- Dec 9, 2005
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Coping with Divorce - Live with the Louhs | Ancient Faith Ministries
Have you or anyone you know ever had to cope with a divorce? Join the Louhs to discuss how to journey with and through the grief associated with it. With guests Hope Evans, Maria Harduvel, and Christina Elderkin. - An episode of the Live with the Louhs podcast on Ancient Faith Radio
www.ancientfaith.com
I finally got to listen to the entire podcast.
I don’t think the issue here is my personal opinions, but what is objective Church teaching in the sum of Holy Tradition and the consensus of the fathers and saints on that teaching throughout Church history. Also, I have not been divorced, but once upon a time, I came to the very edge. As a person who has maintained a difficult international marriage, and learned to love when the going gets super-tough, I know from nearly 32 years of direct experience how acrimonious, how blindly furious, how much sadness and a heart dulled by depression, the plates, pots and pans, thrown both figuratively and literally, and in general how hard the experience can be, and what is required to hold it together. People who think one must be divorced in order to understand those sad and horrible situations simply don’t know what even a successful marriage may require.
Before I fire any broadsides, I think I should make every effort to stress what these people get right. People - all of whom except for one recorded voice were women - are in pain. They suffer, and at times experience desires no one can approve of, right up to thoughts of murder and suicide. This pain requires compassion, and I give the Louhs and their guest speakers full marks for compassion. I would not criticize compassion in the least. Truth needs to be spoken in love, and without love, is just a bull in a china shop.
That said, I encountered the same general problem as in Met. Anthony Bloom’s book on marriage. When divorce becomes the topic, there was absolutely no reference to Tradition and Church teaching. It might as well have been a program run by heterodox, Hindus, or atheists. Sure, the name of Christ is occasionally mentioned, but His words? Not one. Spiritual fathers are referenced a couple of times. But nothing from Scripture, or the Church fathers. The assumptions were entirely those of the modern world. Granted that this was a podcast talking about coping with a divorce that had already happened, though they did touch on “being on the way to divorce”. Plenty of talk about self-care, worrying about yourself, everything the world teaches us, and which we walk into the Church already believing and thinking. And of course the Christian ideal never came up even once. The assumption is that it is unthinkable. Options like separating but remaining married and celibate - the one option that would leave open the possibility of restoring a marriage later when the spouses come to repentance - are simply not on the table. I’m not saying it’s desirable, but then, neither is martyrdom from our perspective, though some saints did desire it.
Real giveaways that there is no support for their views in Church Tradition come after the forty-minute mark. At 41 minutes, one of the speakers remarks that while we have public funeral services to grieve for lost loved ones, there is no practice or rite of open grieving in the Church for divorce. The reason why, again, never seems to occur to them, or even that there could be a reason. They assume that it’s a ball that the Church somehow “dropped” over its 2,000-year history. At about the 44-minute mark, the speaker talks about needing to go outside of the Church to find support for what she had chosen, and urges listeners to find “like-minded people” for support in the Church.
This sort of podcast matters, because to people looking for guidance and teaching and help in their own struggle, under the aegis of a priest, AND on AFR, it appears to be Church teaching, even though none of it, except for the compassion part, I suppose, comes from our Tradition. I didn’t find anything identifiably Orthodox in the program at all.
I think this is a fairly good example of (unconscious/unintentional) neo-gnosticism in the Church. Like the character of “Rey” in the Disney Star Wars abominations, people have nothing to learn from Tradition, they already “have what they need inside of them”.