to wherever this death-resurrection paradigm seems to be at work in human life. Moral theology is quite at home, therefore, with our growing understanding that the development of a lasting relationship in marriage seems to follow this death-resurrection paradigm. It arises out of a lot of dying to self on the part of both partners. Our appreciation of what this entails has been heightened since Vatican II encouraged us to think of marriage in personalist rather than contractual terms.
Can moral theology feel equally at home with the suggestion that the death-resurrection paradigm might also be at work in the case of marriage breakdown, with or without subsequent remarriage? It is certainly true that many men and women who have suffered the trauma of marriage breakdown and divorce speak of their experience in terms of dying or bereavement. If this description accurately expresses the experience of marriage breakdown for many couples, there would seem to be something here that moral theology should be paying special attention to. It might be that somewhere in this dying experience of marriage breakdown lies the seed of resurrection and new life. The aim of this article is to offer a few tentative thoughts on this possibility.
What I would like to suggest is that, if marriage breakdown is experienced as a real ‘dying’, there are grounds for hoping that out of this ‘dying’ there might break forth real ‘resurrection and new life’. I am also suggesting that this might be true not merely at the level of the breakdown of individual marriages. It might also be true at a more general level. The phenomenon of increasing marriage breakdown in our society might have hidden within it the seeds of an emerging new life for loving and faithful sexual partnerships. Moreover, I get the impression that this suggestion seems to ring true in the lives of some divorced people I know and also seems to have some backing in the reading I have done on this topic over many years. I would stress that I am not saying that every marriage breakdown and divorce is part of a death-resurrection experience.
It could be argued that ‘no success without failure’ is simply another way of stating the ‘good news’ brought by Jesus. One could even paraphrase one of the well-known sayings of Jesus as: ‘I have not come to call the successful, but failures.’ After all, Jesus kept open table for people whom the religiously successful dismissed as failures. In fact, these so-called ‘failures’ flocked to hear Jesus because he brought them the ‘good news’ that in the eyes of God they were not failures at all.
This ‘good news’ challenges our normal criteria for success and failure. The story of Jesus is not that of a successful man who dedicated his life to empowering the world’s ‘failures’ to become ‘successes’ like him. Jesus deliberately chose a path which he knew was doomed to failure. The Passion and death of Jesus was not an accident. Of set purpose Jesus set his face for Jerusalem and even the baffled apostles could see the inevitable outcome of such a decision.
To deliberately opt for failure seems crazy! Either Jesus has taken leave of his senses or else there is something very mysterious going on here. What we view as success is challenged by the freely-willed dishonourable death of Jesus.
The failure referred to in the statement, ‘success is impossible without failure’, is the same painful and shattering experience humanity has always found failure to be. The ‘good news’ lies in the realignment of the relationship between failure and success. In this realignment success itself is redefined. This goes back to what Jesus said about the need to lose our lives in order to find them. It also ties in with his realignment of the relationship between death and life. There too death remains something we humanly recoil from, an experience which in itself we find meaningless and absurd.
The realignment is one of direction. Failure, for all its pain, is no longer seen as the end of the road, a cul-de-sac leading nowhere. Death is no longer the final full-stop in the last chapter of life, after which the story is ended and there is no more to be said. What is being suggested is that the losing of self which is involved in accepting these experiences is the route – the only route – to finding our true selves. To find our true selves we must necessarily let go of and lose our false selves. And finding our true selves is the Gospel meaning of success. What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and yet lose one’s own true self?
Dorothy Sölle, reflecting on her own experience of marriage breakdown, comments: ‘I noticed that all those who believe limp a little’ (quoted by Mieth, p. 48). This is a very penetrating remark. For me it throws light on something I have noted from my own very limited experience. It is that the common denominator linking many people whom I would consider men and women of deep personal faith is not the style or frequency of their religious practice. Rather it is the fact that they have been through some kind of ‘rock bottom’ experience which has left them feeling weak and powerless, their helplessness totally exposed to themselves and others. Whatever complex array of defence and escape mechanisms they had built up as a mask hiding their real selves from others and, even more so, from themselves had been stripped away. When this ‘rock-bottom’ experience has been the failure of their marriage it has shattered whatever semblance of self-esteem they may have had. The person who had made an act of faith in them when they pledged their marriage vows is now saying: ‘I no longer believe in you. You are not the person I thought you were.’ Such an experience of personal rejection leaves them feeling broken into fragments. It is real ‘dark night of the soul’ stuff. No wonder they describe it in terms of a ‘dying’ experience!
Stripped naked like this a person encounters self with no possibility of selfdeception. In a very real sense such a person is alone before God. Their instinctive cry is: ‘I am worthless. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ Out of the heart of this cloud of unknowing comes the voice of God: ‘This is my beloved son/daughter in whom I am well pleased.’ Paul Tillich describes this experience very powerfully in a celebrated sermon where he speaks of a voice welling up from the depths of a person at such a moment. ‘You are accepted’, it says. Commenting in more general terms on the same deeply personal experience Mieth says: ‘Human beings are worth more before God than they are to themselves’ (p. 46). Dorothy Sölle mentions that the Bible passage which brought her light when she was at rock-bottom was the message Paul heard in his time of weakness: ‘My grace is enough for you: my power is at its best in weakness.’ (2 Cor 12:9) This led Paul himself to comment: ‘For it is when I am weak that I am strong’ (v. 10).
It is in her account of the beginnings of her resurrection that Sölle makes her remark about the limping characteristic of believers. It is worth quoting this whole passage as given by Mieth:
I began to an infinitesimal degree to accept that my husband was going another way, his own way. I had come to the end and God had torn up the first plan. He did not comfort me like a psychologist, who would have explained to me that this was foreseeable. He did not offer me the usual social consolations; he threw me face down on the floor. It was not death that I wanted for myself, nor was it life either. It was another death. Later I noticed that all those who believe limp a little, like Jacob after he had struggled with the angel. They have already died once. One cannot wish this on anyone, but one cannot attempt to spare them the lesson either. There is as little substitute for the experience of faith as there is for the experience of love (Mieth, p. 48).
Faith-provoking failures can come in all shapes and sizes. That is only to be expected, since the unreal selves imprisoning us also come in all shapes and sizes. The question facing moral theologians is whether divorce, with or without remarriage, might be one possible shape of faith-provoking failure. This need not be as shocking as it sounds. After all, a ‘successful marriage’ does not seem to feature in the New Testament among the basic criteria for Christian living. In fact, a ‘successful marriage’ could be part of that ‘whole world’ which it would be pointless to gain if it was to be achieved only through the loss of one’s true self.
To say that God is the author of marriage does not commit us to believing that God issued some kind of formal decree commanding marriage to come into being. We can assume that men and women, created by God, used their God-given intelligence to reflect on their developing experience of living together.
Learning as they went along from their mistakes our forebears discovered the ‘goodness’ of being able to depend on each other for life. They found too that there was usually more chance of peace and harmony in the home – and mutual happiness together – when they kept ‘making love’ as something special to themselves and did not share it with others, even though that did not exclude their loving other people deeply, especially their children. In discovering all this, they were discovering a deep dimension of their own ‘goodness’ as human beings. In this way, as co-authors with God, they brought ‘marriage’ into being. They had learned from experience that this was the ‘good’ way for most men and women to live together. Though it had its difficulties, it brought them happiness and security and provided a home for their children, thus enabling the human family to increase and grow.
To understand marriage as ‘God-given’ in this sense is to appreciate that the institution of marriage is a living tradition. We are faithful to this tradition to the extent that we are open to discovering how best marriage should be lived today. That means we too must learn from our present-day experience as well as from the knowledge we have which was not available to our ancestors. For instance, nowadays we have a richer knowledge and understanding of human sexuality and the generative processes. We also know how the sexual dimension of our lives has a crucial impact on our growth as persons from our earliest years. We have a better appreciation of the way human relationships develop and the stages through which they need to pass. Moreover, our understanding of history and culture has made us aware that human sexual relationships can be lived out in a variety of ways. Our late-twentieth century, Western, rather romantic approach to marriage with its accompanying ‘nuclear family’ model is just one possible way among many in which the marriage relationship has been lived and can be lived. It is not necessarily the best way. So we should be open to learn from experience how marriage today can become better adapted to current needs. If we refuse to draw on the full riches of our modern understanding and insist on imposing on people an earlier model of marriage, we may well find ourselves being unfaithful to the death-resurrection paradigm which is so basic to our Christian faith.
One of the very striking images of the creative work of God is that of the potter, working with his clay, fashioning and refashioning his material, even breaking the vessels in order to reshape them anew. Perhaps that is an image we should keep in mind in our role as co-authors, with God, of the human institution of marriage. Maybe the times we are living in are a very creative moment in the unfolding of God’s plan for the way men and women should live together lovingly and responsibly
A theology of marriage and human relationships which is sensitive to the death-resurrection paradigm at work in human affairs should not only be open to the ‘signs of the times’ at a general level. It should also be able to speak a positive word of hope to men and women who have been through the ‘dying’ experience of the failure of their marriage relationship. The death-resurrection message that can help to release new life in them is not the deadly reiteration of the ‘bad news’ that they have failed. To interpret the Gospel in terms of an obligation to remain faithful to a partnership which in reality has ceased to exist is to impose a burden which cannot but dishearten and crush a person since it is impossible of fulfilment in any meaningful sense. It is refusing to face up to the reality so clearly expressed by Dorothy Sölle: ‘I began to an infinitesimal degree to accept that my husband was going another way, his own way. I had come to the end and God had torn up the first plan’ (Mieth, p. 48).
The death-resurrection message of the Church is not a consolidation of the experience of failure. Rather it offers a positive interpretation of that negative experience. It could perhaps be paraphrased somewhat along the following lines:
You are shattered by your failure. You may feel worthless. This painful experience might lead you to believe that you are not capable of taking on a commitment to lifelong fidelity and sustaining it. Do not believe all that about yourself. The Lord invites you to believe in him and to believe in yourself. You are not alone. He is with you to strengthen you as you continue your journey through life. Arise! Come forth and live. Leave behind your old self, that half-truth you were living. You have lost that false self and found your true self.
Live your new and true life by loving as I have loved you. Have confidence to follow that love wherever it leads you. If your new life turns out to be a life lived in the single state, whether alone or as parent to your children, live it out with complete belief in your own dignity and that of those around you. Live out your singleness as the gift of the richness of yourself to the present and the future. Refuse to let all the love you can share as a single person be devalued by ‘negative’ utopian thinking. That would turn it into a life-denying noose placed round your neck by the restraining obligation of a partnership which no longer exists.
If your new life eventually leads you to a new life-giving relationship, accept that with gratitude and live it out in faith – faith in yourself, in your partner and in your God who is entrusting his gift of love to you in this new chapter of your life.
The experience of some who have been through the painful experience of the failure of their marriage would suggest that a crucial act of faith for them can be the moment when they finally commit themselves to leave the false security of a marriage which has been imprisoning and destroying them and take a major step out into the unknown. Elisabeth Bleske writes: ‘The way of divorce and remarriage … can in fact be a bold decision to life and further development’ (p. 112). When I read that, it reminded me of Rosemary Haughton’s reflection, out of her experience of sharing life with mothers forced to flee with their children from a destructive marriage:
We simply cannot go on pretending that we can put back together the pieces of a theology of marriage which has been shattered by experience. For many women the moment of conversion, the true metanoia, has come when they reach the decision to seek a divorce (‘The Meaning of Marriage in Women’s New Consciousness’, in William P. Roberts, edit., Commitment to Partnership, p. 149).