October 8, 2000
© 2000 by Grant M. Gallup
Genesis 2:18-24 Naked and not ashamed
Psalm 8 Domine, Dominus noster or 128 Beati omnes
Hebrews 2:(1-8) 9-18 The pioneer of their liberation
Mark 10: 2-9 What God has joined together let no one separate
James Pike, sometime bishop of California, was himself married several times, when that was still a fairly novel thing amongst the clergy. He used to say that the reason Islam was such a fierce competitor for Christianity was that it preached One God and three wives, whereas Christianity preached one wife and three gods. Monotheism is easier than monogamy. Polygamy--having several wives--is a custom still deeply ingrained in many African societies and in those of the Medio Oriente. While most Muslims might aspire to two or three wives, some Arab potentates have dozens, even a hundred wives. Right wing groups in the Church, very eager to defend the "nuclear family" and preach no sex at all for gays, none for anyone before or after marriage, and only limited and starchy types of sex within it, seem to forget that in the Bible, many of the great saints practiced polygamy, and that without polygamy, their own family trees might be rather more wayside shrubbery than abundant and Mormonic growth. John McNeill, the Jesuit expelled from the papal presence for thinking and writing about same sex unions, has helped us not only with his imaginative theology, but his trenchant observations on the likelikhood that Jesus blessed a same sex union when he restored the Centurion's servant/lover to his bosom, ending the divorce that illness had caused. Father McNeill embraces the God whose name is Love, and the Pope divorces himself from the community of the Beloved Disciple.
Anglicanism has wrestled in the marriage bed for a long time, since the dawdling days and randy nights of our Defender of the Faith Henry Tudor. And African bishops at various times have taken or given permission to countenance polygamy. In many places, polygamy is and has been a solution to the problems posed by a birth-rate and survival-rate which leave many more women come to maturity than men. (In the western church, Mormons were almost alone in following patriarchal polygamy, and were persuaded to do so at least as much by their frontier circumstances as by the angel Moroni.) In time the gender ratio may even out. But just now, to force all the wives but one to leave the husband would be to consign them to poverty and disgrace. Who will support them? Who will feed their children? Where would they go? Beyond that, it consigns the husband himself to disgrace and dis-esteem in a society where many wives are a sign of wealth and dignity; manhood itself is defined in this way. So some bishops have said that entire polygamous families may be baptized, provided that after marriage no new wives may be added to the harem, and that ultimately in this way the institution of polygamy may be eased out. But our problems in the Episcopal Church come from our widely accepted practice of serial monogamy, not polygamy. There, we are learning to depend on the Eastern Orthodox doctrine that marriages themselves can "die" and so leave partners free to remarry. It has thus been revealed to us why it is that God has put erasers on pencils.
Divorce, like abortion, is never going to be embraced and celebrated in the practice of our religion. Both are lamentable and even tragic, whatever the circumstances may be that make them, in case law, necessary, and even therapeutic. They are not part of the Constitution of human life, but of a codicil for human failure. C. S. Lewis' essay, "The Great Divorce", is (like Milton's "Paradise Lost") the story of the great chasm between heaven gate and hell gate made deep by human sin, where the Church lives in time. But Christ comes to bridge this chasm, to conquer death, to lead captivity captive, to restore all things in heaven and earth.
We should remember the whole context of polygamy when we hear the Scriptures today about the divorce discussion with the scholarly Pharisees. We should remember their myth of the origin of sexuality--the deep sleep, the rib-ectomy, the creation of Eva from the rib of Adam, and the pronouncement of marriage as union into one flesh.
We should notice that our story is from the second chapter of Genesis--it is the older of the two versions of human beginnings that are given there. In the first chapter, God makes the human all at once, in two models, at the same time. But here in chapter two, the ADAM comes first, that is, the GENERIC HUMAN being, undifferentiated into gender. And God is in the process of looking for good company for the ADAM, not for a sex partner at all, but a companion, a helper, someone to dispel the alone-ness, and only after bringing round all the animals and birds for the ADAM to have a look at does God put the ADAM under a general anaesthesia and perform the rib-ectomy.Now this story is much misinterpreted by people as putting women in second place since Eve is taken "out of the ADAM." This misses the point, which after all does not pretend to be biological science, which tells quite a different--indeed, an opposite tale, nor to say everything that can be said about the Origin of our Species. The one point of the story is that human beings have one origin, and that the gender specificity, maleness or femaleness, is not to be thought of as definitive or ontological, but that across the sexes we are "bone of each other's bone, flesh of each other's flesh." As the androgyne Quintin Crisp famously declared, "Male and female created He me." Myths are, as the great psychologists like Carl Jung knew, public dreams. Indeed, it is in sleep that Adam's rib is taken and the dream of Eve brings about new possibilities--the one divides so that there may be two becoming one again.
There are other ancient myths that we should know about, that explain in symbols all of these things, in other ways. The Upanishads of India, 8th century B.C.E. tell of the universe before time, being the Self, in the form of a human. The Self thouts, "It is I!" and finds itself alone, and "lacked delight and wished there were another." This sounds like our Genesis: "for the human there was not found a helper fit for him", doesn't it? Well then, in the Sanskrit myth, the Self swells up and splits in two and becomes male and female. It was BOTH before that. The male embraces the female and the human race arises, and then they become Bull and Cow, Mare and Stallion, and so on. And they realize that they are one with creation, from the original Godself through the ants in the anthill. this myth too symbolizes the unity of creation, and the origin of sexuality as the fulfillment of the need for companionship and relationship: except that in the Sanskrit myth it is GOD (that is, the Universe) itself that differentiates into sexes, in order to then unite. So in this understanding, GOD and the UNIVERSE are not separate, as they are in our western myth. Protestantism in general has seen "salvation" as an individual's deliverance from damnation, and has little room for sacraments or the community in the process. Likewise marriage and divorce are individual matters. But the Catholic tradition everywhere says we can't be saved all alone, we can't even get married all alone--"it takes a village," as Hillary says, or "it takes the Church," as a Catholic Christian would say. Unfortunately, the traditional Roman Catholic way of handling failure in marriage is to claim it didn't happen at all--that there was no marriage; what you do is annul the rites that proclaimed it. The fee for this is higher of course than the fee for a license to commit matrimony. Anglicanism has better sense than that, having arrived at it after more experience with divorce than it was proud of. The Eastern Orthodox, perhaps from their climate and culture, learned more quickly.
In our Western version, GOD does not split into two, but remains apart, over-seeing the split of his creature into two. Our religion then challenges us forever to relationship with others, with other human beings, and only through them to find our relationsihp with the Creator. No Hindu thinks that way--his religion challenges him to identify instead with the Universe, the Being that he/she split from, the divinity he/she is a part of.
In the Greek version of the creation myth, which appears in Plato's Symposium, we have a story of three distinct creatures at the beginning: one race of males, who live in the sun; a race of females, here on earth; and a race of intersex, in which the male and female are joined--living in the moon. The gods are afraid of such creatures, for they are huge, each is a double creature, back to back, each with 4 hands, 4 feet, and so forth, and the male race is 2 males joined back to back; the female race, 2 females joined back to back; the both-sex race, a male and female joined back to back. The Gods--Zeus and Apollo, cut them all in two, down the middle, like slicing an apple down through the core, to keep them from becoming too powerful and overcoming the gods to run the universe. In this myth, when they are divided, they continue to desire each other--and so seek each other and continue to seek each other until reunited. This myth explained for the Greeks the phenomenon not only of male-female love, but of ame-sex attraction, and the belief that human nature is originally unitive. That is, "if we are friends of God we shall find our true loves" and be reunited with the One who is our other self--whether that is an other-sex or a same-sex relationship. This myth, like our own Biblical myth, does not divide God, nor does it assign one primary gender to God, but it does explain for people what sexuality seems to be doing in the human race. It is not after all just about reproduction, it is about relationship. It is God's provision for companionship, for love, for unitive relationships.
Now let us look at the good news that Jesus has for the Pharisees in the gospel periocope today. They come to him not really to learn about human relationsips or the wonder of sexuality, of the grat enabling grace in the stories of old--but they come to argue a legal point. Not: "Is it legal to get a divorce? But they ask "Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife?" Well Jesus knew the law books, maybe nearly as well as they, and so he said, "What do the law books say?" and they said, "It's legal--fill out the forms, and you've got it." And Jesus said, "It's a provision made because of human failing, but you have missed the point of it all." God made you for rapture and you want to talk rupture. God made you for love and you want to talk law. God made you for union and you want to talk division. God wanted one mind, one heart, one flesh--and you want to talk two bank accounts, two aprtments, two water-beds. God wanted you to have union, not separation.
Of course "Moses" allows for failure. Of course the Church can see that some relationsips come apart, and that "certificates" will sometimes take the place of everlasting honeymoons. In Jesus' time, as in many parts of Africa today, even to countenance that a woman be sent away from her husand was to consign her to death and destruction. Why would a man divorce his wife in Jesus' time? Adultery? If SHE had committed adultery, then her husband could divorce her and she could be stoned to death, as part of the divorce. Was she not the sexual partner he expected? Too bad--send her away. Was it that her father was not rich after all? Set her on fire with a quart of kerosene, as is done to penniless brides in India even today. An accident near the fire is a kind of final divorce decree there. You don't have to return the dowry.
It is this that Jesus is addressing when he denies divorce to the all-powerful Jewish male of the first century. There is no discussion of a woman divorcing her husband here. And Jesus is coming to the defense of the defenseless women, just as the bishops in Africa do in their defense of polygamy: they are not laying down rules for everywhere and for all time. They are, like Jesus, saying that your insistence upon talking about rights and permissions misses the point: Human relationships are about duty and opportunity, and God's hope for them, expressed in commandment and commitment. And they are about rapture and love and and the possibility that every human being can find an end to his or her alone-ness in union with another. "For this reason shall a person leave the nuclear family and be joined unto another". . . so that new life, new arrangements, new possibilities may come to pass, so that aloneness may come to an end, and there will no longer be the division that gender creates but the union that sexuality makes possible. When God brings human beings together, therefore, in this venture of rapture and union, let no human institution, let no legal tradition, be used to create division again. Let no one put asunder.
And therefore the letter to the Hebrews says, "we don't see human beings quite having succeeded at all this, 'though we are little lower than angels." Everything is supposed to ultimately be neatly arranged--in subjection to the human race, nothing is to be left outside our episkopé, our oversight. But as it is, we don't yet see it happening that way. But what we see is JESUS. And here is the one we look to. It's strange isn't it, the One we look to is this One who never married, who has become the Bridegroom of us all. This One, Jesus, partakes of our nature in order to end its defeats, its divorces, its death, its separation, its bondage, and so makes up in his own faithfulness to us and for us for all the faith-lessness we have known from each other. At the marriage service, the couple is alays reminded that their relationship is a MYSTERION, a sacrament, of the love Christ the bridegreoom has for each of us, for his Novia, his Esposa, the Church. And indeed every human relationship of love and rapture and the finding of fulfillment in another is a sacrament of that endless marriage which we elebrate with Christ our God.
What GOD has joined together, no human legal or canonical or cultural system can destroy. Not even divorce can or should erase what was good and healthy and abiding in a failed relationship.
The whole point of a Christian marriage continues to be, as our American Book of Common Prayer declares, that the couple's life together may be "a sign of Christ's love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair".
Edward O. Wilson wrote "Consilience" a few years ago to prophesy that the divorce of religion and science is coming to an end, that they will marry up in a reconciliation when science solves all the problems that religion now thinks it explains. But "Life is a Miracle," declared Wendell Berry, and these two cultures of the sciences and the arts need to be married up again, not continue in their life of divorce and estrangement. Berry thinks Wilson's blueprint is the subjugation of religion and art by science--the kind of marriage we saw in the patriarchal age, when women were dominated by men, and they both called it marriage.
Is there Life after Divorce? Sometimes there's more life, more healing, more growth, after this surgery. We are still in the hands of the God of Life.
W. H. Auden writes at the end of "For the Time Being":
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for
years.
He is the Life.
Love Him in the world of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
GRANT M. GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
Apartado RP-10
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
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