E.C.
Well-Known Member
- Jan 12, 2007
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THIS IS A POST IN TAW FOR TAW MEMBERS (which includes honorary members).
I don’t want to forbid all other posts, but I have no interest in a CF-wide discussion between people who do not agree on what Christian authority to teach us is. PLEASE BEAR IN MIND THAT THIS IS THE ORTHODOX CONGREGATIONAL FORUM AND RESPECT THAT NON-ORTHODOX MAY NOT TEACH HERE.
Divorce between practicing Orthodox Christians who both declare repentance and a determination to follow Christ is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Orthodox people should stop doing it and stop justifying it. I’m not talking about non-Orthodox, I’m not talking about non-Christians, I’m not talking about unrepentant apostate adulterers. I’m talking about Mark ch 10, especially verse 9.
And one of the biggest lies is that it is a private affair between the two spouses. No, it is not. It is a communal act, and affects EVERYBODY around us. I learned that when friends got divorced and I was in an outer circle, just becoming friends with them. That “Orthodox” divorce shook me more than my sister’s divorce across the sea at the same time.
We are commanded to love our neighbor and love our enemies. Where in the heck do we think we can make our spouse an exception?
The rejection of this clear Orthodox teaching by people in the Church has driven me into a crisis of faith I’m still not quite out of, the idea that we can reject Christian teaching that we don’t like, think outdated, or “doesn’t apply to people any more”. I can’t even tell you how much that realization, that people in the Church actually do pick and choose which teachings they will keep, and which they will throw out, has crushed my naive belief that we share a common faith, that the Church really IS the Church, and not just another fake organization.
I made it about this far into the thread before realizing the time, but I promise I'll get back to it tomorrow.Agreed, and that case doesn’t fall under what I am talking about. There are bona fide victims in divorce, my sister being one, my mother another. But we tend to jump on the chance to be victims, that drive to ignore our own sins and blame everything on another is the opposite of what we are generally supposed to be doing, and I am talking about two Orthodox Christians who both say they want to continue to try to lead the life we are called to.
Divorce was the first attack on the sanctity of the family. It made all if the other attacks possible. If we admit divorce because people are merely unhappy with each other, then we can’t talk about the sanctity of marriage, period, as we do not hold it as holy. Admitting it in general, outside of the words of Christ, is an attack on MY marriage. It means MY marriage may be dissolved on exactly the same principle, and I myself am a forgiven sinner. I do not judge anyone’s status before God.
I say that the Church has become SO lax on the issue that we need to tighten up our attitude hard, and stop seeing marriage as the world sees it. Exceptions remain exceptions. The 2% is real. But 98% of us are not exceptions on any given form of brokenness, just wannabes. We all want exceptions, the “get out of jail free” card. And we are not supposed to want that.
My parents divorced when I was six and my brother was eight. It was ugly, brutal, and vicious to the point that until my own brother got married nine years ago I honestly thought that staying single was the best course of action for me. Sure, I had a number of girlfriends, but didn't see a future with any of them. Once my older brother got married, I realized that as screwed up as we both are from the divorce wars that if he could be normal enough to marry another normal, stable person than maybe there's some hope for me yet. For a long time I wished that my parents had never divorced and often wondered what life would have been like if they hadn't. It wasn't until the last few years when I saw more of my mother's toxic personality (she objects to my engagement to a foreigner from a mostly brown people country despite her claiming to be a liberal, but that's a rant for another day) when I realized that as crummy as the divorced-kid life was, it would have been worse had they remained married. Objectively speaking, knowing both of my parents well enough, perhaps they shouldn't have gotten married in the first place. My dad was a devout Roman Catholic at the time (now an Orthodox subdeacon) and my mom became Catholic to marry my dad, but I have very few recollections of her actually going to mass with us.
I wish divorce didn't exist. I absolutely do. It tore apart my family, created a civil war out of the Catholic school we attended, and even caused a delay in me receiving emergency medical attention as a teenager because some idiot nurse had the gall to ask "where's his mother" when we hadn't lived with her for at least three years by that point.
Yeah, part of the problem is that nowadays we grant divorces too easily. Why? I'll give an example. My landlady has a friend who is in her 80s. She's been in an unhappy marriage most of her life and especially the last ten years as her husband's mind descends more and more into alzheimer's. Her marriage has been, in her words, horrible for decades. Is it better to live under an uneasy peace or a violent war? That's what divorces really come down to for all involved. And you're right, it isn't limited to the couple in question because then they start demanding that their friends, families, coworkers, neighbors, church friends, and every other acquaintance under the sun take sides. And most of those people don't want to take sides, they just want to remain friends with both and they just want their kids to remain friends with those kids too. It absolutely is a community affair, but since you've brought up the problem of divorce and how it effects the community, what is your solution? Do we ban divorces outright? Do that and you'll end up in the situation that Irish society had for decades when divorce was still illegal: men will abandon their families for women in America, Canada, or the UK while their wives are stuck raising kids unable to collect whatever meager welfare the state or Church provides because officially she's still a dependent of a working man. Do we now put whether a couple could divorce or not to a community vote? Maybe, but we'll just end up with corrupt politics and deals made just like during political elections albeit on a smaller scale.
I think the best thing we can do to prevent divorce is to do a better job at not only preparing for marriage, but also making the expectations clear for it. I'll use the example of Hasidic Jews. In Hasidic Jewish communities, generally speaking, the father studies Torah while the mother runs the household. It is also expected to have a lot of kids because having kids, and lots of them, in that community is seen as a huge blessing from God and a commandment (thou shalt!). The Hasidic Jewish culture works in such a way that those who are raised in it, both men and women, know exactly what they're getting into when it comes to marriage which helps them have an extremely low, virtually non-existent divorce rate. I think that we as Orthodox Christians need to do a better job of preparing our society and communities for HEALTHY marriages. It doesn't mean that one spouse becomes the slave of the other one, but it does mean that they need to know what marriage is all about in the Orthodox Church. It also means that we have to fight a lot of flawed, unhealthy, Hollywood rom-com bull. It also means that the couple needs to know what the other person's expectations are. After all, the two leading causes of divorce in the USA usually come down to finances and unmet expectations.
TLDR: best way to prevent divorce is to better prepare for marriage.
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