THE recent Australian Catholic bishops’ National Family Gathering, despite what may have been the positive response of those who attended, nevertheless failed to speak to the lived reality experienced by many people today.
It appears that the traditional assumption that marriage is something that happens at the altar-rails, and is irrevocably sealed with nuptial union, rather than being a work-in-progress between two maturing and committed adults, was firmly in place.
The failure to acknowledge that, with the best will in the world, a relationship begun in such a way, may not reach the depth, maturity and wisdom that true marriage entails, is unrealistic, and lacks a depth of spiritual wisdom that one might hope for.
The growth of a person to maturity, with a sense of self-worth and sufficient capacity to truly give him or herself to another, may in fact entail growth through the experience of marriage breakdown, which should not be construed as failure, but rather a possibility for spiritual and psychological growth.
Time and experience can reveal incompatibility in temperament and outlook, differing rates and capacity for growth, which make a true marriage impossible, with the consequent necessity that separation, followed by divorce, is the only option that is consistent with true integrity.
Such an experience can be a gift that enables a depth of growth and maturity that can allow both partners to become more fully who they are created to be, and involves the courage to leave a relationship that is not life giving, with all the pain that that involves, to enter a freedom that is not possible within the confines of a limiting and externally imposed set of traditional values.
In such a case, ‘what God has joined together’ (Mt 19:6) is the inner life of the person with a congruent lived outer expression of that life, not as is usually interpreted, the external married state that is not congruent with inner reality.
It is this integrity of inner and outer life that ‘no one may separate’ without violation.
For this to be recognised by the Church, would mean a greater degree of engagement with the reality of psychological and spiritual growth, and with the true nature of Christian marriage, and would entail the necessity of listening with an open heart to the living word of the Gospel which speaks ‘to disturb and heal us’, and cannot be contained by our preconceptions or past interpretations.
It would enable seekers of the truth to have a greater degree of trust in the institutional Church’s capacity for compassion and true wisdom.
MARGARET SMITH
Silkstone, Qld
