Lectio Divina and Divorce: Reflections in Twelve Parts about What Divorce Has to Teach the Church

IFirst, let me say what this essay is not:It is not an argument about whether "the Church" or churches should allow divorce.It is not a painstaking consideration of what Jesus had to say about divorce, and, given those words, the circumstances in which it might or might not be legitimate to divorce.It is not an essay about whether remarriage should be permitted after divorce.It is not a reading of the social scientific literature-reams, of it, now; whole libraries of literature-on the effects of divorce on children.1It is not a claim about what divorce reveals about "the culture"- for example, that the United States is in peril because peoples selfish desire for fulfillment has eroded a gemeinschaftliche commitment to the common good.This essay, instead, suggests that divorce can help the church remember certain things about the Christian story. This essay asks: What is the witness of divorcing and divorced people in the church to the church?To take up that question is to push Christian discussions of divorce in at least two ways. First, it is to push those who fear that any discussion of the theological and pastoral witness of divorce is perforce an accommodation of a grievous trend, and therefore to be avoided. Second, it is to push those (mostly pastors) who are worried not about accommodation but about alienation, and who are so keen to welcome and receive divorced people into their church communities that they say little to nothing about divorce at all. That impulse-to avoid hurting people-is laudable, but when it creates wells of silence around divorce, divorced or divorcing people are left with no tools to reflect theologically on their own divorces, and the church community is left with little sense of how it might receive the divorced person as a witness. To those who fear accommodation, and to those who fear alienation, this essay wants to ask: What might divorce help the church remember? What true things might divorce help the church see?Many ethicists, theologians, and pastors have written about what marriage and singleness teach the church. Marriage images reconciliation for the church. Marriage offers the church a picture of forgiveness and faithfulness. Marriage gives the church a glimpse of our eschatological union with Christ, a reminder that the heavenly banquet is not just any meal-it is a wedding feast. Singleness, in turn, offers a focused picture of the "vacancy for God" that all Christians are to cultivate. Singleness witnesses to another eschatological verity, as important for the church's imagination as that wedding banquet: in heaven there will be no marriage or giving in marriage. Both marriage and singleness are gifts God has given to the church. They are stations of life God has created for the enrichment and sanctification of not only those individual people who are married or single; God has given marriage and singleness to the whole church, for the enrichment and sanctification of the whole church. The church needs both marriage and singleness.2To suggest that divorce can teach the church something is not to argue that divorce is "a good" as such, or a gift created by God in a way that precisely parallels marriage and singleness. It is rather to move away, momentarily, from the category of rationale and read the many divorces in our midst from another place. Instead of focusing on whether and under what circumstances Christians can divorce, and instead of using divorce to launch a critique of society, this essay introduces another question: Divorce is a failure, and a morally serious failure at that; is it a failure that can teach the church anything about penitence, forgiveness, justice, grace, vocation? About love?IIPut another way, if we in the church were to practice lectio divina with divorce-in-our-midst as the text, what might the Holy Spirit call to our attention?* * 3IIISometimes, after hard discernment, divorce seems to be the action most likely to prompt human flourishing. …