Tag Archives: Divorce

The Convenience of Marriage

30 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Humor, Matrimony, Sacraments

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From Lewis today I have this profound insight into marriage. (Well, actually, I just had to post it because it is so funny.)

Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.

The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis

Of course the reason this is funny is because there is some truth in it. I am always a little skeptical whenever anyone tells me, “Oh, my wife/husband and I never fight or argue.” After all, marriage is the joining together of a distinct and unique man and woman who are also fallen and sinful. As a result, our pride will from time to time (or most of the time) get in the way – those are the times when we forget that marriage is about giving ourselves to our spouse and not about what we can get out of it. Too often we forget this and when we do then quarrelling will result.

Our modern society doesn’t really understand that about marriage and that is why (at least it is part of the reason) that so many marriages end in divorce.* Just because there are disagreements in a marriage doesn’t mean that you picked the wrong person and need to move on and find someone else. I think it is quite the opposite. If we would use those times of disagreement in order to look at ourselves and see what we need to fix within ourselves, instead of expecting our spouse to be the one to give in, then we would be living our marriages as we should and would also be much happier for it.

At this point someone may be making a thousand excuses in his mind of why he is not the one that has to change. When this happens we need to remember that part of being a Christian is learning to die to ourselves. And this dying to self also applies to marriage. Every time you go to your spouse after an argument and sincerely say, “I’m sorry”, and then amend your life (or at least try) then you are in fact dying to self. And it is that dying to self that will lead to happiness – in this life and in the next.

*(Marriages don’t actually end just because a judge has granted a civil divorce. If it is a valid marriage it only ends at the death of one of the spouses. Another point of clarification needs to be made – an annulment also does not end a marriage; instead, it is a declaration by the Church that the marriage was never vaild to begin with.)

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On the Validity of C.S. Lewis’ Marriage

17 Saturday May 2014

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Canon Law, Matrimony, Morality, Sacraments, Thankfulness

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The quote below is an excerpt from one of Lewis' letters to his friend Dorothy Sayers. The reason I am posting it is because it has given me a bit of information that I did not know about Lewis, and I am sharing it because it is something that everyone who loves Lewis needs to know.

25 June 1957

I ought to tell you my own news. On examination it turned out that Joy’s previous marriage, made in her pre-Christian days, was no marriage: the man had a wife still living. The Bishop of Oxford said it was not the present policy to approve re-marriage in such cases, but that his view did not bind the conscience of any individual priest. Then dear Father Bide (do you know him?) who had come to lay his hands on Joy—for he has on his record what looks very like one miracle—without being asked and merely on being told the situation at once said he would marry us. So we had a bedside marriage with a nuptial Mass.

The important thing to note here is that Lewis' marriage to Joy was completely valid! I had always thought that Lewis was ‘living in sin’ in his marriage because he had married Joy, who was divorced. This always bothered me because Lewis does not seem like the type that would do such a thing. Also, for such a prominent Christian apologist to do such a thing it would cause scandal by making others think that divorce and remarriage is OK, which it is not. But from his own writing in this letter it appears that he knew that Joy's first marriage was invalid because she had married a man who was already married and then civilly divorced. And, as Catholic teaching tells us, once you have entered into marriage any attempt to enter into another marriage is impossible until the death of the spouse. (And, by the way, this is a universal law – not just one for Catholics.)

Truly, I give thanks to God for having discovered this. Now my love and respect for Lewis has grown immensely. And now there only remains one thing about Lewis that makes me sad – that he was never able to see the full Truth of the Catholic faith and convert. But still – his witness to Christ has led many into the Catholic Church and I am grateful to be one of them.

A Rival Good to God’s: On Cardinal Kasper’s Divorce Proposal

06 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Catholic Obligations, Matrimony, Pro-Family, Sacraments, Thought for the Day

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I just finished reading A Rival Good to God’s: On Cardinal Kasper’s Divorce Proposal from Crisis Magazine. You really should read the whole think at the link above. My summary of the article would be that you cannot fix the divorce and ‘re-marriage’ problem within the Church and within society by dumbing down the rules established for marriage by Jesus. If the Church were to implement Cardinal Kasper’s proposal it would only make the number of divorces go up and not down. My favorite parts are quoted below.

…in the many centuries when the Gospel informed the law, divorce was impossible in the West, or nearly so. The result was not widespread misery, but durable marriages that produced children who themselves entered into durable marriages. Lifelong marriage is not some ethereal ideal; it was the lived reality of the great majority of people in the West for most of history. The prevalence of divorce in today’s West is not the result of marriage becoming harder, but the result of divorce being made far easier. In the past, when people encountered problems in their marriages, they knew they had to find a way to work through them. Now, they think they can do what they want instead. Cardinal Kasper’s proposal seems to put an imprimatur on this way of thinking. It essentially accepts a Western world with 40 percent or so of marriages ending in divorce as a reality that cannot be changed, even though the Christians who emerged from the catacombs managed to change a Roman world where divorce was free and easy into a Christian world where marriages were expected to be permanent and generally were.

The article closes with the following:

A respectable argument can be made that the corrupting influence of the modern world has so degraded the popular understanding of marriage that there are more marriages that may properly be annulled today than in the past. But if this is indeed the case, what is needed is a clear and unambiguous reaffirmation of the Church’s teaching on marriage, so that the divorce revolution can be resisted and eventually undone. What is not needed is succumbing to the perennial temptation of choosing a rival good to God’s.