My friend Larry has a term for it: “spiritual divorcées.” They often crop up in small, intimate Christian groups, particularly those that focus on deepening spirituality. Spiritual divorcees are married people who have heeded the call to greater solitude, silence, and prayer in their lives, and now find themselves in a marital crisis.
The more seriously they practice these disciplines, the greater the gulf grows between them and a once-beloved husband or wife, who either cannot understand, does not approve, or perhaps does not believe in God at all.
Part of this problem stems from the fact that people who seek out solitude, silence, and prayer have traditionally been celibates: monks or nuns. This is because it is very hard to focus one’s full attention and energies on God while at the same time tending to a marriage. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:32-34
I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.
Another wrinkle is that married people can be extra-sensitive to the feelings of isolation and loneliness that often come during the early stages on the contemplative path, especially if their marriage has, up to this point, been a warm and intimate one, focused on the other. At first they are frightened by the new distance, but then, impatient with the partner’s apparent stubbornness, they become angry. And suddenly a spiritual divorcée is born, a person now particularly vulnerable to fantasy and temptation. Affairs of the heart ensue, not necessarily sexual, but often very intense, with like-minded pilgrims. The door has been opened to grave sin.
What is the answer? St. Paul offers good advice:
If any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she is willing to go on living with him, he should not divorce her; and if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he is willing to go on living with her, she should not divorce her husband. For the unbelieving husband is made holy through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy through the brother (1 Cor 7:12-14).
In other words, regardless of how painful and lonely a marriage can become when the partners are not on the same page in regard to spiritual practices, God has His own plans for the covenant they have made with one another. They cannot safely detach themselves from the context in which they live; their hunger for God must somehow be addressed through the marriage and not outside it.
When Mike and I went through this struggle, what helped the most was to consciously try to see our household of two as a small monastic community, a “school for the Lord’s Service,” as St. Benedict put it in his Rule. This took our marriage out of the secular realm, with all its notions about romantic fulfillment and personal growth, and put it on the same footing as any other spiritual enterprise. Suddenly, it was no longer about “us” and our “relationship” but about what God might be trying to do through and with the two of us. Amazingly, within a few years, we were no longer spiritual divorcés, struggling to communicate, but had formed a genuine union, far deeper than the purely romantic one we’d so painfully lost in the early stages of this path.
And when we did, Christ’s peculiar analogy for His relationship to the Church finally began to make sense to me. The celibate St. Paul builds on this analogy when he says, “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:25-26, 31-32). If we can once again take the Sacrament of Matrimony seriously, if we can learn to see a marriage — no matter how troubled or dissatisfying for the individual people involved — as holy and worthy of protection, we can not only avoid a dangerous spiritual pitfall but come to a richer understanding of the nature of Christ’s love for us.
Paula Huston was an editor and contributing essayist for Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments (Dutton, 2000), and is the author of The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyola, 2003) and the forthcoming Holy Work: Practices for a Contemplative Life (Loyola, 2006). For more information about these books and others, visit her website at www.paulahuston.com.
