In our culture we usually relate to ‘I want a divorce’ in terms of the dissolution of a marriage. But I was just thinking about all the other little foxes that spoil the vine (in and out of marriage) before physical separation comes into play. From time to time, the highly controversial method of extracting crucial information from enemy combatants known as water boarding shows up in the news. While these observations are not about that controversy one way or another, I’ve concluded that in marriage some spouses use a form of torture (on the object of their fickle affections) known as the cold shoulder. The freezing of one’s better half out of communication and/or all but essential activities is not that much different than the two of us standing in front of a judge and having him “decree” that ‘you go this way with this or that child(ren) and your little pile of rocks; and your former lover/mate, now object of hatred, you go the other way ‘. Call it the cold shoulder if you what, but it’s divorce, for all intents and purposes, just under the same roof and with the idea that the @$#@! I’m stuck with will be magically transformed into ’seeing it my way’, by me not speaking to him or her. Divorce, except I’m the one pulling the decreeing lever with the black hood over my head to protect the guilty.
What’s the quickest way imaginable to eventually end up standing in front of the divorce judge? Many of us kiss and make up for a season, until the next time we don’t get our way, and we switch back into water boarding mode, showering our mate with a wall of silence. And what could be more diabolical and harder on a marriage than that, one might wonder? How about recruiting the children to ‘understand what a victim I am in this relationship’ by bad mouthing your spouse in front of them. The kids don’t exactly water board the offending parent/mate, they often throw ‘em overboard by disrespecting them to show their displeasure regarding the offending spouse’s alleged abuse of their Mom or Dad.
In the beginning of the year 1966 Simon and Garfunkel penned these words:
“And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
“Fools”, said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls”
And whispered in the sounds of silence
So what ever happened to the ‘words of the prophets’ written on the subway walls and tenement halls? Dare we consider them today as husbands and wives who are sometimes tempted to make an enemy combatant out of our spouse and be sentenced to watching ’silence like a cancer grow’?
Now to the married I command, yet not I but the Lord: A wife is not to depart from her husband.
1 Corinthians 7:9-11;
Luke 18:11 “The Pharisee (A)stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector’. ; For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed and there is nothing, neither hid that shall not be known Luke 12.2.; Also I say unto you, whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the son of man also before the angels of God Luke 12.8; But he that shall deny me before men, shall be denied before the Angles of God. Luke 12.9; Luke 11:33
33“No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead he puts it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light.;
Next time I think we’ll deal with divorce, separate vacation style. The separate vacation, innouous enough on the surface, ‘ Dan can’t get off when I can and besides he and my parents don’t see things eye to eye so it’s better if I just go without him. Dan, on the other hand, is fine with that since he can go to his one thousandth dog show in the last five years, and, don’t you know, my poor wife it alergic to dog dander. Pssst, don’t look now, but it’s just plain dan that she’s alergic to, the dog is what their marriage has turned into by separating from each other on many levels under the same roof.
