The Flowering Cross

Not long ago I read in a popular magazine a reply to a correspondent which rather impressed me by its prudence. A young married woman had written in to the magazine’s appointed oracle in matters of the heart, to say that she had ceased to love her husband and fallen violently in love with another man, and that she felt she would have to head off with this other man, though she still hated the thought of hurting her husband.

The reply ran something like this: ‘Dear Worried Girl – You would be wise to stay where you are. If you head off with this other man, the odds are that he won’t marry you, and your second condition will be worse than your first. If you are a susceptible person, it’s quite likely that you will fall in love about page 411 fifteen times before you are an old woman. But you have made a promise to keep intimacy of mind and body for your husband, and not for anyone else. If you stick to this promise, you will probably eventually be glad about it. . . .’

I rather admired the common sense of this reply; especially in its acceptance that the feelings of married people may well fluctuate violently, yet that this is no reason for them to violate an objective bond. The objective doctrines of the Church regarding Matrimony are, of course, well known to us. We Catholics know that we have the power to enter into marriage, but not the power to terminate marriage, since God is the third Person involved in the agreement, and He has decided that Christian marriage should be indissoluble except by death.

Nevertheless, we are human beings, not in ourselves radically unlike our Protestant or non-Christian neighbours, and we share nearly all the same problems, in or out of marriage. It is only in our recognition of marriage as an absolute objective bond, independent of personal feelings, that we perhaps differ from the majority of our contemporaries. And even in this matter there may be great variety of opinion within the Church.

The reply which I have quoted above, to the enamoured female correspondent, conceals, I think, a genuine belief in the objectivity of marriage, though it is unlikely that the oracle was a Catholic; and some Catholics, while accepting the objective doctrine of the Church in this regard, may still have serious subjective difficulties. It is perhaps chiefly for their sakes that I am trying to shed light on the issue.

While we all know and formally accept what the Church teaches – namely that Matrimony is a Sacrament which mysteriously signifies the union of Our Lord with His Church – yet it may be hard for a priest or a fellow-layman to bring this point home in a real way to a wife whose husband is a drunk, a compulsive philanderer, and incapable of holding a job, or to a husband whose wife is habitually shrewish, a very bad housekeeper and pathologically averse to lovemaking. Curiously, it is in the direct vicinity of Calvary that people find it hardest to recognise the Divine Presence in their lives. Or perhaps not so curiously – for it is an understandable immaturity in most of us that we regard God as the giver of good things and cease to recognise Him easily when he begins to give us a small share of His own pain.

I have noticed that some of my fellow Catholics, especially women, have felt that my tentative comments on the married state, at other times and in other places, have been too negative – that I have emphasised too much the difficulties of marriage and not enough of its joys – yet I doubt if this is really so. Again and again, in every confessional in the country, priests are obliged to say to men or women who have encountered in Matrimony areas of harshness which they did not expect: ‘Now, don’t be too worried. We’re each of us given a cross to carry. If you carry it and do your best, the road may become less dark, and certainly the Lord Himself will reward your generosity. . . .’

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It is because of this kind of advice, accepted and carried into effect, and not because of some natural predisposition among Catholics to a serenity and cheerfulness greater than that of their neighbours, that a vast number of Catholic marriages hold together and go from strength to strength while an equally great number of marriages outside the Visible Church are decaying and falling apart. I do not think however that the deepest meaning of the Church’s doctrines regarding Matrimony implies merely a blind obedience to the will of God. Such obedience must exist as a safeguard of other virtues. But I see the Church’s doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage primarily as an expression of God’s mercy in human terms. Even outside the Church, how often must a husband or wife in the full flush of rebellion against the married state, turning over bitter thoughts in his or her mind, not have looked suddenly at the children and thought: ‘I can’t do this. It’s not worth it. They depend on me for a large amount of their emotional and spiritual support. . . .’

And then this same troubled person may look at his or her spouse and think: ‘Yes, him (or her), too!’ He (or she) is really in some ways very helpless and vulnerable. All people are like that. I’m like that, too. God give me the strength to swallow my pride and get on with the job of trying to look after these fellow creatures committed to my charge. . . .’

These are the thoughts of mercy, involving a detachment from one’s own needs and a recognition of the needs of others; and if they rise out of pain they do not end in pain; they end in a development of character and a greater nearness to God.

To return to the original letter and reply in the popular magazine, I do not think the young woman was in any way abnormal in falling out of love with her husband and into love with another man. Probably what had happened was that her ideal image of her husband, as the person who would and could bring about a magical transformation in her life, had faded, and she saw instead the actual person, a limited human being rough-edged and full of defects, whom it was her vocation to cherish and look after, and the change was too sudden. It terrified her. She thought that her marriage had ended when in fact it had just begun to get under way. In a community more charitable and closely knit than our own, she would have sought the counsel of an older woman, and perhaps been steadied and calmed by it, and in a sense she did this, by the only way available to her, by writing to the oracle of the magazine she was accustomed to read.

Again, I imagine that the other man was an ideal image whom she felt subconsciously obliged to substitute for the first image of her husband. This in itself would not have been calamitous. From my own observation I’d say that practically all married women have a secret image of a Ghostly Lover who combines all the positive attributes that their husbands and other men appear to lack; and the fantasy, if it is held with humour and some realism, page 413 may even be a safety valve for them. But the wholly humourless Religion of Love with which our society is permeated would, as soon as she had formed an attachment to another man, issue its own highly subjective edicts to her: ‘All right, Sally, you’ve ceased to love Bill and now you love Jack; how terrible, and how dramatic! A woman’s life has to be governed by love. So you must pack your bags and leave Bill and go and live with Jack. . . .’

Yet the very fact that she was prepared to seek advice from the magazine oracle showed that she had her secret doubts of the reality of the Religion of Love. Again, some of my good Catholic friends may feel I am being cynical. But the issue seems to me to turn, not on a choice between love and no love – as if the Church strangely had begun to forbid human beings to love one another – but on a choice between two kinds of love – a love that springs solely or chiefly from one’s own needs, or a love that accepts the limitations of one’s marriage partner and (what is harder) one’s own radical defects, and tries to learn to give rather than to take. This second kind of love is strong in only a very few of us; and it may take a lifetime to learn the practice of it. I take it that Matrimony was established chiefly so that we should learn it; since without it we may find it hard to enter Heaven.

I have no quarrel with the existence of sexual love in the world. Indeed, most of the poetry or prose or plays I have written accept it as one of the liveliest factors in human growth. But a view of marriage which gives an absolute priority to sexual love, and either ignores or demotes to second place the love that is actually a form of mercy, can only lead to the break-up of a great number of marriages; for sexual love belongs to the subconscious mind, that area of dreams and myths and magical suppositions, and in most people will fluctuate alarmingly, both in regard to the same person at different times, and in regard to different people. Often, I think, the unimaginative monotonies of our social structure exterminate sexual love quite early in our marriages by burying it under maintenance work and the acquisition of material goods; and it is not strange if some sadness or resentment in either spouse may lead him or her to reach out unconsciously to other people. Here again a humorous and realist view of the matter should help to remove the fangs of the serpent. A man who has over the years learned to love his wife in a realist way, or a wife who has learned to love her husband, if one morning he or she wakes up from a dream in which they have been expressing violent love to the image of some other person – I think he or she should laugh heartily, though preferably inwardly, and say: ‘Ah, well, I’m not as old as I thought! The same mechanism is still working that used to trouble me in the past – thank God I no longer think I have to do anything about it!’

And even if the occurrence were not a dream, but a sudden conscious attachment to another person, it would be wise to react in the same way. I think such sporadic attachments are pretty well universal, though not universally admitted; they are part of the permanent emotional sideshow; and they can, page 414 of course, be temporally painful and disrupting. But the difference between the emotional child and the emotional adult surely lies in the capacity to cope with them without any actual breach of the walls of marriage.

There are various factors, however, which tend to undermine the stability of marriages in our present society. When I see young people getting married I often tremble for them, not because they lack virtues, but because the times are so disturbed. These are some of the social factors, as I see them.

There has been a general decay of belief in the indissolubility of marriage and in objective Christian morality. Perhaps in the past there were some bad side-effects of the traditional belief – some people put up with conditions in marriage that were actually intolerable; and those who became divorced or who married again, or even just separated (as the Church allows) were subjected to a harsh and uncharitable scrutiny. Nevertheless, the change to a laxer code affects even those who do not accept it. The climate of the times, and in particular the example of others, makes stability more difficult to maintain.

If a young wife falls out with her husband, the local Regional Committee of the Hate Your Husband Club, comprised of chronically unhappy wives and divorcees, will soon be on her doorstep; if a young husband falls out with his wife, he will soon encounter a phalanx of the Down With Wives Society ready to listen to his grievances at the local pub, and if possible to inflame them. In this atmosphere molehills can easily turn into mountains.

The affluence of our society may be a hindrance to good relationships in marriage. In a curious way material possessions seem to drive nature out of a household. Again and again I have heard married couples remark that the time when the physical and emotional side of their marriage flowered best was not when they had built the new house and acquired the crib at the beach, but in the days when they were poor and had only each other to turn to. As old Karl Marx so brilliantly observed, in modern industrial society ‘Life itself appears only as a means of life’, and, ‘This crystallisation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up to now. . . .’

Marx had as great a horror as any of the recent Popes have had of the alienation of man from himself and his fellows which goes with our form of economic structure; though, as we recognise, his solutions are different from theirs. But the sense of young married men (and nowadays those of their wives who are also working) that the modern world is a wilderness which does not care much whether they live or die, throws them back on married life itself for almost all their expectations of personal fulfilment. Marriages often crack under the strain. People become resentful both because they feel unnaturally constricted to a single relationship for all their emotional sustenance, and because that sustenance cannot be fully provided. There is often a sense of page 415 strain and claustrophobia in modern marriages; and it would be strange to suppose that this occurs because human nature has worsened; the society, not the couples involved, must answer for the largest part of it, though of course the couples may ignorantly blame one another’s shortcomings.

Emphasis in books and in conversation on the necessity for perfect marital adjustment may itself provoke dissatisfaction by setting men and women in search of a Cloud Cuckoo Land of perfection not achievable this side of the grave. And so they may cease to be glad, as their ancestors often were, of smaller mercies like health or friendship or freedom from penury. Young women who have been accustomed to put their money upon their backs and faces may find it appallingly hard to adjust to a lower standard of living, and equally hard to accept the change from a relatively sociable existence to solitary confinement in a flat with half a ton of washing and several noisy babies.

Trappist solitude is the keynote: a solitude that even Trappists find it difficult to accept, and here forced on the newly married by our peculiarly non-communal society. And a young man who has married a vivacious and flirtatious girl may be scared out of his wits by her transformation into a neurotic and life-hating gorgon. He doesn’t know that it’s happening to everybody; that it’s the way our society digests its members; that one has somehow to ride it out and hope for the best. Nor does his wife know this. Both of them now have their troubles; and unless they have very good sense, they may tend to blame each other for these troubles.

The Religion of Love may do a lot of harm. While there may be something charming about women regarding men as heroes, and men regarding women as goddesses, it is charming only in romantic songs – when the principle is applied as a yardrule of our fellow beings, it leads swiftly to chaos and an unwarranted sense of disappointment. I believe the Religion of Love is responsible for more disastrous triangles and broken marriages than any other single factor. Our society tends to idolise the affluent, the healthy and the beautiful; it turns away sharply from the sick, the ugly and the poor, who are, for Catholics, walking images of Our Lord crucified. Thus when sickness, poverty, or the loss of good looks enters the marriage circle, our young people may feel subconsciously betrayed. In fact a new kind of love is being asked of them.

The changing roles of men and women may produce an undeniable strain. A great many modern men feel that they are nonentities both at work and in their homes; boys are educated to fulfil in the relation between the sexes a twenty times less aggressive, more passive role than that of their forefathers; and some wives, while apparently welcoming this new dispensation, may be secretly dissatisfied with it. On the other hand, the advent of the emancipation of women has come to mean that women are often dominant in their households; and this in turn may produce secret dissatisfaction among men. It is a kind of reversal.

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As Thomas Merton has pointed out more than once in his commentaries on modern society, again and again frustration comes to us from conflicting values. If a wife desires at one and the same time both to be dominant and to be dominated, there is no possible way in which she can be freed from her frustration. The advent of family planning may also be a mixed blessing; for it introduces powerful elements of inhibition to the most intimate areas of marriage, and removes from married sexuality the legitimate fertility which in the past distinguished it sharply from sexuality outside the marriage bond. There are no more patriarchs or matriarchs among us. Yet it is not uncommon for modern husbands and wives to desire at the same time a large family and a limited family. What stranger martyr could there be than a young woman who is voluntarily on the Pill yet has a strong desire to conceive? The martyrdom comes from conflicting values; and the contradiction can only be resolved either by a logical acceptance of some coherent philosophy, or – as is probably more common – by an intuitive pursuit of the values that are felt to be the deepest.

In practice I have no doubt that most marriages still succeed, and that those who ask for Divine help receive it abundantly. But I think it would be a sign of an over-simple mind if any of us thought we could keep exactly the same kind of society we now have – materialistic, impersonal, centralised, de-sacralised – and prevent the decay of marriages merely by stressing Christian values. On the other hand, without Christian values – courage, love, prudence, hope – we can hardly begin to make a change.

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