right, last and final instalment in the drama, also quite appropriate since we are discussing religion.
three days after receiving my "beautiful" i-have-to-move-on email, the guy i mentioned in the past few weeks wrote me a very moving email making plans to leave everything else (ie wife job etc) behind him so as to have a shot at a new life with me. he had detailed plans, and asked me to give him an answer of sorts by next monday. i thought and thought and thought and here's what happened (note: it was not the first time that the religious argument was brought up, actually it was quite present on both sides throughout teh horrore)
i said
The question of second marriages is not, it seems, one of these debatable topics where the stances proposed by various churches are, to a large extent, the work of man - and I have just been reminded by Matthew 15: 1-9 that one has to be wary of the work of man. It is, much to my chagrin if such a thought is not too blasphemous, a subject on which Jesus spoke profusely, and he was pretty clear. It's there in Matthew 5: 31-32, Mark 10: 11-12, Luke 16:18: both the person who divorces their spouse and remarry, and the person's second spouse commit adultery, end of the story.
As you will know, the exception of "unlawful marriage" is only reported in Matthew, as if it was a bit of a very last resort rather than a core point, but it is still there, which is definitely more than enough to make the idea of annulment acceptable. If Jesus mentioned this specifically, there must have been a good reason: he did not mention circumstances where the spouses didn't want to be with each other any more (I don't even know whether contemporary conceptions of marital love would have resonated with Jews of the time), nor he referred to any individual problem that might arise between the two, and if we assume that he knew what he was doing and what the consequence thousand of years down the line would be then we are forced to conclude that he didn't mean for disagreements, or differences in personality, or even disgraces such as childlessness to be a sufficient cause for divorce.
However, he still referred to unlawful marriage, and I mentioned in a past letter how this is only one of the possible translations of "porneia", which for example was translated as "having a concubine" in the Italian Bishops' Conference edition of the Bible up to 1974. And this is, obviously, where my specific contribution has to stop: I cannot by any means know whether your marriage is "unlawful" in the sense that we discussed when debating annulment. While I know that declarations of nullity are frequently granted on grounds of depression at the time of the marriage (unsurprisingly, this happens a lot in America), you and your wife are the only two people who really know what was going on at the time.
And then he said:
After days of thought I am left with the overwhelming feeling that my marriage is valid as it was originally contracted, which means that any other marriage would be a second marriage, which is not a possibility. This leaves me feeling, as you put it, like sitting by the river and waiting to die, but with a feeling born from the faith that I have rediscovered through you that we will probably want to die a little less every day.
It feels at the moment as though we have had two weeks of being battered on every front in our heads and our hearts, and that we are reaching similar conclusions, which do at least have (or seek) a divine root. For my part in causing any hurt I cannot apologise enough. The only consolation is that having thought for so long we will not be left wondering in the future.
1. As I might have said before, the next person who mentions the fact that "people are religious because they are weak and want comfort" gets throttled, and in this specific i don't care that i should be turning the other cheek - I will just pray for forgiveness after i have smashed said person to bits
2. Assuming that tr00 love never dies, do we have any information on how it can at least refrain from killing people? I am not really sure that this whole story can be survived (not in a mechanical sense, of course, but it might have horrendous long-term consequences), and I would like to know why and why me. I know that, going by the Bible arguments expounded above, I should just bear my cross until I figure out the reasons, but at the moment I just feel like drifting (maybe also becasue I am sick).
