Why Faith Is Like A Marriage, and Why I Hold Out Hope For It

The person you love most can cut you the deepest. 

Anyone who has been married for a minute knows this. You literally mortgaged your entire life on this one person, this vow, this covenant, and living and loving them til death do you part. When you've shared a bed with someone for a year, ten years, half a century, you get to know them pretty well and vice versa. If you're a spiteful person, you have plenty of ammunition you can use against them. 

Though my wife and I have a good, healthy marriage, we are witnessing in friends the complete leveling of theirs. In sensitivity to the situation, I don't want to divulge details, but I can say that the entire foundation has been called into question, and while for years they had been superficially coasting with minimal blood traveling through restricted veins, an artery has ruptured in their marriage that has caused an proverbial aneurysm and brought it to the brink of collapse. Believe me when I say the issues are serious, and will take an enormous amount of investment and re-commitment to bring it back from the ledge. 

I said when I was on The Journey Home that when I came into the Church at the age of 18, I knew it was for life, and my 1st Communion and Confirmation felt like "walking down the aisle on my wedding day." So, I've always had this feeling that my relationship with the Church was not a fad, or a passing commitment, but literally a covenant. And it is fitting that the Lord recounts his relationship with his people throughout scripture in marital language. The Church is the spouse of Christ.

So, ok, in many ways both my wife and I have gone all chips in on each other, and all in on the Church as well. Because, as many Protestant Christians have trouble understanding, one's faith as a Catholic cannot essentially exist in any real way outside of the Church. It is a foreign concept that one could "love Christ and not the Church," any more than one could be truthful in saying he loved God but hated his brother (1 Jn 4:20). 

For some people who feel liberated by their recent throwing off of the shackles of the institutional Church--freedom from the gaslighting, the cognitive dissonance, the fear of the threat of eternal damnation--are making the claim that none of it is real, none of it true, and that the promulgation of Traditiones Custodes proves that it's nothing but bullshit. That those who stay in the Church are fools suffering from a kind of Stockholm Syndrom, especially since it's obvious at this point that the vicar of Christ himself is acting like an abusive father meeting out beatings. They feel vindicated by their escape, and the "I told you sos" from these religious pundits just feel like salt in the wound for the rest of us (who hold to the traditional faith and Mass) now having to contend with the "What nows?"   

For the first time in, I think, my history as a Catholic believer, the thought came to me, "What if they shut down the Latin Mass, and we just...stopped going?" Essentially, what if we just gave up, and said, "you know what, I don't believe any of this anymore." 

It's hard at this moment because we are dealing with the uncertainty of our future of worship, and also dealing with the existential questions and the pragmatic "where do we go on Sunday if this thing goes through" decisions that need to be made. And like many of those being crucified in their marriages who have the thought planted in their mind during those moments of insurmountable agony and betrayal: "what if I just leave the house for a pack of cigarettes, and don't come back?"

My friend Leila wrote a follow up book to her Primal Loss: The Adult Children of Divorce Speak. The book gave voice to those who had suffered from the trauma of divorce--that is, the children--but some readers expressed that that couldn't be where the story ended. And so she wrote Impossible Marriages Redeemed to tell the story of marriages that had been put up on the cross to be picked apart by ravens and yet did not come down off of it. By God's grace, many of these couples experienced a complete destruction and leveling of their marriage and yet refused to concede. They tied themselves to the mast of the ship, like Odysseus, and stuck to their vows by sheer force of will. And because they did not give up, but threw themselves on the mercy of God to save their marriage when they didn't know what else to do, God heard their desperate prayer and slowly brought it back from the dead. With man, this was impossible. But with God, all things are possible (Mt 19:26).

The promulgation of TC is a kind of humiliation, it feels like. All we want to do, as Catholics of the traditional persuasion, is to worship God in the fullest, most fitting way possible. Many of us can attest that it has borne good fruit, and is not (despite the gaslighting) rooted in a spirit of disobedience. Were the CDF to say tomorrow (today?): "You can no longer worship in this way?" many of us are faced with these decisions of "well, how are we to worship, then?" 

I think about Padre Pio a lot when he was forbidden to offer Mass, and how difficult and painful that must have been for him. But he accepted it as a crucifixion in obedience. I don't quite know if it's an apt comparison. But I wonder if many of us have been gliding along, superficially in our faith and worship, neglecting that if we are to follow Christ we are to be baptized into his death (Rom 6:3). What could be more painful then having the thing we care about most ripped away from us, and even more painfully so, not by a Communist government or a leftist mob, but by the Church herself? Like the spouse that knows us and our vulnerabilities.   

We may be on the eve of this period of uncertainty, liturgical wandering, and painful humiliation. And the threat of schism and defection to Orthodoxy and the SSPX may prove to be an extremely likely. When it comes to the Vatican's forecasting of who these traditionalists are a friend aptly said, "They are expecting college Republicans and they're getting the Maccabees."

And yet, for myself as the spiritual head of my household, I feel like the Lord is allowing this. This is not an accident, or outside of His will; nothing happens apart from His will! If we are going through a crucifixion of sorts, should we be surprised as if this was not a part of our discipleship. If the Lord is leveling His Church to the foundation the way He leveled the Temple, will He not rebuild it? Or do we not trust Him to guide us through this, and instead leave our marriage and forfeit the deepening of our faith and love in the Golden Years through the fiery trial (1 Pt 4:12)? We are people of the Resurrection, as St. Paul writes,  

    

"Now if Christ be preached, that he arose again from the dead, how do some among you say, that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God: because we have given testimony against God, that he hath raised up Christ; whom he hath not raised up, if the dead rise not again. For if the dead rise not again, neither is Christ risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins.Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ, are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

But thanks be to God, who hath given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast and unmoveable; always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in vain in the Lord." (1 Cor 15:12-19; 57-58)

I have hope. I must have hope to survive. If we go through dark times, we must then lean more on Christ to guide us in the dark. If we are stripped down liturgically, crowned with thorns, we are in good company. To the extent that the wheat is separated and the faithful are not blown away like chaff, that we endure our suffering and do not defect, we will be resurrected. If you don't believe that, just what then is your faith in the crucified Christ founded on? 

I don't know what God is doing but I lament and assent with Job "Though He slay me, yet I will TRUST IN HIM!" (Job 13:15).