PAUL'S QUESTION...
MY LIFE CHOICES...

She touches on an interesting concept: life choices. Do people ever really consider that (anymore). Are they binding? I'm not trying to argue one way or the other, and my personal beliefs have definitely shifted over the years. But I know that I've made some.
One of the most fascinating things about our point in history is the way things that used to be simply accepted as life-long commitments are now clearly seen as long commitments, but without the actual "death do us part" part.
A friend of mine who had long before taken final vows as a Benedictine nun was forced to leave her community for reasons I have never clearly understood; she suffered for years from having been forced to renege on her vows, which she took profoundly seriously--just not more seriously than her conscience. She has never told me what actually happened, but I can only imagine what sort of ghastly spiritual "cleft stick" could have forced her to choose between her conscience and a very consciously made vow of obedience. It's not a nice thought.
I used to say that I didn't believe in divorce. At least, not for me. And yes, I know, it does sound odd coming from me--I get the dissonance. The dissonance that interests me, though, is the fact that almost everything I value in life came from the divorce of my parents, and my subsequent adoption by my mother's second husband. So I was able to recognize divorce as necessary, even life-giving, and still think it was not for me. My adoption makes me deeply grateful to Paul [Saint Paul, that is] who declared that we are all sons by adoption. I completely understand what he means when he says:
And we bring you the good news that what God promised to our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, "You are my Son; today I have begotten you.'You may remember those words, in the King James Version, from Handel's Messiah. God does indeed beget us anew; that is my own experience.

Vater werden ist nicht schwer--In English, that goes something like this:
Vatersein dagegen sehr.
It's easy to become a father;The English translation does not have the bite of the original, but it's the best I can do at the moment. All I am trying to get at is that physical paternity is as completely uninteresting to God as it is [ahem, cough, blush] to me. What interests Him is who you make into your father by accepting authority, offering obedience, and receiving an inheritance. Did He not promise Abraham that he would raise a posterity as great in number as the stars or grains of sand on the beach from his seed? (Mind you, that was as he was asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son...) And has not the wisdom of a tiny, persecuted tribe become the foundation of the religious life of billions of people?
But being one is lots of bother.

But back to life-long commitments. My friend who lost her community after some twenty to thirty years of service suffered terribly, but at the time she left I wrote her that our time was marked by the way things that had once been seen as "permanent" were becoming recognized in their true nature as creatures, as much rooted in time and timeliness as the human race.

This looks like one of the gifts of the Christian era, in which--over time--indentured servitude [contracted service for a set term] replaced slavery. Time-shares have replaced the wholly-owned vacation house for people who still have such things at all; servants are hired by the day or the hour, and shared within communities rather than being life-long employees of one family. [Most people who have what my mother called "cleaning ladies" get them for half a day once a week if they are lucky.]
I have cousins who were brought up by the same governess who had raised their mothers; she rotated through the households of her former charges as she was needed, and was quite a presence in the lives in three generations of her "employers." [Try renting Jyll Johnston's "Martha and Ethel" [click here], a documentary film about one New York family's relationship with two such "employees."] I think I can say that you would look in vain for that kind of "employment" anywhere in the developed world today--or anywhere in the world, if the relationship is to be voluntary.

Well, I have said before that I break down into a myriad contradictions once you remove the central unifying force of heart and soul; last month I wrote this:
Now, it may just be that I am split 50/50 on every issue: good boy/bad boy, gay/straight, male/female, top/bottom, dom/sub, leather/drag, in/out, up/down, wine/water, devout/profane. I strongly suspect I am. [My complete inability to decide when faced with a restaurant menu might be an omen--I always want one of whatever there is.]

I wandered in the desert, feeling abandoned and alone, for all of forty weeks. Here, the same principle is at work as in the question of the length of "life-long commitments." What any reasonable person might have expected to last years, took weeks; we are not chained to the Great Wheel of Time, but are given grace to experience the Great Things of Time within the little wheel of our own experience.
The Jews proclaimed their little seven-day week from Sabbath to Sabbath as sufficient metaphor for the entire year, an entire lifetime, the entire life of creation, and gathered to prefigure the feast at the end of time after every service, feasting, as the rabbis claimed we would, on Leviathan. [OK, that was before we almost wiped out Leviathan by rendering his body down to light our evenings at home...].
I entered my marriage with every expectation that it would last a lifetime, and it cost me a great deal to give up that faith. But I see that while we do in fact not live in a world where such things happen anymore, the only proper way to enter any real relationship is in the faith and hope that love will allow it to be "such a thing" about to happen. Only if we make a lifetime commitment are we free to see that it has come to an end; there is a reason that our time has come up with awful phrases like "serial dating."

That is because he is "He Who Will Be Who He Will Be," and I, like you, my brothers and sisters, am a thing of spit and dust and wind...
As the great shape-note recasting of Job 4: 17–21 puts it:
Shall that vile race of flesh and blood
Contend with their Creator God?
Shall mortal worms presume to be
More holy, wise or just than he?
Behold, he puts his trust in none
Of all the spirits round his throne;
Their natures, when compared with his,
Are neither holy, just, nor wise.
But how much meaner things are they
Who spring from dust and dwell in clay!
Touched by the finger of thy wrath,
We faint, we vanish, like the moth.
From night to day, from day to night,
We die by thousands in thy sight;
Buried in dust whole nations lie,
Like a forgotten vanity.
Almighty Power! to thee we bow
How frail are we! how glorious thou!
No more the sons of earth shall dare
With an eternal God compare.
C
Hi Troll,
ReplyDeleteI was under the impression that your marriage ended because Isis did not want it to continue if it meant acknowledging the existence of that part of yourself - which meant you were not hers "in freedom."
A healthy relationship is its own living entity kept alive by the nourishment of both (or all) individuals involved. I thought Isis effectively "pulled the plug."
Please correct me where I am undoubtedly wrong.
Cheers.
F
Flipper:
ReplyDeleteit depends on when you date the beginning of the end. The final end came because I could no longer remain silent, but silence was something I had taken on myself after seeing how the truth affected her.
I'm not sure what a "healthy" relationship is--or what authority gets to decide, but it seems to me that love, like the tango, takes two.
I am not in any way trying to shun the blame for the end of my marriage; if I had been able to "suck it up" for another ten years, we would still be together. In the end, the cost became too great and the return too small.
But who backed away first? That is a true chicken-and-egg question. Isis could say that I started on my way out the door when I laid all my cards [including the leather one] on the table ten years before I left.
Who knows?
In the final analysis, things happen, and it is not always possible to determine what or who caused what. What you can do is take responsibility for your share, and how you react to the events.
And there I think I have been dealt a better hand than Isis all 'round.
Glad to hear from you.
T@C