Amy Laura’s 3 Apocryphal Rules of Divorce

In March, 2011, I separated from my husband of twenty-one years, and I hosted a national, interfaith conference on torture.  This week, as it happens, while working to complete a special issue about torture for the journal Muslim World, I have received several messages from former students asking for suggestions about preaching on divorce.  The lectionary that United Methodists share slots Mark 10: 2-16 as our Gospel this Sunday and, in this passage, Jesus explicitly prohibits divorce.  His words are so stark that the disciples query him again in private; surely they had misheard him?  Jesus explains that anyone who remarries after divorce commits adultery.

If I were preaching this Sunday, I would concentrate on Psalm 8:4.  What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?  Isn’t that too gorgeous to pass up?  I could tie it to World Communion Sunday (also October 7) and also to the anti-torture movement!   But . . . would that be chickening out?  Dang it.

Alongside my scholarly writing, I have been sketching a not-too-pious book about the indignity of divorce: “Bad Reputation: How Joan Jett and Jesus Saved Me.”  That little project is thanks to a brave former student, who pushed me to write more real words like the ones I wrote the day I officially separated (Ash Wednesday, 2011).  [Link, please, to Eating Chocolate for Lent.]  She is also a United Methodist minister, and this entry is for her.  I am NOT (Dear. Lord.) recommending that preachers use this scrap as a sermon guide.  But it might be helpful to people who will be seething or weeping (or both) after worship this week.

You can read these rules backwards or forwards, depending on your mood.

RULE #1: Going to church during divorce sucks.  At least it did for me.  I knew I had to put one foot in front of the other on Sunday, and go, even though the smell of the place nearly made me hurl.  Don’t get me wrong.  Trinity UMC, Durham does not stink.  But stench is in the nose of the beholder (or whatever) and that little part of my brain that connects smell with memory linked grief with hymnals and anger with candles.  I was stubbornly determined not to lose my church home, but I also hated going.  I tried distracting my brain with knitting, needle-point, and cloying perfume.  The smell is easier to stomach now.  Other parts are still hard.  Walking into church as a divorcé feels like entering holy space as an icon of brokenness, or as a road-sign to chaos.  Another mom sighed to me that divorce seems like a “sparkly, pretty thing” to people who are struggling.  Maybe some Christian women see a divorcé as a temptation towards the other side, towards a new life without the daily negotiations of greasy laundry, grocery shopping and dog poop removal.  In all honesty, I remember reacting with wounded self-righteousness when a revered mentor and her much-beloved husband divorced at Yale.  If they couldn’t make it, for God’s sake, how were we supposed to?  I had taken a miserably private misery and selfishly wrote it onto my own problems.  Knowing that my failed marriage now serves as a lure or as a discouragement (or whatever the heck else), inspires me these days to imagine myself rather majestically as Hester Prynne.  I embroider the large letter D written on my body with blond highlights and wedge-heels.  But this has all nearly driven me nuts.

RULE #2: Your post-divorce self will scare your friends.  At least I scared my friends.  I scared myself.  Marriage, even a good one, involves adapting to fit together with a partner.  Torn out of the twisted yin/yang of a tough marriage, I tried to recover the me that is me apart from the married-me.  And the parts of me that had endured were the most tenaciously quirky parts.  The aspects of myself that had not dissolved into the marriage were the weirdly indissoluble ones.  The me that had chosen Cinderella shoes and a parasol when, as a kid, my grandma took me to K-mart for a toy.  The me that had scandalized my mother by wearing a lace bikini at church camp and frightened the Methodist counselors by dancing to Rock Lobster.  The me who is (in my own father’s words) “boy crazy.”  The me who loves running around the track and, when faced with injustice, loves running my loud mouth.  (I had paraphrased Mao for my 1990 speech at Emory’s graduation, for goodness sake.)  After my separation, the brazen me I found confused just about everyone who had come to know me as a decently respectable mother and scholar.  And, I confused myself.  I had dealt with trouble at home by working really, really hard – by pouring myself into reading and writing and teaching and organizing.  But that part of my brain had been fried from overuse.  The means by which I had come to justify my existence on this earth – as a kind, married, working mother, failed me.  I was unproductive, intolerant, and unkind to the sorts of people with whom I had been previously patient.  And, anyone who reminded me that I was supposed to be against “work” and instead all about God’s grace?  I wanted to bite them.  But what scared me most was that boy crazy part.  As one friend put it, most people do not get a divorce while engaged in a fulfilling sex life.  One distinguished church leader put it to me more bluntly.  “Amy Laura, you will probably have sex with a man you didn’t plan to have sex with.”  No, I replied, I probably won’t.  “Amy Laura, you probably will.”  No, I don’t think so.  “Amy Laura, go ahead and forgive yourself now, because you will.”  Jesus.

RULE #3:  No one understands you.  Well, that is a bit extreme.  Divorce is like pregnancy, maybe, in that everyone has some experience, of some sort, with divorce, or once read a book about someone who went through a divorce, or whatever.  And every cultural discourse has something to say about marriage and divorce.  Divorce is also like a little snowflake of arsenic: every divorce is uniquely poisonous.  As I tried to hear and sort through all the advice that came my way, I eventually came to understand something they probably teach in CPE 101 (which I never took).  Every friend, family member, and stranger in the check-out line saw my situation through their own particular desires, hopes, and fears.  I came to appreciate the time I had spent enduring weird reactions to my daughter’s adoption.  People sometimes don’t have any clue what to say, so they try to say something, and it was my job to learn how to respond with a smile, and forgiveness.  (Rather than biting them.)  One divorced woman who has been through a boatload of pain in her life told me that divorce was the loneliest thing she had ever gone through.  This rings true to me.  Which may run blessedly counter to this RULE, right?  Regarding the scariest part of divorce for me, dating, advice ranged from “you HAVE to wait a year, because you are UNFIT to inflict yourself on anyone” (true words, and, maybe true also) to “you need a rebound fling now, to cleanse your palate!”  But the very, very trickiest part of everything was the darned temporal thing.  People who had read some random book or another about divorce gave me timelines of supposed reassurance.  “It will take about a month for every year you were married,” for example.  Sigh . . .  People who had lived through grief kept repeating more vaguely “time heals.”  Time heals.  Time.  Heals.  Turns out that they are right.  But I still want one of those swanky time-travel machines from Dr. Who.  I want to flip off time and skip ahead to the easy part.  Please?

Maybe preaching on Psalm 8 isn’t such a bad idea after all . . . Don’t skip the Gospel reading, but maybe focus on Psalm 8.  For, Jesus suffers us to come to him, as God is ever mindful of even me and you.