Torn Asunder: Children, the Myth of the Good Divorce, and the Recovery of Origins

By Margaret McCarthy

A timely unsettling of old "settled" questions surrounding divorce

Amid the current nationwide debate over what "marriage" is, this book examines anew the nature and meaning of marriage from the standpoint of what adult children of divorce have actually experienced.

Upholding the inextricable link between our personal identity and our origin in a union of two — and, more deeply, in the Fatherhood of God — the contributors to this volume reflect on the damage that divorce does to children, opening up important questions for all of us: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to love and to marry?

After decades of talk about the rights of adults to get a divorce and the benefits for children of an amicable split between parents (a so-called "good divorce"), these authors — theologians, philosophers, political scientists, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, and cultural critics — effectively unsettle conventional opinion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467445344

Book preview

America.

Introduction

MARGARET HARPER MCCARTHY

These days, it is clear to everyone that we are in the midst of a great debate over the nature of marriage, especially as concerns the subjects of it, whether they be a man and a woman whose love in principle is capable of generating children, or simply two individuals who love each other. At first glance, the questioning about what marriage is seems entirely new. In one obvious way, of course, it is, since no one in all of recorded history has ever suggested that amorous friendships among men or among women — however much these might have been celebrated or tolerated — might qualify as material for marriage. In another way, however, it is not new at all, since the weakening of the once indissoluble link between marriage and children has been well underway for some time now.¹ Before the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States, it was to this weakened link that proponents of same-sex arrangements would often point when faced with the objection that same-sex unions cannot in principle generate children.²

Marriage, indeed, has for some time now has been a companionate union, based solely on the emotional life of the two individuals involved and detached from larger external concerns having to do with the broader society, economic and otherwise.³ Thus if the having of children has now become one of those external concerns,⁴ it is so because children have already been in a tenuous relationship with parents since the dawn of the companionate marriages. The reason for this longstanding tenuousness is chiefly due to the fact that the parents of these children viewed themselves principally as rights-bearing individuals whose pursuit of liberty, understood as the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,⁵ made it difficult to see why they, who had entered marriage freely as consenting adults could not leave it just as freely, when finding it to be an impediment to that same pursuit.⁶ Marriage of necessity has been subordinated to the sacred rights and goals of these individuals, even, and, perhaps especially, for those who married only for love. Indeed, as Wendell Berry has noted, marriage was and is thus subordinated for the consenting adults still in it. They are, he says, divorced in marriage.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.⁷

Naturally if marriage had to be subordinated to the two consenting adults defending their rights and interests in their pursuit of happiness, so did their children.

If there is a debate, then, about the relation between children and marriage, it is one that is first rooted in a broader culture of divorce,⁸ which has made its choice for the consenting adults in these companionate marriages. For all of its apparent advantages, it is undeniable that no-fault divorce opened the gates to the widespread instability that now exists between parents and their children, introducing the latter, as it has, to a whole array of new relationships in their ever-changing step and blended families.

It is from within this larger framework that we turn to the question of the children of divorce in this book. The child speaks eloquently about what is or is not negotiable for its own welfare and very being, while being subjected to the many social experiments of our time. And in doing so, it also speaks about the union that brought it into being in the first place, even in the poverty of the child’s experience. The fruit bears witness to the tree, as the old proverb says. By looking at the children of divorce, then, we are faced with momentous questions about childhood as well as marriage itself, the adults in it, the young people being prepared for it, and what it is they all most deeply desire. In sum we are faced with the central question about our humanity. The attention on the child in our case, then, is not a retreat from all of the publically censored questions concerning the nature of marriage, of love and happiness, and the human person. It is, rather, a way of focusing these, whether they be dismissed from public discourse or not.

There are of course, many who have studied the unsettling effects of divorce on children.⁹ We refer to these studies here in much of what follows; but we do this with an eye to something new and fresh that situates the question of the children of divorce within our larger framework. The newness is the recent writing of children of divorce themselves — some represented in this work — who now as adults have begun to speak about the effects of divorce. It is one thing to be the object of social research. It is quite another, though, to speak about divorce from the inside. The freshness, moreover, is precisely what these adults say about what is ultimately at stake for those caught up in it, both children and parents.

What these new interlocutors in the debate about divorce have begun to identify in themselves is a wound that affects them at the level of their very being. In her groundbreaking book, Elizabeth Marquardt speaks about being caught "Between Two Worlds,"¹⁰ by the worlds who as one gave the child its very life and identity (putting its united mark on the smallest detail of his or her physiology and personality). The child of divorced parents, says Marquardt, is not only standing between these worlds; she is split down the middle, finding in herself traits of one or the other parent (traits that often have to be silenced or muted depending on which parent one is visiting). In the same vein Andrew Root speaks about the loss of ontological security for the child of divorce who has had the ground on which he had been thrust into the world pulled out from under him. When the goodness of the unity that puts a child into existence is positively denied, and then dismantled, it puts into question the goodness of the fruit of that union. Indeed, says Root, divorce, unlike the death of parents, questions if [the child] ever should have been at all, since the divorced parents cannot but wish they had never married.¹¹ What divorce opens up, then, to children caught in its net, is the extent to which their being is not indifferent to their origin: to those who brought them into being in the first place.

Essentially, what has happened in recent years is the unsettling of the good divorce doctrine. In a nutshell, that doctrine held that a divorce was better than a bad marriage for children, provided the divorce was a good choice, one in which the parents refrained from any public conflict, and divided their children’s time and affection equally.¹² As for any negative effects of having parents in two different places, diminished resources, both economic and personal, these, it was said, could be minimized by remedial social capital through social programs, after-school care, homework assistance, mentoring, and the like. Such was the doctrine that served to clear the collective conscience of a society built around the free, unimpeded behavior of adults in pursuit of fulfillment, allaying its fears that all of the tying and untying of marital knots might not in the best interests of children (nor of their parents). And such was the doctrine that accompanied and fueled a whole divorce culture with its scores of divorce lawyers and social workers.

But when many started to identify the deeper effect of divorce on children, this called into question the idea that what mattered most was the quality of a divorce, not the divorce itself. There was a basic underlying effect of divorce to which the other statistically measurable effects — success in school, enrollment in college, income levels, etc. — might even be indifferent. Children of good divorces, after all, might be quite successful in college, indeed might have more reason to be so, having a greater need to please.¹³ Notwithstanding, they bore the same deep wound as the children of less fortunate divorces. And for that wound there was no remedial social capital.

However much that capital might be useful, it was a fix for a problem that had essentially been misdiagnosed. It didn’t address the nature of the problem. Indeed this approach did much to silence what was at the very core of the experience of divorce, that divorce had changed the nature of childhood itself.¹⁴ It is not surprising, then, that the mere acknowledgment of what was at stake in divorce for children offered a great source of relief for the generations whose experiences had long been managed by happy talk about their parents’ good divorces.¹⁵

It has now, therefore, become possible to really look at things. In the first place children of divorce allow us to reassess our assumptions about what it is we like most about ourselves. If children of divorce aren’t simply OK in the face of the willed destruction of what brought them into being in the first place, the question about just how much what we are is tied to what gave us to ourselves is inevitably raised. We are used to thinking that our origin is a matter of indifference to us, even problematic for our autonomy, and that what is most important is what we make of ourselves, how we reconceive ourselves.¹⁶ Yet is this true? The child of divorce in his intransigent desire for the unity of his parents knows this is not the case. Might he or she then not be for all of us the evidence, by way of loss, that in the end, we are not simply what we make ourselves to be?

Then too the child of divorce has begun to ask about what stands behind one’s own parents, the Origin of origins? The break in their parents’ unity has in a way opened this up — deep calls unto Deep, as the psalmist said. And it ought to for us. We are all, after all, children of divorce, not only because we are part of a culture that practices divorce so widely — and prepares young people for it — but also because there is not one of us who does not suffer from a crack in the unity of his or her parents (and who does not inflict the same on his or her own children). Might children of divorce then be for all of us a voice crying in the wilderness pointing all of us to our need to recover our origins, going all the way to the question of God himself, Origin of origins, of which our parents are an image, however feeble?

The experience brought forth by children of divorce also allows us to re-think what marriage itself is. It calls into question the dominant ideal of marriage which would decouple marriage from children, but also from any greater reality, as it allegedly champions love, happiness, and personal fulfillment. If children of divorce, even as adults, show that their parents’ loving union is not negligible for them, might they not also be opening up a larger horizon to their own parents’ love? Children after all are the permanent signposts of their parents’ unity, the nagging signposts in many cases, especially in cases of divorce. In being so, they remind their parents of the depth of the love they were caught up in, when they were caught up with each other in the beginning. For the child, in its very being, speaks at once of the going beyond oneself of love and of the forever that every love worth its name implies (however incapable the lovers are in fulfilling these). And in so doing, it is the child now — especially the child of divorce — who offers to its mother and father, and all other mothers and fathers, a glimpse of an even greater More which their little love was seeking — however unawares — and a greater Forever without which all the feeble promises of love could never possibly be fulfilled. By insisting on the inalienable link between themselves and the marriage of their parents, then, a whole generation of adult children of divorce have opened up for us what it is that we mean when we say to each other I love you. We might note here that in doing this, they have also allowed us to see what we have recently become blind to: the simple fact of sexual difference without which there is no going beyond oneself.

For us then, as we said, our attention to the children of divorce is an attention to fundamental questions about our humanity, especially now as its many essential elements risk being altogether obscured. As Benedict XVI said:

The family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself — about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold. First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for? Man’s refusal to make any commitment — which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering — means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his I ultimately for himself, without really rising above it. Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child — essential elements of the experience of being human are lost."¹⁷

It is with an eye to the larger questions which the child of divorce opens up, then, that this collaborative work is written. The book has four parts. The first part considers the effects of divorce on children from the perspective of sociologists (Sullins, Thorn, Marquardt), psychologists (Fitzgibbons), and theologians (Root, Lickona, and Lopez). The second part looks at marriage itself as it has been subjected to divorce as a pursuit of happiness. It looks at how divorce was conceived — especially legally — as the happy alternative to unhappy marriages (MacPherson). Then, in light of decades of experience with divorce, it re-considers the alternatives, and considers the need to understand the nature of love itself (Um), the role of forgiveness (Sodergren), and sacrifice (Laracy). The third part looks at the role of courtship both in its generation of a culture of divorce (McCarthy and Vaitoska) and in its role in re-generating a culture of marriage (Kantor). Finally, the fourth part considers the larger social fabric needed to uphold a culture of marriage (Schindler and Schlueter).

1. Legally speaking this began in the 1960s. In Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), the U.S. Supreme Court declared that married couples had a constitutional right to purchase and use contraception; in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972), the court broadened this right to include also non-married couples. Thus, sexual union was divorced from both procreation and marriage precisely at the time that no-fault divorce reforms were rendering marriage a transitory legal status.

2. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts explicitly built upon the Eisenstadt foundation of a privacy right when legalizing same-sex marriage in that state (Hillary Goodridge et al. v. Dept. of Public Health et al., 440 Mass. 309, 329, [2003]), as did the U.S. Supreme Court when decriminalizing homosexual acts among consenting adults (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 564-65 [2003]). See n. 1 above.

3. The detachment of children from the companionate marriage is well documented in Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 63-86 and Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2005).

4. The external concerns from which the companionate marriage detached itself eventually came to include children, as is well documented in the recent study Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America, The National Marriage Project, 2013, http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/KnotYet-FinalForWeb.pdf, 26.

5. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).

6. For a text that shows how deeply rooted in the American soul is the necessity of divorce, on the grounds of the newly acquired individual liberty and its more perfect voluntary unions, see J. Fliegelman, Affectionate Unions and the New Voluntarism, in Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 123-54.

7. Wendell Berry, Feminism, the Body, and the Machine, in The Art of the Common Place (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 67.

8. It was Barbara Dafoe Whitehead who drew our attention to the cultural dimension of divorce in The Divorce Culture (New York: Knopf, 1997).

9. The 25-year study by Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, is perhaps the most significant. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 300.

10. Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005).

11. Andrew Root, The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 77.

12. On the good divorce, see Marquardt, Between Two Worlds, 12-16; 171-73.

13. Marquardt, Between Two Worlds, 9-10.

14. Marquardt, Between Two Worlds, 12.

15. Marquardt refers to the literature that tries to re-cast the child’s experience of divorce in positive terms as happy talk, a talk which, in her judgment, is nothing but denial in the face of two dominant, though competing, desires, the desire to accept the freedom of consenting adults to divorce, on the one hand, and the desire to raise happy children, on the other (Between Two Worlds, 178). Identifying what it is that children of divorce want, she calls for a society which will at the very least face the truth squarely about the reality of divorce for children (Between Two Worlds, 190). Andrew Root similarly admonishes parents to face the truth of divorce square in the face (Children of Divorce, 128).

16. This theme in modernity is taken up by James E. Block, The Crucible of Consent: American Child Rearing and the Growing of Liberal Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

17. Benedict XVI, Address of His Holinesss Benedict XVI on the Occasion of Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, December 21, 2012. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2012/december/documents/hf_ben­xvi_spe_20121221_auguri­curia_en.html.

The Homelessness of Divorce

LISA LICKONA

In his book The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being¹ Andrew Root tells the story of his parents’ divorce and the deep impact it had on his life. Root’s experience is eerily similar to my own. Both of us experienced our parents’ divorce while we were in graduate school studying theology, and both of us were on the threshold of marriage ourselves at the same time that our own parents’ marriages fell apart. And so it is not at all surprising, that, after reading Root’s book, I found myself excavating the memories of my parents’ divorce some twenty-one years ago. Or I should say rather that I was trying to excavate memories, for I discovered that I had made a deep habit of un-remembering certain things. I had surrounded my memories with a protective layer of bubble wrap. As I tried to recall that troubled time, I found myself straining to make out the dim shapes and muddled forms that lay back in the past.

I pondered my state of repressed memory, the mechanism I had developed to prevent myself from remembering something that was, frankly, very painful. And then I wondered whether this repression of memory — my own and that of millions of children over more than a generation — has affected our culture at large. Are we, I wondered, involved in a massive cultural un-remembering? Perhaps this explains in part our incessant media culture, our insatiable consumerism, and our quasi-religious attachment to every new technological gadget that comes along. We children of divorce, eager to be distracted from our memories, willingly ride any wave that takes us forward to a newer, and hopefully happier, place. We want to move beyond our pain.

But there is another force at work in the all-too-common suppression of memories of divorce. Even when children of divorce want to excavate their experiences, the prevailing culture prefers that they not. This is in large part because our culture is — because we are! — uncomfortable with any problem that rocks the human person at the level of our being. As Andrew Root points out, we either deal with divorce as a problem of education, patiently explaining to children why the divorce happened and how it was not their fault, or as a problem of social capital, one that can be fixed by better custody arrangements, stronger stepfamilies or better access to education. We want divorce to be something children can get past, grow out of, or be talked out of.²

But precisely because divorce is a problem of being, the solutions that remain merely at the level of doing are, for the most part, ineffective. Indeed, although these alternatives can produce a highly functioning human being in many respects, there remains at the heart of that person a deep sense of incompleteness and loneliness. At our center, there is a void. This is the real story of children of divorce, the one that is being told in our time by authors like Andrew Root and Elizabeth Marquardt. More sophisticated strategies for achieving a good divorce or better research into what produces emotionally resilient children, however wellmeaning, are really attempts to impose upon a child adult views of functionality or the paramount importance of self-realization against the evidence of the child’s own being.

In Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, Marquardt painstakingly documents the measurable aspects of the void left by divorce through a study that compares the views of adult children of divorce with those of their peers from intact families. She embroiders the study with interviews and her own astute analysis. After reading the book, I found myself returning again and again to a section entitled Stuff in the chapter on Home. Marquardt carefully lays out how a divorce disrupts a child’s sense of having a home and being at home. Many of us take for granted the idea of home. Children of divorce don’t have this luxury:

When parents get divorced, one or both of them leave the family home. They divide up their possessions and may get rid of some things entirely. Some do not want to live amid physical reminders of the marriage. Others may need to sell pricier items and split the money. Some remarry, acquiring new things with their spouse and get rid of the old. Sometimes even treasured things just get lost in the shuffle of multiple moves and marriages.³

One woman Marquardt interviews tells of how little remained in her mother’s new house from her parents’ marriage. There is nothing there from my childhood. There’s pictures . . . there’s one mixing bowl I think my mom still has in the kitchen. That’s about it, you know?⁴ Marquardt comments, Old, otherwise unremarkable items remind us of our childhoods and signal belonging. For Ashley, the image of that one mixing bowl stood as one of the few tangible reminders of her childhood, proof that her mother’s home had at one time been hers.⁵

I kept returning to this because it matched my own experience in so many respects. I found myself repeatedly nostalgic about little things that represented my parents’ marriage to me — the knick knacks that had somehow survived the split. When I was able to find and keep these objects — often rescuing them from my parents’ seemingly incessant campaign to rid themselves of the trappings of their marriage — I felt as I imagined the persecuted Christians felt when they recovered the charred remains of a martyr who died for the faith. Those intrepid souls carefully sifted the bits of bone from among the ashes, carried them home and placed them in a reliquary to be remembered by future generations. I have likewise treasured my relics and hidden them away for my children.

After a while I became aware that my desire to cling to these things was way beyond the kind of attachment my friends from intact homes had for their parents’ belongings. I could imagine that to a child of an intact family, the old mixing bowl on mom’s counter would probably not mean much at all. He probably would not notice if it disappeared, and if he did, he might be happy that his parents finally got rid of that old piece of junk. When you have a mom and a dad who remain together, you don’t need the mixing bowl. But when you don’t have mom and dad together, you are gripped by an anxious nostalgia, a desire to find, somewhere in the world, the missing sign — the sign of unity, of permanence, of love — even if it’s just an old mixing bowl.

The truth is, the mixing bowl is the sign of something else. And that is what the sad story of divorce has recalled for us — the significance of signs, the importance of things meaning things. Children, we should remember, are primed for the concrete — sticks and stones, paint and glitter. And it is in and through the concrete that they encounter the less tangible yet most important, most fundamental realities — truth, love, being itself. By attending to the concrete signposts of life, the child follows the path of human discovery, that will hopefully lead him to true health and wholeness. Many children fairly fly along this path willy-nilly, laying their hands and hearts on whatever adults put before them — be it something beautiful like a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson or something less high-minded, like a Rugrats episode. They learn most immediately from that which is most immediate — the touches of love, the words that are said, the tone of the voice. And what they learn comes mostly from their parents, the ones who are the first teachers.

And yet many parents have almost wholly given up on the idea that they are the first teachers of their children, the privileged witnesses to the deepest, most permanent realities. And this is why adults tell children that divorce is something that you can get past—because we adults no longer accept the responsibility of being the guarantors of meaning for our children. For if we can convince children of this truth, we will all be home free.

The Enlightenment

To be fair, our discomfort with things meaning something greater than they are is something that we have inherited. It began hundreds of years ago when we decided that the material order — what we can see and touch — was nothing more than that: merely what we can see and touch. There was no longer a heaven above us . . . only stars. And even stars were demoted to balls of gas in the great nothingness of space. Western culture as a whole has for hundreds of years been engaged in a great un-remembering, an attempt to detach what we see from what it can possibly mean, to undermine the meaning of meaning itself. This great cultural un-remembering goes by the ironic name of the Enlightenment — ironic, I say, because the cost of entering the light has been a great darkness. What was, in an earlier era, imbued with meaning — the sticks, the stones, the trees, and the stars — now became for us just so many configurations of matter — minerals, vegetation, balls of burning gas — that, while interesting to study, are devoid of signification, of any portent of meaning beyond themselves.

Walker Percy famously argued that modern man is lost in this cosmos, a cosmos no longer peopled with God and men, angels and demons . . . only meaningless bits of dust.⁶ Standing in a line of thinkers going back to the mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal, and extending to the farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry, Percy identified the cultural shift away from the idea of the material order as created, a shift that has left modern man bereft of a home in the material order.

Yet even as we experienced this shift in our collective consciousness from a magical world (recall G. K. Chesterton’s Elfland⁷), a world in which we knew who we were and where we were, to a world that could be studied, manipulated, and ultimately destroyed at our own hands, we preserved one very important thing: the family. It was as though we instinctively realized that no matter how much we rejected everything that went before, we could not reject this one very important thing. People understood that, at a minimum, it was good for a man and a woman to stay together for the sake of the children, and that this staying together really did have something to do with the good of the children. A man and a woman were still willing to mean something to their children. They were willing to sacrifice immediate marital happiness for their kids’ solidity, their sense of being grounded, their being at home.

For this reason, until recently, the child remained ensconced in a network of meaning that continued to reassure him of who and where he was. Because of the changes in our enlightened world — the beginning of the industrial era, a newfound love of mobility, and the creation of new economies, based not on land and locality but on manufacturing and international commerce — this network of meaning was considerably less vast for a child of the last two hundred years as compared to the child of an earlier era.⁸ But at least he had his parents, his siblings, perhaps even a familial tradition. Home was the place where your people were.⁹ Think of the idyllic childhood of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Ingalls were always moving — indeed these pioneers were as mobile as we are in our modern culture — but, wherever they went, Laura could always count on the same enduring realities: Pa’s fiddle, baby Carrie’s cries, the old bulldog, Jack. There was more than enough home to make every new house seem safe, to make each new adventure nothing more ominous than a new adventure.¹⁰

This was true until about fifty years ago,¹¹ when we finally shattered the foundation, the world of the child. Marriage, it was asserted, was merely a mutual agreement of two wills. Thus, when those two wills found themselves moving in opposite directions, they ought not to be constrained by the contract that they had formerly agreed to; they ought to be free to re-write that contract, to create their own future, their own personal quest for meaning. The very nature, the very meaning of marriage itself was thrown into question.

Now, facing the existential anguish of the children of divorce, we are forced to look critically at this view of marriage, to re-consider what is really going on when two people promise themselves to one other. In the light of the experience of children of divorce, we can now see clear evidence that the proposal that married love can mean whatever we want it to mean has tragic consequences in the lives of the children. We are forced to recall that marriage has certain characteristics. It has a definition. It has a form.¹² It has a meaning and a purpose.

The truth is, love is something more — it points to something more — than the two lovers themselves. If lovers are to truly make present the reality of love in the world, they must go beyond their own definitions, beyond their own visions of themselves and what is good for them, and be willing to become something more, precisely for the sake of those whose very existence depends on that love.¹³ In short, by reflecting on the experiences of children of divorce, we find ourselves before the very old-fashioned notion of sacramental marriage — the notion that marriage ought to be permanent and self-sacrificial — for it is a sign of something beyond itself, namely the enduring faithfulness and generosity of God.

Origins

In her recently released memoir, In Spite of Everything, Susan Gregory Thomas tells the story of her parents’ divorce in the 1970s, her troubled adolescence, and her own marriage, which also ended in divorce.¹⁴ Although Thomas’ white, Anglo-Saxon parents gave her little in the way of religious education, her experience of divorce pushes her to the ontological edge. What, in spite of everything else that has happened, can I live for? What grounds me as a person? She faces a religious question. Whereas biology or sociology or philosophy can tell us what we are — homo sapiens, thinking apes, rational animals — only by asking the religious question can we begin to talk about who we are.¹⁵ This is precisely the pressing question of the child of divorce — who am I now that these two people who together made up my origin have gone their separate ways, have denied the unity that made me?

Saint John Paul II spent much of his pontificate giving us an answer to the question who am I? in two parts: man is the only creature that God has created for his own sake, and he was created to give of himself¹⁶. Much has been made about what John Paul II shows us about human personhood in the communion of man and woman, the theology of the body. Perhaps we should now attend to the way that the identity of the person is experienced within the ambit of the family. We will have to go off road from the famous Wednesday Catechesis to the Letter to Families, the Letter to Women, and the play Radiation of Fatherhood. In these texts John Paul II sees the communication of the love of God, the love that is at the source of everything, as the heart of human parenthood.¹⁷ And this parenthood is, in turn, the full flowering of married love. Through their union in love man and woman provide the foundation for a child’s sense of who he is; through their loving initiative, the child discovers that he is wanted for his own sake.¹⁸

God, in his mysterious providence, has so willed it that for each one of us there are two people — two fallible and continually failing people — whose love for each other creates a home for us in the cosmos. Elizabeth Marquardt has brilliantly pointed out that much of the work that a married couple does to make a home is done behind the scenes, unknown to the children.¹⁹ It is the work of working it out. It is the work of negotiation and compromise, of making plans and bringing them to bear on the family. I would add that much of the work of a marriage happens fundamentally in the heart of the married person. It happens when one encounters the will of an other who may desire something very different from oneself, whose own dreams and desires and very personhood might seem suddenly strange and off-putting. Is this not the experience of many a married person: waking up one morning and discovering that the person in the bed next to you — the person with whom you have shared the deepest part of yourself — is a stranger? Here the deepest work of marriage must begin. It is the work of the heart in which one discovers that love is not actually about me being me but me being for you.

For John Paul II this being for the other at the heart of marriage represents genuine human maturity. What prevents this gift of self from draining the person is what, ontologically speaking, precedes it: the fundamental experience of each person alone before God—original solitude. In other words, each man and woman is capable of being for an other if God has already been for them. And, developmentally speaking, this experience of being loved by God comes first of all through the love of our two parents, who witness to us the love that is permanent, faithful, fruitful.²⁰

A cycle is created. We feel God’s love for the first time through the love of our parents. This love grounds our life, our sense of self, our very being. And so we can give of ourselves in our own marriages, thereby expressing God’s love for our own children. Divorce destroys the cycle of love, thereby throwing our human identity into doubt. But, this raises the question: Can the cycle be repaired? What hope is there for the