springeth green.” Those human relationships that promise the greatest joy also hold the potential for the deepest hurt. I do not believe that any relationship offers more possibilities or binds us more deeply to one another than marriage does. To that connection we make the most solemn pledges, promising “to love, honor and cherish” each other “for richer. for poorer, “in sickness and in health,” ‘‘forsaking all others to be faithful as long as both shall live.” Life, destiny and hope reside in marriage.

The children born of that relationship represent a binding unity. To be able to raise those children to adulthood, to share together in their moments of transition, to give them the security enabling them to leave home and to fly with their own wings is a joy indeed. To be able to offer grown children a place to visit that is a happy refuge populated by people called grandparents is one of life’s deepest dimensions. Such opportunities are the serendipities of a good marriage. When childraising responsibilities have been completed, for a husband and a wife to be able to grow old together in mutual trust and love, cherishing memories of the joys and sorrows, the victories and defeats that have bound them closely together - surely, that is an ideal to be sought, a vision not to be relinquished, a goal worth the striving. But in our broken world ideals are often unrealized. Visions are frequently compromised and ultimate goals, it seems, are seldom fully achieved.

When we fail, the church needs to meet us in our pain, to enable us to stand even though we have fallen, and to give us courage to

live, love and risk again. No one should abandon a sacred relationship without making every effort to heal and transform the brokenness. Not to struggle to preserve a sacred trust is to reveal a shallowness that will continue to plague one’s life. But when that struggle has been engaged deeply and honestly and still has not succeeded, then the church must reach out to its hurting people with a faith that embraces the past in forgiveness and opens the future in hope.

The pressures on marriage today are enormous. Mobility, loneliness, rootlessness and many other factors take a daily toll. Without compromising its essential commitment to the ideal of faithful, monogamous marriage, the church needs to proclaim that divorce is sometimes the alternative which gives hope for life, and that remaining in a marriage is sometimes the alternative which delivers only death. The fullness of life for each of God’s creatures is the Christian church’s ultimate goal for human life. When a marriage serves that goal, it is the most beautiful and complete of human relationships. When a marriage does not or cannot serve that goal, it becomes less than ultimate and may well prove less than eternal. In such a case the church needs to accept the reality and the pain that separation and divorce bring to God’s people, and to help redeem and transform that reality and that pain.

I am convinced that no divorced couple could go through the service for “A Recognition of the End of a Marriage” without knowing that in the searing pain of human brokenness there is redemption, forgiveness, hope and the opportunity to seek a new fulfillment along a new path. We Christians serve a God who can bring resurrection out of crucifixion, life out of death, joy out of sorrow, redemption out of pain. Perhaps this God can also bring us to wholeness despite our brokenness. In that hope we live<<<<Back<<<<