The Ministry of Healing and the Gospel of Hope - Chapter Five

Chapter Five: Marriage as a Sacrament of Hope and Healing

“May their lives together be a sacrament of love in this broken world, so that unity may overcome estrangement,

forgiveness heal guilt, and joy overcome despair.”

- The Marriage Litany (Book of Alternative Services)

While physical illness is perhaps the kind of brokenness that most affects individuals and families, marital breakdown is perhaps a close second.  In our immediate and extended families, many of us have experienced the sadness and trauma caused by the break-up of a marriage.  Sometimes marriages fall apart and no one is surprised.  Sometimes a break-up can be welcomed with relief.  Some relationships are a bad fit from the start, while others are plagued by various forms of dehumanizing abuse. Some marriages come to an end when one partners comes to an awakening and awareness about their sexual orientation. In most cases, even when the marriage ought to end, a break up will be received with great sadness by both the immediate and extended family. We are left wondering why the marriage could not be salvaged. For many, even if the break-up is in the end a good thing, it is still likely to be a traumatic experience. 

About ten years into our marriage, Athena and I realized how few couples we had as friends.  When we began to think about it, many of the couples who were married around the same time we had married were now had divorced or separated.  Whether or not these break-ups were in the end for good or ill, we realized what a profound impact they had had on our life.  In a world in which so many relationships fall apart, a couple cannot but help ask themselves, “are we next?” Is the failure of marriage inevitable?  Even if we are able to convince ourselves that our marriage is solid and that we are continuing to grow in love through good times and bad, it can feel like an awfully lonely journey when so many marriages around us have dissolved or are in the process of falling apart.  An issues that often emerges for couples when a couple they are close with breaks up is the question, “who are we to be friends with?” And what happens when everyone seems to be “breaking up”?  The epidemic of marriage breakdown is one that can very quickly draw us into despair about the state of our world, the state of intimate relationships in general, and causes us to question the strength and fidelity of our own marriages.  It is so easy to let that despair take hold of us, or conversely to bury our heads in the sands of illusion and fail to deal with the issues that emerge in our relationships.  Many relationships fall apart through denial.

When Athena and I realized that very few of the couples that we were friends with were still together, we found that the first thing we had to do was to name the reality that we, too, had suffered a loss. When a marriage or relationship breaks up, it is not only the two individuals that experience a loss and must grieve, but it is the community of which that couple is a part, which also suffers. This is not to blame the couple, but only to say that brokenness is not easily contained.

 Shortly after we began to experience this phenomenon of seeing our friends’ marriages ending, some of these same friends began to remarry new partners. Initially, we attempted to form friendships with the new couples, and while not impossible, it could be frightfully awkward in many cases.  Finally, we had to acknowledge the pain and reality that what we once had with those friends was forever gone. It’s not that we couldn’t continue to be friends with each individual of the couples who had separated, or with their new partners, but what we had together was no longer a reality. We had to face what we had lost, just as each of the couples who had separated had to face their new realities.

After some false starts at trying to keep some friendships alive and failing, we decided to begin again.  We sat down and made a list of all the couples that we knew who were still together.  That was actually a hopeful exercise, because we came to realize that there were many more people still together than we thought.  Many of them had moved away and so building a relationship with them was not possible.  There were others with whom we knew we simply would not click as couples.  There were couples in which I did not care much for him or Athena for her, no matter how close one of us was with one member of the couple. However, there were at least a few that we thought we would be able to connect with, and after some thoughtful and prayerful consideration we reached out to another couple that we knew in an intentional way.

For over ten years now, we have gotten together with Richard and Erika once a month for wine and cheese and to read the classics.  It was a risk.  Richard and I had worked together and liked each other, but our wives had never met.  Richard and I knew we could get along, but we took a chance that Athena and Erika, both of them were teachers, both of them lovers of great literature, might have something in common and would be able get along.  It has turned out to be a very nourishing relationship for all of us, I think. In fact, Athena and Erika have become great friends and get a long famously.  It took a leap of faith; it took intentional and prayerful reflection; and it took believing that there was hope in the midst of loss.

It is my firm conviction that marriage may indeed be the most important place the church can participate in the healing ministry in a broken world.  In a world that treats human beings as consumers rather than companions where else can we find that counter-cultural message of the gospel more radically exhibited.  In a world in which relationships are defined by competition rather than collaboration, where can we find the gospel more powerfully proclaimed?  In a world in which longing is satisfied by selfishness rather than selfless abandon, where can we find hope for fulfilment?

Every wedding over which I preside is for me a moment in which God’s hope is incarnate.  When we consider the brokenness of the world, we begin to routinely accept helplessness as the norm. When we consider how brokenness is accepted either despairingly or in helpless denial, think of the powerful witness of the act of two individuals professing their love for each other publicly, in the midst of their families and friends, before a broken and hurting world, in the name of the God of love. In a world in which we routinely witness and hear of people harming each other, demeaning each other, objectifying the other, consider how absolutely revolutionary and counter-cultural is the demonstration of the two becoming one, of saying yes to love, yes to hope, yes to the possibility of a new life together in which the two are indeed better than one.  A wedding is an eschatological enactment of the breaking through of the kingdom of God.   We might even say as our Lord did, “In this, the Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” 

Sometimes clergy gripe about the couples who have never darkened the door of the church coming to us out of the blue and asking us to officiate at their weddings, but how dare we?  If we stand before our congregations every week with the task of proclaiming hope, how dare we quench the Spirit of God in the lives of two people who have come to the Church asking us to stand with them?  I, for one, am willing to receive all the help I can get in proclaiming that message.  For clergy, I think our task is one of helping them to understand the radical nature of the love they are asking us to help them proclaim, and the hopeful message that their action of joining together in a public ceremony exhibits to those around them.   We need to help them understand the healing that they bring to the world and to those they love in this sacramental enactment of God’s love for the Church and the world (both of which are constantly in need of healing and love!).

First of all, I think we should be delighted that people still want to get married. This is no longer a given.  There are many that will simply begin a life together without ceremony, without the prayers and witness of a loving community, without the blessing of God, and never give a second thought to what the importance of their union might be beyond the walls of their home.  Yet, there are those who still come to us and ask us to help them in this task.  They may not know exactly why they wish to make their love and fidelity to each other the subject of a public ritual, or why they may desire to affirm their vows before God, but they know it is important.  What an extraordinary opportunity for us to help them understand the prodding of the Holy Spirit in their hearts as they begin a new life together.  What an opportunity to help them proclaim the gospel of hope!

This brings us to the prayer that is found in the litany of the Canadian wedding liturgy, (above).  The prayer petitions the following: “May their lives together be a sacrament of love in this broken world.” The world needs to see what love is.  The world needs tangible evidence that love is real. The wedding liturgy is a ritual enactment of divine love. It is an act that proclaims a fundamental and life-altering reality.  The world needs a sacrament of love, and marriage is just such a sacrament.  I often say to couples, and I preach this as well, that we can only know what God’s love is like by experiencing it through the love another human being, to love and to be loved.  Otherwise, what is love?  I cannot understand love as some ethereal concept and I certainly have no idea of what the love of God is, unless I first know the tangible love of another person.  Of course, marriage is only one such way in which we know love; we have the love of parents, friends, even the love of a stranger laying down their life for another. This is the purpose of the Incarnation of God in Christ. This is why God became human to make love real, to make love tangible. The Word made flesh incarnates divine Love for us.  What is a sacrament but an outward, tangible, visible reality that points to an inward, intangible, invisible but no less authentic reality?  Jesus is the sacrament of God’s love. In Christ Jesus we know what love is, we know a love that is so powerful that it even dies for us.  We know a love that is so powerful that it triumphs over death for us.   For God so loved the world!  Yet, God’s love is so unfathomable until we meet this deep love in Jesus.  Would that he had not ascended and left us, and yet he has given us the Comforter that he might be with us always unto the end of the age.  And so the Spirit moves in love in the lives of people and love is incarnate again and again, in each of our lives and relationships. 

I am a realist.  I know that not every marriage that begins in love ends in love.  As clergy, it may be tempting for us to let the statistics overwhelm us and drive us into either apathy or despair, and to look at the couples that come to us for marriage as statistics.  We can be tempted to ask ourselves if the ones standing before us in any given marriage liturgy will “make it.” We can try to set up all sorts of obstacles and tests to make sure that their love is real, but that is not what we are called to do. That would be to quench the Spirit of God, and to sell short the ministry of the couple preaching through their sacrament the proclamation of God’s love.  Yes, I have wondered about certain couples, and I have time and time again been surprised.  God is very good.

Here’s another wonderful thing, and on one level this should be a “no-brainer”, but how many of us actually believe it? God is always the God of second chances.  God is the God of healing.  While we would desire that no marriage would fall apart, the kingdom of God is only just breaking through; it and we, are a work in progress.  Humans continue to make mistakes, we continue to hurt each other, and we continue to suffer brokenness, pain, and betrayal.  Yet, shall these things destroy us?  Shall these things tempt us into despair or illusion?

We turn once again to the marriage litany, in which having petitioned that the couple’s life together may be a sacrament of love to this broken world, the litany continues: “That unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy overcome despair.” A loving and healthy marriage will be a place of healing.  It will be the place where unity will always overcome estrangement.  Unity will be the highest goal because unity is not about my will or wish over and against the other person’s but my willingness to find a unity, to create a unity from the oneness of our sacramental joining together. Please be aware, unity is not uniformity. Each individual brings their own unique and different selves into the relationship, but yet, the two become one flesh.  The exhortation at the beginning of the liturgy reminds us that the union of man and woman “is of heart, body and mind,” and that is for their “mutual comfort and help.”  We may very well be hard pressed to find mutuality and unity anywhere else we look in our lives. The world around us pits us relentlessly against each other in competition and battle.  However, the home is to be a place where mutuality and unity are created, lived out, and continually brought into being. It is a place where, ideally, we honour each other’s individuality and vulnerability with a tenderness not known in the world. Where the brokenness of the ways of the world drive us apart, the home should be a place where unity challenges estrangement as a norm and transforms and reshapes it through mutual, creative self-offering each to the other.  I am a part of something larger and more profound than I am on my own. I do not have to lose myself, and yet in self-offering, I find myself.  When I am joined with another, I gain much more than I lose, and if we find ourselves separated we lose much more than we gain.  To be sure (and we must always be pastorally sensitive in these matters) there are some cases of abuse and destructive behaviour, in which the self-offering and vulnerability of one is abused by the other. This is not mutuality and as such, there can be no unity where violence reigns (physical or emotional). However, I am not talking about these cases.  Rather, I am speaking of a relationship in which we find our life’s purpose and goal in the loving embrace of another (and thus eschatologically we experience the loving embrace of our God). There will be moments in which that relationship may be compromised and yet are drawn back and know that we must return to the place of our joy and delight, even when one or both of us have wounded that love.

This is the place where forgiveness challenges guilt.  Guilt is such an overwhelmingly destructive force.  Guilt causes me to hide from those I love and to hide from myself.  It causes me to cover my nakedness in shame and believe that I can even hide from God.  Yet, God looks upon our guilt with such profound compassion.  What is the story of Christianity if it is not about forgiveness?  In every marriage, we will inevitably hurt each other, and if we really do love each other we will hurt for the hurt we have caused, and guilt will seek to widen that that gulf between us.  However, the courage to forgive, the courage to seek healing, the courage to accept forgiveness--these the things that cast out guilt and fear.  This is why marriage has the potential to be such a healing institution; it is where we have the most at stake.  If we can find healing in the most intimate relationship of our life, then healing will take root in all of our relationships.  Healing will become a way of life for us.  The sacrament is efficacious not only for the marital relationship, but for the community.  It becomes an evangelical proclamation. Forgiveness heals guilt - this is one aspect of the message of the cross.  To some it is foolishness, for us it is the power and wisdom of God.

Likewise, as the litany petitions, we will find that joy overcomes despair.  There have been many times that I have known that I have done or said things that are hurtful to my wife (and to others in my life).  When I have realized the ways in which I have hurt others, this realization breeds fear and shame in my soul.  I become afraid that what I have done will irreparably damage my most precious relationship.  When this fear grips me, I begin to despair.  Once again, when we are afraid, we can be tempted into the world of illusion, to run from our fear and despair by pretending we have done nothing wrong, that the other person is not hurt.  People often fall into infidelity in this world of illusion.  It is not uncommon for us seek out a partner that we think loves us more, meets our truest and deepest needs, but in reality, such relationships only helping us to hide from the truth.  Sooner or later, honesty and authenticity compels us to face the fear that stalks us and confront the illusion.  Whether our sin be great or small, it will continue to drive a wedge between us unless we seek out reconciliation and healing.

Sooner or later we must look my beloved in the face and tell him or her that we are sorry for what we have done (or left undone).  We must own our mistakes and brokenness that we might be freed.  The truth shall set us free.  We must each, individually, take the risk of being honest about what we have done wrong.  The gospel message of “I forgive you,” the gospel value of forgiveness, mystically through the power of the Holy Spirit, transforms our fear of rejection, our fear of losing everything, our fear of what we have done to someone we love, into hope.  It is a risk both to forgive and seek forgiveness, but the joy of reconciliation is a beautiful thing. Mourning is turned to dancing.  A marriage lived with authenticity, with risk, and with devotion to truth is indeed a sacrament to a broken world.

You might ask, though, what of those marriages that fail to make such a proclamation and are not sacraments of this kind, but witnesses to brokenness, despair and illusion?  There are many such marriages, but one of the most wonderful things about being a priest is seeing that hand of God bring healing to those who have suffered scandalous abuse and betrayal by the one to whom they gave their life over in marriage when a way opens for a second, or third chance.

God is indeed the God of second chances and I am so deeply privileged to have journeyed as a priest and pastor with friends who have made that painful journey from the darkness of a destructive relationship up that spiral staircase and again into the light of healing.  On several occasions I have stood with dear friends as they made that sacramental pronouncement for God’s reconciling love before their family and friends. I have stood with friends who had been in profoundly destructive relationships for many years. Most had tried desperately to make their relationships work but it was not to be.  These destructive relationships were crushing them. 

It can often be the case that when a survivor emerges from a destructive marriage that they seek out another destructive partner. A person’s self-esteem may be so damaged that they don’t believe they are lovable, or that their view of love has become so distorted that they mistake abuse for love. Often they learned and acquired patterns of destructive behaviours, themselves, that are terribly hard to break because although those behaviours may have been the thing that has kept them alive, those same behaviours may be far from positive in a new and healthy relationship.  The advice we most readily give is to wait, not to rebound, not to seek out again what you have just escaped from.  This is good sound pastoral advice.  Sometimes, though, we can be mightily surprised by the healing that God can bring, and how quickly it comes.

We can be skeptical when two wounded people find each other.  We worry for them.  We pray that they are not getting in over their heads again.  We often make the assumption that they have lost their right to risk love again, and judge them for falling in love again too quickly, and urge them to proceed with caution.  Yet, these two people found each other and their coming together was an act of healing. No, that is not quite right - it began a process of healing.  What was different this time around?  The healing inevitably beings when each realize that not only had they been abused, but that their abuse had shaped who they were and how they lived and behaved.  They knew that they could not live that way any longer, nor could they change overnight.  But what they did believe was that they could be healed.  What they had, was hope.  What they had was hope that God could heal them and that it was better to journey together in that healing.  They began to make the fundamental discovery that they are indeed loveable and worthy of love and respect. They became willing again to take the risk that “the two are better than one.”  They were willing to take the risk that by owning their brokenness, by being open about it with each other in a vulnerability they could never risk with their previous partners, they might be healed and transformed.  They decided that their love could indeed be a sacrament to a broken world, they believed that unity does indeed overcome estrangement.  They believed that forgiveness does heal guilt.  They believed that joy overcomes despair!  In spite of all that happened to them, in spite of the fact that they could not find healing in their previous relationships as hard as they tried, in spite of the fact that they felt that they had lost many years of their lives, they believed that God brings healing and God wants them to be whole.

Not every second marriage is a success either, but I have seen many, many people find love again, and find deep healing.  Their lives are a sacrament of God’s love.  Their relationships, while perhaps not perfect (is there such a thing?) are healthy. Sure, they fight, they have negative patterns that they fall into, but they have support, they are intentional about their healing and they seek transformation and healing day by day. They live in hope because they have tasted God’s healing grace.

The other thing I have learned from many of these couples, and from twenty-five years of my own marriage, is not to judge a marriage or relationship by the standard of other relationships.  A couple makes the relationship they want and need.  I often tell people not to let other people define their marriage for them.  There are lots of cultural and religious marital expectations that are simply destructive. Each couple must be willing to create and re-create the relationship as it moves forward. Many of the couples who are on their second or third long-term relationship have learned that some old norms didn’t help them stay married the first time.  We all deal with expectations. We need to question them sometimes and ask not how we can live up to what others thing a marriage ought to be, but how we will be authentic and faithful to each other.

When my faith is weak, when I have trouble believing that God works miracles, that God brings healing, that God takes a risk on us, I reflect but for a moment on the stories of many couples I have known and I have cause to hope.  God is very, very good indeed.
...THE MINISTRY OF HEALING AND THE GOSPEL OF HOPE CONTINUES NEXT TUESDAY...