Last Sunday, the Church observed the Exultation of the Cross. It's one of those feast days that falls on the same day (September 14th) every year, and if it happens to fall on a Sunday, it supersedes the regular Sunday observance. The readings reminded me of four years ago, when I wrote the following reflection in the wake of my divorce.
Not Without a Vision
Proverbs 29:18
Where there is no prophecy the people cast off restraint,
but blessed is he who keeps the law. (RSV)
Without a vision the people lose restraint;
but happy is the one who follows instruction. (NAB)
When I met with my pastor after my divorce, he opened our conversation by asking me if I had prayed. I had, although I told him that I wasn’t confident in my ability to discern whether my prayer was actually a dialogue with God, or just myself. I had prayed a novena to the Holy Spirit, begging that my marriage be saved, and that prayer appeared to have gone unanswered. In prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, I had become convinced that the coming divorce could not be avoided, that trying to do so would make things worse rather than better, and that what God wanted of me was to emerge on the other side of the calamity with an intact faith and a more intimate relationship with Him.
The divorce came, and I was emotionally shattered. I began attending a support group for divorced Catholics. The support group met on an evening when the host parish offered a weekday mass. Before the third meeting of the support group, I chose to attend mass, which happened to be on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The first reading was Nm 21:4b-9:
With their patience worn out by the journey,
the people complained against God and Moses,
“Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert,
where there is no food or water?
We are disgusted with this wretched food!”
In punishment the LORD sent among the people saraph serpents,
which bit the people so that many of them died.
Then the people came to Moses and said,
“We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you.
Pray the LORD to take the serpents from us.”
So Moses prayed for the people, and the LORD said to Moses,
“Make a saraph and mount it on a pole,
and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live.”
Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole,
and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent
looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.
It’s hard to imagine a worse spirit-killing plague than divorce, especially if you accept the often-asserted statistic that half of all marriages are legally terminated before the death of one of the spouses. One, or both, of the spouses become “disgusted with this wretched food” that is their marriage. God sent among the Israelites the saraph serpents that “bit the people so that many of them died.” Many people today find themselves divorced, and often that leads to a spiritual death that leaves them bitter, disillusioned, and cynical.
Those bitten by the serpent were told to look at the image of the serpent that God had directed Moses to mount on a pole. Traditionally, the Church has interpreted the serpent on the pole to be a sign of Christ on the cross. Those who had been bitten could look at the serpent on the pole and they would live.
Divorce is a rupture of the covenant between two people who have joined themselves together as husband and wife. Christ, crucified on the cross, is the ultimate expression of the broken covenant between God and Israel. God’s own high priests had placed the incarnate Son of God on the instrument of torture and execution in a definitive rejection of God’s love and mercy. And yet Christ, through the paschal mystery, turns that rejection into a new Covenant.
Through my prayer, God was telling me that I needed to look to the cross. The divorce would be painful and unavoidable, but if I kept my eyes on Jesus, he would lead me through the death of my marriage to a more fulfilling relationship with Him. That insight in a moment of prayer, reinforced in other moments of prayer, was my prophetic vision.
Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me, save that thou art
Thou my best thought, by day or by night
Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light
Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word
I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord
Thou my great Father, and I thy true son
Thou in me dwelling and I with thee one
Riches I heed not, nor vain, empty praise
Thou mine inheritance, now and always
Thou and thou only first in my heart
High King of heaven, my treasure thou art
High King of heaven, my victory won
May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's sun
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall
Still be my vision, O ruler of all
