i do hope that we continue to process these issues, we will not see it simply just in terms of man and woman, marriage and divorce, but also of family and career, family and church, family and community, family and place, etc. we have all claimed the call to abandon one community/place for another - leaving behind vulnerable relationships, because this next job would be a better fit, or because we are not willing to compromise our values or our freedom, or because our children deserve better, or because God said so, etc.
again, this may be the Great Distortion of the children of the baby boomers, or possibly of the children of Adam and Eve.
From Wendell Berry's short story "Fidelity"...
"Kyle Bode's father had originated in the broad bottomlands of a community called Nowhere, two counties west of Louisville. Under pressure from birth to "to get out of here and make something out of yourself", Kyle's father had come to Louisville and worked his way into a farm equipment dealership. Kyle was the dealer's third child and second son. He might have succeeded to the dealership - "You boys can be partners," their father had said - but the older brother possessed an invincible practicality and a head start, and besides Kyle did not want to spend his life dealing with farmers. He had higher aims, which made him dangerous to those he considered below him. Unlike his brother, Kyle was an idealist, with a little bit of an ambition to be a hero. Perhaps by the same token, he was also a man given to lethargy and to sudden onsets of violence by which he attempted to drive back whatever circumstances his lethargy had allowed to close in on him. Sagged and silent in his chair at a party or a beer joint, he would suddenly thrust himself, with fists flying, at some spontaneously elected opponent. This did not happen often enough to damage him much, and it remained surprising to his friends.
Soon after graduation, he married his high school sweetheart. And then while he was beginning his career as a policeman, they, and especially he, began to dabble in some of the recreational sidelines of the counter-cultural revolution. He became sexually liberated. He suspected that his wife had experienced this liberation as well, but he did not catch her, and perhaps this was an ill omen for his police career. On the contrary, as it happened, she caught him in the very inflorescence of ecstasy on the floor of the carport of a house where they were attending a party. He was afraid for a while that she would divorce him, but when it became clear to him that she would not, he began to feel that she was limiting his development, and he divorced her in order to be free to be himself.
He cut quite a figure at parties after that. One festive night a young lady said, "Kyle, do you know who you really look like?" And he said, "No." And she said, "Ringo Starr." That was when he began to comb down his bangs. Girls and young women were always saying that to him after that, "Do you know who you look like?" And he would say, "No. Who?" as if he had no notion what they were talking about.
His second wife - whom he married when he made her pregnant, for he really was a conscientious young man who wanted to do the right thing - was proud of that resemblance, at first seriously and then jokingly, for a while. And then he ceased to remind her of anyone but himself, whereupon she divorced him.
He knew that she had not left him because she was dissatisfied with him but because she was not able to be satisfied for very long with anything. He disliked and feared this in her at the same time that he recognized it in himself. He, too, was dissatisfied; he could not see what he had because he was always looking around for something else that he thought he wanted. And so perhaps it was out of mutual dissatisfaction that their divorce had come, and now they were free. Perhaps even their little daughter was free, who was tied down no more than her parents were, for they sent her flying back and forth between them like a shuttlecock, and spoiled her in vying for her allegiance, and gave her more freedom of choice than she could have used well at twice her age. They were all free, he supposed. But finally he had to ask if they were, any of them, better off than they were. For they were not satisfied. And by now he had to suppose, and to fear, that they were not going to be satisfied........."
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are you satisfied?
how do we achieve happiness?
what, again, does it mean to be free?
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Have you seen "Into the Wild"?
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