A more spiritual treatment of divorce

The streets have been plastered with posters for this week’s divorce referendum, bearing the words: “Help reduce financial distress – vote Yes” and “Help reduce emotional distress – vote Yes”.

All advertising is effective, so I daresay this sells its message successfully enough. Though I found myself thinking sceptically that it might be more honest to proclaim that the best way to reduce the financial stress of divorce is…to stay married. Marriage breakup impoverishes all but the very rich.

Emotional stress is something else again, and I can’t say I’ve met many individuals over the course of my life who have avoided it.

However, this referendum is a civil matter and people must vote as they think right.

And then I read something about life after divorce from a genuinely, committed viewpoint of Christian spirituality which I found so different, so thoughtful – in contrast to those slick advertising slogans.

Breakdown

This was a paper written by my Dublin neighbour Joseph McCarroll about how he learned to “live and to love after the breakdown of my marriage”.

Joe and his wife are separated, and he has been civilly divorced  (he is the father of two children and four grandchildren). But he still honours the marriage that he had, still wears his wedding ring, and has developed a spiritual path to understanding his broken marriage; a path, too, of self-understanding. This is based on the wisdom of Chiara Lubich, the Italian leader of the Focolare movement.

After his marriage ended, Joe felt a sense of failure – which is common – but protested that it wasn’t his fault. “I blamed my wife, her parents, my parents, my job, the state of society, the media, the politicians…almost everything except tea-leaves and thunderstorms.”

Then slowly he came to see that this was self-deception. “A considerable part of the blame was mine. I did not put enough time, effort and commitment…or enough of myself” into the marriage.

Perhaps we need more of the spiritual approach in how to heal our lives

The breakup led to a forensic period of self-examination, for “life is designed to invite us, bulldoze us, tsunami us if needs be, to grow in understanding of ourselves”.

And so he developed a way of mending himself, of facing daily life “imaginatively and cheerfully”, and of accepting that he was still a married person whose marriage had failed.

He dreaded being “less fully a man”, and of “having no love in his life”: but he learned that there is a way “to fill every day with loving actions”, and “to love each person we meet as Jesus would love them in our place”. Enlarging our hearts can have a hugely positive effect on our energies: and “facing suffering is one of the central experiences of our lives”.

Joe McCarroll is indeed a cheerful and positive person who seems to have a warm relationship with his family, even though he lives alone. His thoughtful philosophy – delivered as a talk two years ago – about facing marriage breakup is an uplifting, genuinely alternative way of looking at divorce.

Perhaps we need more of the spiritual approach in how to heal our lives, less of the snappy, superficial slogans which have so little depth about facing a distressing life experience.

Courtesy never goes out of fashion

Whenever a younger person stands up to give me a seat on bus, tram or train, I always thank them warmly because courteous deeds should be rewarded with a smile.

But a guy of my own vintage said to me the other day: “You know, any time a young person gives me a seat, I notice that it’s always  someone who evidently isn’t an Irish native. It’s always someone from Estonia, India, Brazil, wherever.”

“Maybe young Irish people are just shy about making this gesture?” I suggested.

“Not at all!” he scoffed. “Young Irish people have a sense of over-entitlement! Their attitude is – I’m entitled to this seat, so why should I give it up for some old geezer?”

Maybe this is a suitable subject for a sociological study: are the non-natives in Ireland more polite and considerate than the natives?

And do schools nowadays, including Catholic schools, still include courtesy in their curriculum of moral education?

Or has the concept of ‘equality’ eclipsed the notion that physically, not all persons are equal – and some need a little more assistance than others?