Transcript
Welcome to Princeton Presents. We are taping at Princeton Theological Seminary today, and I am the Reverend Dr. Kathy Nelson, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Dayton, New Jersey, and today my guest is the Reverend Dr. J. Randall Nichols, a professor here at Princeton Theological Seminary and also a counselor on the staff of Trinity Counseling Center here in Princeton, New Jersey. Welcome, Randy. Thank you. Glad to be here. It's nice to have you a part of
our program to talk about a subject that we in the church have so seldom talked about, and that is divorce, a course reflective also of then what is marriage, We'll get a chance to do much of that today, thankfully, based in part upon your book, which you have written recently. What would the title of that be? The title of the book is Ending Marriage, Keeping Faith. Subtitle is A New Guide Through the Spiritual Journey of Divorce,
a book that came out of my own divorce experience attempting to look at divorce from a spiritual, theological perspective as well as a psychological, emotional one. Well, with your doctorate in the area of communications and also with a lot of background in the sciences related to psychology, certainly your perspective here is going to be very useful and helpful, I trust, to those viewing our program today. I hope so. Let's talk for half an hour or so
about the whole relationship of Christian marriage to changing perspectives of society today, and then maybe we can weave our way into what then results in the situation of divorce in society, since we have such a large rate of that in today's world. Okay. I'm going to pick up first on your term Christian marriage, because that's a very problematic sort of term. For instance, if we want to speak of such a thing as Christian marriage, wouldn't it
make sense also to speak of Christian divorce, but we don't. One of the issues that I think is around for people who are involved in marriages and divorces, especially if they are Christians, is that we have a tremendously wide range of perspectives on marriage and divorce, tremendously wide range of experiences of all that today, far more so than we ever had traditionally, and yet much of our traditional understanding of those things came from a time when
things were much more uniform, much more predictable, so we're in a different era. We sure are. Different set of questions, different answers. Households are in such a different era that when you put the two things together, Christian marriage and Christian divorce, and I'm glad you reframed it in that light, we do begin to then be able to talk about the changing household patterns as well, since we now have people who are maybe in their second, third,
fourth marriages with a lot of extended family and other complications. I would want to say, for example, and I don't want to be misunderstood, but to say that there really isn't such a thing as Christian marriage. Christians get married and attempt to live out their Christian commitments and values in the marital relationship, as hopefully they try to do in the workplace and in child rearing and everywhere else, but there is no magical thing that happens to
create a Christian marriage as opposed to some other kind. Well exactly, Jewish or perhaps Muslim or non-religious. Or just non-religious. That's right. So, and I would say the same with Christian divorce. Of course, we don't want to talk about Christian divorce, but I think it does make sense for Christian people to use what they believe about their faith in waging the very painful process of divorce. Well in light of all this sort of framing
of how we're going to move forward today, I think one of the pieces I'd like to go back to in relationship to the issue of Christian marriage is how the church perhaps has at least labeled for those who call themselves Christian. Marriage as a covenant relationship built around scriptural injunctions about marriage and how that then also has made it complicated and difficult in relationship to Christian divorce or divorce of two Christian persons perhaps in a marriage
related there too to the scriptures and how the injunctions have appeared to limit or dictate particular ways in which divorce can be accomplished only in certain circumstances and maybe we can talk just a bit about some of the twists and complications of some of that. The idea of marriage as a covenant you see is very troublesome in certain ways because it reflects a desire that I think most of us have to say the marriage relationship is
something special, it is something very serious, it is a lifelong commitment. We want a term to describe the involvement and seriousness for that, we want a kind of special term and so we reach for the biblical idea of covenant to do that. Now the problem with that is that it is a very human covenant unlike the covenant between God and God's people for example which human beings are forever breaking though God doesn't. So we have to
be careful of the image of marriage as a covenant because it can become a kind of trap when people begin to think that because this is a covenant I somehow am on theologically dangerous or offensive ground if it breaks down. Certainly and the church in many ways has brought that to the mindset of people entering marriage being a pastor, doing a lot of premarital counseling, of course you work with images about what scripture has presented as
how God relates to the couple making that commitment. Sometimes that has made it seem I'm sure from the church's perspective and from the perspective of the participants in the marriage ceremony as if it is a three-way covenant involving God complicating the picture by bringing in that larger entity of our faith creator. And much of the language of the wedding service you see especially the older language reflects this kind of idea that God is involved in
this. Now this gets to be a very important distinction because we do want to say that God is involved. God is involved in every nook and cranny of human life. That's no different from anything else and we do want to say that marriage is a special kind of relationship. That's not the same thing as saying it has somehow become magical or non-human or because we have talked about God it's immune from change, from breakdown, from
frustration, from all kinds of things that crop up in the divorcing situation. That raises some of the question about what we do with some of the images Randy from some of our services. For example in the marriage ceremony frequently we use the unity candle, the two parties together taking small candles, lighting the unity candle and frequently blowing out their individual candles representing then the one body that they've become together in this marriage. Picking up on some
of the scriptural images of the two becoming one. How do we handle some of that? Well that gets to be very troublesome because it's a very powerful kind of imagery. I don't happen to like that very one for example. It suggests on the positive side that a new relationship, a new creation has come into that idea in marriage and we want it theologically. But if by blowing out the individual candles it also suggests that these people
have stopped being individuals and have somehow blended together that's simply unhealthy and there's no precedent for that theologically. So I'd rather leave the individual candles lighted to represent a couple of important things. One is this new relationship but also the fact that these people remain human beings with all of the brokenness and sinfulness and all the rest that human beings always have because that when we get into divorce is what sometimes this imagery has sort of
very subtly lulled us into thinking was all gone and suddenly we discover it's not all gone. We're still limited, we're still flawed and now what happens? Many of us in the past are at seeing persons coming to us, you know, months, years into marriage with questions about why it is the other party hasn't become as they assume the person would be. It comes right back to that very kind of thing and I think leads us a
bit into the next level maybe of our conversation to address more some of the issues related then to the brokenness that happens in some households around the marriage covenant and how that does then in some situations lead to a need to look at the issue of divorce. Absolutely and that kind of brokenness is there and when a marriage does get into trouble and divorce becomes one of the options then the question is where is our spiritual
or theological thinking about it and if we've been lulled into thinking that well Christian marriages don't get into trouble or ought not get into trouble then suddenly we're left sort of outside the camp without the resources that we need rather than the more from my perspective more dominant theological position that human brokenness is what religion is about. God's work has to do with addressing and healing human brokenness and divorce is a form of human brokenness in
the sense that dreams we had have fizzled, ideals we thought we represented we discovered not to represent so well, circumstances that we thought were going to go along the way we anticipated have not, all kinds of things have happened to remind us that we live on thin ice a lot of the time and sometimes it breaks. How do you think persons perhaps considering the issue of divorce might begin to weigh whether or not they've struggled long
enough with the marriage are there pieces of work that they should still be doing to attempt to continue in this relationship? How would one begin to assess where they're at in the relationship to begin to raise some of the questions? Well I guess the most obvious answer is probably still the best one. When things get into difficulty some kind of outside professional consultation whether it's a pastor or a marital therapist may be a necessary guide to
help these people take a look at several important things that we typically don't look at in marriage. What did we expect the marriage to be? Were there unrealistic expectations? What sort of implied and really not much talked about agreement between the two people was driving this marriage anyway? Was that realistic or not? What changes have happened to the people in the marriage? What is realistic for a future? What's in the best interest of everybody involved in
the marriage? Children, the couple, conceivably other people? There are all kinds of factors that have to get assessed and some help in navigating that is I think a very important thing. From my point of view as a therapist of course the frustration is that people wait too late to come for this kind of consultation and by the time they do arrive then sometimes enough erosion has taken place that we are not able to do much about
it. Well, that probably ties in a bit to that recent article in Ton Magazine about trying to continue to reclaim marriage. And so if you have any more you want to say about that Randy maybe this is a good location for us to talk a little bit more about what would be some of the warning signs for example of a relationship starting to deteriorate at the early end of that. Well, I'm not too comfortable with the
idea of warning signs because there are so many and varied and if I give a list of warning signs I don't want people to use that as a checklist. Let me do come back though to the Time article and the movement that it seems to be growing now of for lack of a better term a kind of save the marriage approach. The good news of that is that we're paying some attention to marital dynamics and to
the fact that people are not born knowing how to be married. It's a learning process which very few agencies including the church have paid very much attention to and now some of these organizations are highly diverse in their approaches and their quality and all that. But some are at least paying some attention to that both before marriage and during marriage to help couples do this very kind of assessment. That's the good news. If it, the bad
news would be if that movement reinforces the kind of shaming pattern of divorce then we're going to continue to cause problems for people rather than help them with problems. Well having said all of that let's look for a bit at what the church needs to do in helping people rethink the issue of divorce. Frequently for example as I think about my own preaching in the church we seldom pick passages related to divorce to share on a
Sunday morning in an average congregations life. It occurs to me that that then leaves that to the back burner, leaves people wondering if divorce is acceptable at all. We may think that sure the times have changed, you see more of it in society, it's there in the church but what are we doing to address that? That's a very good question and even aside from biblical passages about divorce which are very few and far between and very
difficult to interpret. Complicated. But if I, when I'm doing a workshop for example as I often do on my book with a group of divorcing people I routinely ask how many of them have ever heard a sermon on divorce and in a room of 50 or 60 people maybe a half a dozen hands will go up, maybe. So addressing the thing is one thing with what 40 or 50 percent of marriage is now ending in divorce
for the church to continue to take the implied position that this is a rare and unusual happening that is something that we ought not to expect is simply unrealistic. Every minister conducting a wedding ought to have somewhere in his or her mind that there's really no better than a 50-50 chance that this marriage is not going to get in trouble. That's just the plain reality. That's bound to scare the listener I'm sure because we don't
come to talk. I hope it scares clergy also. Well yes of course. I'm trusting some of them are listening too. You know I think that there is that implied understanding that a Christian when entering marriage is making that a lifelong commitment. Absolutely and that's true. People are not cynical about getting married. They mean the words they say. It's not that we go into it with our fingers crossed saying well I'm really going to bail out. There's
a kind of popular stereotype that that is sometimes the case very very rarely in my experience. People are serious about marriage. They're genuine and the sad thing is that things happen. Well in relationship to us being more open then and talking more freely about divorce how can one begin to deal with the shame of that as one contemplates or goes through the process of divorcing their spouse? How then does one begin to contemplate and handle some
of those messages that both society and the church have been largely responsible for presenting? Well this requires on the part of divorcing people a degree of courage that sometimes is very hard to muster in refusing to accept the shame. I want to make a distinction here which is very popular now in a variety of self-help circles but it's a very good distinction between shame and guilt. Guilt when I've done something wrong and need to make
amends for it is an appropriate feeling and reaction. It reminds me that I need to take some steps to restore some things. Guilt is healthy in that sense. Guilt has to do with actions, with behaviors. The church has been in the guilt handling business for a good long time with confession and repentance and penance and the same applies in marriages. Shame is a very different deal. Shame is related more to a sense of self. It's a
pervasive blanket and a shaming culture or a shaming family produces all kinds of emotional dysfunction. Unfortunately my position is that the way we handle divorce in this culture including in the church all too often contributes to shame rather than helping people make realistic assessments of where they failed, if they did, what they have that they need to make some amends for and change if that's there and that sort of thing. Divorcing people can insist on that.
Divorcing people can say at least to themselves if not to other people I don't buy the shame. I will try to take responsibility for what I need to take responsibility for and I need some help doing that. It seems like that's a key ingredient that frequently gets overlooked is the ability to take responsibility, much of which might very well be for the individuals in the relationship to recognize a relationship doesn't work and that instead of living
it out because a commitment has been made, they recognize that that which they committed to is not the end result. And then to begin to take a look at who am I in this, what have I done and how do I take some responsibility for that. In this sense divorcing people have a great deal to teach the church. That's another subject I realize but I always like to stir the pot a bit when I can about
this because if the church is afraid of divorce, if it treats it as a shameful thing, if it doesn't have its theological thinking clear about divorce and about marriage, then it needs to get a message back from the very people who are experiencing it and who in many ways are the experts. The experts about divorce are people experiencing divorce. Right. Well I think that that might very well be a way in which people can get support
certainly by looking for others who've gone through the experience of it, allowing the church to have groups for example where divorced persons can speak to others as well as share in and support one another in the process of reclaiming life in the process of that changing circumstance of divorce. There's another facet to this. I don't want us to rush to reassurance too soon. It probably comes from a good motive when people want to say their divorce
is all right. Well it's not all right. No one really takes that position. It's painful. It's disruptive. People in divorce almost universally feel a sense of guilt and failure at the very least because a dream they had has not panned out. I think it's important that the church and those of us who are Christian take that seriously, not try to sugarcoat it with a premature reassurance. That's a different thing from layering it over with shame. Very
different thing. Helping people to take real responsibility for their own brokenness and to feel themselves connected with the forgiveness that the church believes it has to represent from a God who addresses brokenness. Maybe taking another tact one step further in this whole process, Randy. Earlier on in the conversation you talked about the whole relationship of children to the family scenario of weighing the situation of the marriage covenant. Is it working? Is it to a point of
brokenness where divorce is a criterion that should be looked at? How does one begin to start to look at that whole dynamic of how the children interplay with the decisions the adults are trying to make? Very complicated and very painful. The experience of children in divorce is a difficult subject on which we have a lot of controversy, not enough information and data. Divorcing parents are almost universally conflicted by the question of what is this going to
do to the children? Where are the children in this? It's a very, very complicated subject. I guess the working rules of thumb that one can use here are a couple. One is to ask how much, and I'll just be autobiographical. This is what I found myself asking when I was going through the organizing decision about whether my marriage was going to work or whether it needed to end in divorce. One of the questions is how much
of the energy I have and want to give as a parent to my children is being diverted into trying to save a lost cause? It's easy to say, it's very tough to do, but it's a real question that has to be asked. Are there times, and sometimes I firmly believe there are, though a lot of my colleagues would argue with me about this, I believe there are times that the best interest of the child is going
to be served if the marriage ends for one reason, because there will be a level of parental involvement and energy with them that wasn't there before. It doesn't say there's not going to be pain or risk. Of course there is. A perfect illustration of that comes to mind for me in a recent relationship of counseling. I was spending time with a family that recently was divorced and was with the primary caregiver at this point and the
children. I had gone around the room and asked the children to identify how it felt now that the divorce had occurred. One of the comments reiterated by each of the children in the household was, at least the fighting stopped. More is happening in terms of mom or dad spending and doing things with us. That's a good cue, I think, for something that parents in the divorcing situation can do, which is don't cut the kids out of
the loop. Talk to them. Involve them in the process. The worst thing that can happen for the child in divorce is secrecy and silence. That's a seedbed for all kinds of problematic stuff. These were older children, so it seemed obvious to the parents to include the children in the process. In the dialogue about we're questioning whether we should stay in the relationship to, we've decided now we're going to end it. These are the steps we're going
to take through to now it's ended. This is the way we're trying to work out the shared responsibility of your care. I wonder though, Randy, what do you do when the child's extremely young? How does one wrestle with it then when the child's really an infant? Obviously, you're not going to be in dialogue with the child of that age, but there might be some emotional things that the child's exhibiting. That gets to be somewhat complicated. Of
course, we've got a vast difference between an infant and a three-year-old and a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. All the things begin to change, but I think parents sometimes are surprised at how much appropriate kinds of talking, even to a very young child, can help the child deal a bit better with the reality of the situation. If mommy and daddy are not living together anymore, but they're still mommy and daddy and
they still love the child and the child will still see them both, that can be explained even to a three-year-old. Overexplaining, of course, is a hazard that we're all guilty of. One of the things that I think I'd want to inject at this point is there are no magic bullets in this business. There is no guaranteed foolproof pattern of handling a divorce the right way or well, any more than there is a guaranteed foolproof
pattern for handling a marriage. Unfortunately, the popular press sometimes is looking for such a pattern. Trust me, it's not there. There are some guidelines. There are some things that if we pay attention to, there's a lot of variety in how we can handle the situation. For instance, the working rule of thumb that therapists use with regard to children is that the better the parents are handling the divorce and the emotional dynamics of it, the better off
the kids are going to be. Whatever else the data shows, that seems to be pretty reliable. For parents to work on separating their own issues out from the children and addressing those issues, getting an emotional separation from the ex-spouse where that's appropriate, taking responsibility for one's own role in it, the whole list of things. The better we do that, the more honestly and freely we do that, the better experience the kids are going to have,
regardless how we arrange the furniture. It sounds like a typical experience of dealing with children in the household anyway. Sure, sure. The more open you are with them, the more understanding you are of how your feelings and emotions affect them, the more logical your steps may be. Absolutely, yeah. It's helpful, I think, for us to discuss children, because I think that's one of the pieces that makes it most difficult for people to begin to think of
the issue of divorce, if that happens to be true in their household, that there are children involved. As a pastor, at least, there's a great deal of turmoil in households where they know they will be dividing the family. Yes, it's extraordinarily painful. I do think, though, that there are several things that are far more painful to children than the separation of parents in and of itself. Things like secrecy, things like shame, things like being baffled and
not knowing what's going to happen to me, those are far more toxic than the actual reality of, we've got a different family set up now. Well, that is where we're going to break on this program, Randy. Okay. I think we can come back, and in the next half hour of our next week's program, pick up on that very theme and discuss further the issues related to the children and many other pertinent pieces of our issues related
to Christian divorce. This has been Princeton Presents. We're taking a break now to give you an opportunity to discuss some of the issues we've raised in the first half of our program. We hope that you will return to our second half of the program where we'll continue to discuss the issues of children and the process of divorcing well. Welcome back. This is Princeton Presents. I'm the Reverend Dr. Kathy Nelson, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in
Dayton, New Jersey, and again in this second half of the program is the Reverend Dr. J. Randall Nichols, a professor at Princeton Seminary and also on the staff at Trinity Counseling Center. Randy, welcome back. Thank you. Glad to be back. When we broke last time, we were talking about children in divorce situations, and maybe as we begin today's program, we can talk about what makes for a good divorcing period of time. How does one construct that
as helpfully as one can? The very phrase that you use, which I fed you, good divorcing, may strike some as having a bit of an edge to it. Yet, I think we've learned in, for example, interest in the last generation about death and dying, to speak of things like good grief, about grieving well or even dying well. It would make some sense even for something as painful and complicated as divorce, probably the thing about divorcing well.
Are there things that people, once we're caught in it, once that line has been crossed, which the Episcopalians call irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, a marvelous phrase. They do have some terms that the most of us know. Are there things that divorcing people can pay attention to that may make the process go better? I think there are. One of the first things is to recognize that this is a grieving experience, that something has been lost, and
that divorcing people, I would say, inevitably are involved in a grief experience. Even if the divorce comes as a great relief, you've at least lost a dream. Right. I think that's a very important piece to just stop and focus on for a moment. So many people have built up in their minds, maybe from childhood on, what life would be like in the household they were going to create. That's a significant thing to work with. Absolutely. And
when that's gone, appropriately grieving for that loss is one of the most important things that divorcing people can do. Sometimes divorcing people don't think of it that way. They don't think of the experience as a grief experience, and therefore don't allow themselves the very same kind of grieving that would happen if a loved one dies, if a job is lost, if a house burns down, whatever. So doing the grieving experience is one terribly important part of
divorcing well. And if that's done well, then I think that will allow divorcing people really to divorce. The trouble with divorce is that it doesn't happen very well. People stay connected in inappropriate ways, partly because the grieving hasn't been done. The myth of the friendly divorce that I write about in my book keeps a lot of people, spouses, ex-spouses, tangled up with each other in ways that are inappropriate to the work they really have to
do, which may involve raising children. Otherwise, to achieve a genuine emotional separation and get on with one's life, whatever is in service to that is also in service to divorcing in a healthy way. Well, Randy, let's stop and talk a little bit more about that, because I do agree with you that people get hung up on that, not being able to really separate themselves from that spouse. What might be some of the ways in which people
can do that in a positive way while perhaps still maintaining a friendly enough relationship to continue to raise the children if that's the case? Let me give a couple of for-instances of how the process can go well or badly, just to prime the pump a little bit here. One thing is letting each parent take responsibility for their own experience with kids. And if one parent drops the ball, then it's important that the other parent not
try to pick it up. I remember, for example, working with a woman some while ago who for years had bought birthday presents for her children and labeled them from the father because the father could never remember to do that. It would have been a far clearer and healthier situation, though initially more painful for everybody, simply to level with the kids. Dad forgot your birthday. I'm sorry about that. In other words, for people not to take inappropriate
responsibility for the other one's actions and to move on with it is one good example. That takes a lot of energy because one has to recognize those patterns that they've lived with probably for a number of years. Many people are good caretakers of one another in situations that maybe perhaps lead to divorce. Particularly if that's one of the dynamics that had gone wrong with the marriage. It's very likely to continue with the divorce, which leads me
to another part of divorcing well, particularly for children, and that is discovering what happened. Learning something about what happened in this relationship that caused it to end. If we don't know what happened, if we don't begin to get some insights about that, then the chances are awfully good that we're going to repeat them or that they will keep happening even in the divorcing family. That's the sort of thing that causes problems for children and for divorcing
parents. So by that, are you suggesting then that couples talk with, if they have children, the children about some of the reasons behind why they chose to divorce? Maybe. That can be tricky because some of those reasons are none of the children's business. Yes, and that's the fine line I think we wanted to draw out. But to talk about the reality of the experience and what we're going to do now and what the options are is
the more important thing. So that it's not so much a matter of enlisting the child as a sort of an unofficial therapist, which is a danger that can happen, so much as reassuring the child that the child can trust his or her own experience by getting rid of things like secrets, by ending silence, where silence is really conveying a kind of sense of the child doesn't know what's happening, is very frightened by it, but all under
the category of helping the child learn to trust his or her own experience and creating a family environment, a divorcing family environment, in which the experience is trustworthy. Well, let's say a little bit more about other aspects of this divorcing well process. What are some of the things that the couple themselves need to do to handle better separating themselves from each other? Now, you mentioned there in an earlier piece now on the second half of the
program about that whole need to recognize the separation, while perhaps at the same time maintaining some sort of friendship. How does one do those things? I would not say friendship. I would prefer a term like civility. We have to work together at raising children. We don't have to be friends. If we were friends, we'd still be married. Let's not be unrealistic about this sort of thing. But a couple of things come to mind about that. There
is almost inescapably some anger involved in divorce that goes with the territory about grieving. It's important for divorcing people, whether there are children involved or not, to address that anger, maybe to get some help with it, but at least to address it and not to use a continuation of a dysfunctional relationship as the way of trying to deal with the anger. If you're still staying mad at an ex-spouse and trying to find every way to
make life miserable for the ex-spouse long after the divorce, it's a pretty clear sign that you haven't dealt with your anger, but in fact are using the divorcing relationship as a way to keep it going. Right. That's a for instance. Which may be how the kids get used and other things. Which may be how the kids get used. Exactly. Financial aspects, I'm sure, are part of that too. Financial aspects appear in there. The whole process
of getting a divorce is far more destructive often than I wish it were. People are sometimes worried about whether we're making it too easy for people to divorce. That really isn't my worry as a clinician at all. What I'm struck with is how hard it is for people to get divorced. How hard it is to come to that decision. How hard it is actually to do it. Things like money come into the picture, unaddressed conflicts, all
of which raise the level of destructiveness higher than often it has to be. You raised the whole issue of extended family in the first half hour of our program on this topic. How do you deal with ex-in-laws forcing to keep some kind of civility with those persons that are beyond the immediate household? You know, the in-laws and so on that may very well need to have involvement with the children. Sure. In other words,
do you deal with ex-in-laws? Right. Good question. I think it's important to recognize that relationships with extended family have their own integrity and their own existence, whether a couple is married or not. So there is nothing disloyal or inappropriate about continuing to have an appropriate relationship with ex-in-laws, particularly when there are children involved. The fact that the couple is not married anymore doesn't mean that grandparents have stopped being grandparents, aunts and uncles
have stopped being aunts and uncles, that sort of thing. So to look at each relationship for what it is and to respect its own integrity and to be absolutely honest about what that implies and doesn't imply. So if I take my child to visit my ex-wife's parents because the child wants to and needs to have a visit with grandparents, for me to do that implies nothing about my own relationship to my ex-wife. It implies
something about my care for my kids and their relationship to their grandparents. Can you see that separate sort of business there? I think that's a helpful piece because people I think get caught in those situations too as they begin to look at the process of divorce. How is it impacting not only their own immediate household, they as a couple and then themselves with their children, but how is it going to ripple out into the other network
of family relations? And in the best of all worlds, which almost never happens, but in the best of all worlds, if a couple can give up the idea of blame, if a couple can really get themselves to the point that attaching blame to anyone is not something they have any interest in doing, they can then help spread that message to the rest of the extended family. One of the things that extended family, especially parents it seems
to me, often get caught up in is who's to blame for this divorce? It may be important for people, including the couple themselves, to say blame is not in play. Things happened and went wrong, there are responsibilities that we can all take. Blame is toxic and we're not going to deal with it. That's a helpful piece because frequently one person in the party gets judged as the individual who carries the blame. Yes, and of course our
legal system tends to promote this, at least symbolically, with having one of the partners be the plaintiff and the other the respondent and that sort of thing, divorce action. Even if we have to go through that symbolically for legal process, we don't have to buy into it as personal process. Well that's a healthy view for us to issue today as people consider further this way in which one can divorce well. Talking in relationship to this divorcing
well, what more can the church do Randy as an agent in people's lives to bring about a healthy divorce? Forgive me for being a little cynical, I'm about to say anything because it's doing practically nothing now. I have found it, and I work with a lot of congregations, I have found it very rare for a congregation to do anything in any intentional way with divorcing people. When a person dies, a pastor will make a pastoral visit.
When a person divorces, my experience is that visit probably is not going to get made. We have all kinds of ways in which we ask people in the church to offer their experience to the church. We ask them to offer their grief. We ask them to offer their unemployment, their alcoholism, their turmoils, their doubts. We ask them to, it's an image, to offer these things to the church for healing. We never ask people to offer their
divorce to the church. It's just not done. The image of the visitation has a lot to say to the church. One would never think of not visiting in a household where someone has died. In my own divorcing experience, I had no pastoral visit, nor did my ex-wife, from the church. We knew very well. To come back to your question, what can the church do? The first and most important thing is to rethink what it is
really saying in believing about marriage and divorce. To really rethink our theological assumptions about divorce, particularly as I mentioned in the previous program as regards to the difference between guilt and shame. For the church to give up, maybe in a very deliberate way, to give up making divorce a shaming ritual for people. Then there are a number of things that can be done. The standard would be something like a support group or a study group for
people in divorce, all kinds of those things that would occur to a pastor. I have a worry, for example, about some of the family imagery that we use in the church without really thinking through what it says to single people, whether they're divorced or unmarried. I remember when I was a parish pastor, a woman who joined the church was a widow. She warned me up front she would never come to family night dinners because she was
a single person. The very idea of the family night dinner was offensive because of the symbolic assumption that the real members of the church were those who are in intact families. That takes work on the part of a congregation to also interpret the nature of the congregation. The congregation in and of itself is a family. Then perhaps that can be reframed in a different kind of way that can invite those of us who are single to
be a part of a larger group of people that then become our extended family. That has to be worked through the process the pastoral leadership of the church, the caregiving of the congregation to one another, a whole host of things for people then to feel invited as a member of that household as opposed to households coming together that are envisioned as family units. That really is the message that many churches have hosted for an awfully long
period of time. Yes, it's a very different thing. A lot that we can do also has to do with simply thinking and being aware for clergy and for congregations. For instance, where is the church typically in thinking about the dynamics of marriage today or in thinking about divorce? We don't devote a lot of energy to it or attention to it. I'm not talking about program things now, so much as I am energy and attention. I listened
to a talk show interview with the Tofflers, the futurologists not long ago in which they made the very interesting point that 30 years ago when Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote Future Shock, they predicted that the rather monolithic nature of marriage was going to be very, very different and so it is. Has the church been involved in this thinking through, this research dimension so to say? I think not and that worries me. The same with children. Many
of the public schools have very effective programs for working with children of divorce. I don't see it in the churches. That's very true. Frequently there's very little said or very little done and so seldom do clergy have the skills or knowledge to address some of those things. That too has a bearing on it, I believe. I think some of it has to do with opening up a different window for us to talk about some of the
harder issues of life as they change in different periods of time. The church's interpretation of scripture needs to be looked at anew as does the pastoral care given by a congregation through its members and through its pastoral leadership. That's going to involve a certain rethinking of attitudes and a certain freeing up of language. I come back to a theme I've mentioned before. Here is where divorcing people themselves have a significant contribution to make to the church.
If those of us who are divorcing people can begin to teach the church how we need to be talked to, what questions we need to have addressed, what kinds of support we need, what agonies we need to have help looking at the church, then the divorcing person can make a real contribution. As you know as a pastor, typically what happens when a couple in the church divorces is they leave the church. That's right. More often than
not. The whole issue of brokenness that you touched on in the first half of our other program is one piece to come back to again. Forgiveness being a component of that dealing with our brokenness. The church does not address very well that issue in relationship to divorced persons. I want first and last of all to say that is essentially a theological failing that we need to take into consideration. For us to try to make believe that
the church is really an assembly of people who are perfect or who have no problems with marriage is theologically idolatrous. Just as for us to make the idea of marriage into an idol is another kind of idolatry. But to take seriously the brokenness of human beings and the role of the church in addressing that brokenness, holding it, gathering it up, offering God's healing for it is a very different proposition and gives us a very different sense
of who we are together as a congregation. Let's deal just for a few moments, Randy, about the new natures of households. For example, I'm thinking about the multiple setting where perhaps you've had a person or two even in a relationship that have had one or more marriages before that. How does one handle some of the dynamics of all that extended family? We talked briefly about that, but this certainly is one of the changing natures of marriage
as well. The most obvious answer is very carefully. To give an illustration of that, I worked once with a couple, a remarriage situation where each member of the couple had been married previously and had existing children. The remarried couple themselves did not and would not have children of their own. In working with them, we counted up one day how many separate family systems were represented under their roof. When we got up to nine, we stopped counting.
It didn't make sense to speak of one family. You had to speak of nine different components, each of which had its own family integrity. It gets very, very complicated. Honoring the boundaries of those different family systems is probably the most important thing we could do, and not blurring them, not trying to pretend that they don't exist because they do exist. That helpful image of the grandparent piece that you gave us a little earlier in this program
today, I think has a lot to do with how one can begin to envision those boundaries, to continue to allow them to relate to those extended family members in helpful ways. My kind of working rule of thumb, which you have read about, is this, that whatever helps keep boundaries clear and reliable and open is a loving, healthy thing to be about. Whatever blurs boundaries or makes them mysterious or unreliable is unhealthy and unloving. Well, taking that
tangent and then bringing it back to the issue of counseling, what role can therapy play? Not only, obviously, we've talked some about the divorcing process, but in the whole process of reclaiming oneself after divorce, maybe entering into a new relationship. Well, obviously, I'm biased because I think that therapy and counseling works. I think it can be useful, and I would like to see people avail themselves of it. Since we're piggybacking on the question of boundaries, that
would be one of the first ways that counseling, at whatever point in the process, whether it's premarital counseling, marital counseling, divorce counseling, or personal counseling after divorce. Often, one of the main bits of work that gets done in the counseling process is identifying and appropriately protecting boundaries around a person's or a family system's life and keeping those from getting eroded. That's one of the things that can happen. I mentioned earlier that it was important for divorcing
people to learn what happened to them. Often, that is done in a counseling process. What was it that I was bringing into the marriage as an expectation, as an assumption, as an unrealistic ideal, as a bit of leftover unfinished business for my own family of origin? What was I bringing into it that I need to know about so I don't do it again and that I can address and take care of on my own? Now, probably
it's important to say what I hope people know, but maybe needs to be repeated, that the purpose of counseling is not necessarily to save marriages. The purpose of counseling is to achieve the best outcome for the people involved, whatever that may mean. Well, that has a different framework than for us to look at the whole issue theologically, too. At the beginning of the first segment, we talked about some of our images of Christian life related to
marriage. We used the issue of the unity candle from the marriage service. You so rightly put it that the two individual candles, if blown out, represent a negative view that somehow we disappear to become one, as opposed to these two entities remaining the same. It seems to me that as we're kind of concluding our time together, it'd be to come back to some images about individuality and the whole process of Christian experience and how looking at
self and understanding self certainly has a bearing on how well one is going to do not only in a relationship, but in the aftermath of a breakup or in the process of considering the future. You recently, in just the last few minutes, touched upon the whole issue of our family histories. It seems to me that in what I see frequently in divorcing situations are people who also need to focus some extensive attention on themselves, not just
on the process of how the family unit is going to make it through that divorcing process, but how an individual reclaims self, understands self, where have we come from, where are we progressing to. Maybe you could say a little bit more about that as well, Randy. Well, I think it's terribly important, and of course we have trouble with the idea of self because it's so often loaded negatively as in selfish or self-centered or whatever, and
as a result we have a lot of people who need some help in paying attention to an appropriate development of the self as something to understand, to love, to respect, and that sort of thing. So often this is one of the things that counseling can do. You do remind me though of another point that I would like to make that illustrates this, I think, and that is the way in which popular mythology about what is good
marriage can sometimes work destructively precisely to this sense of self and to the work of a good marriage. One, for instance, in the popular culture there is frequently the idea that married couples should need each other, should look to each other to get their needs met. Again and again I hear a wife say, the problem is he doesn't need me or vice versa. It's possible to take a very different slant on that and it's possible to
say that need as a basis for marriage is dangerous, that I need to learn to get my own needs met myself. What fuels a marriage is not need but want. It's not that I need you to or be something in order for myself to be complete, but I want you to do or be something because I want it. And if I don't get it, I may be disappointed. And if I don't get it, I may be
disappointed, but I won't be less a self because of it. And that is a very key ingredient that I wanted to sort of draw out in the concluding piece here that we're sort of wrapping ourselves up now with. Is there one last thought you want to leave people with today, Randy, about what we've talked about? It's a good question. One last thought for either a therapist or a minister is a very tough thing to ask for.
Or a viewer who may be experiencing this. I come back to a theme that we've come to again and again and the theme of brokenness. God is in the business of holding and healing brokenness. Divorce is an experience of brokenness as many other things are as well. If we can allow ourselves to be held by God, by the church, by loved ones, by therapists, by whomever in order to heal, and by healing I mean at least
the repair of boundaries and the repair of the self, then I think we have a chance to go on and to offer other people something of the same healing. It's a very positive note to end on and we do trust that those looking at the whole issue of divorce and of marriage can look at this whole segment today and the relationship of brokenness as it relates to healing and wholeness. And I thank you for that concluding
note. It's been wonderful having you with us, Randy. Thank you for having me. This has been Princeton Presents. Thank you for joining us and we hope you'll join us again next time.