Divorced parents back together just for Christmas

Yes, it’s one of those intendedly “heartwarming” stories of how we in the 21st Century are making advances in how we celebrate the “holiday season”: the phenomenon of divorced parents coming back together just for the holiday celebration, along with all the kids: not only their own, but those of whom each “ex” has hooked up with since the divorce! It’s a Newsweek story reproduced on the PMSNBC Web site.

The rampant widespreadness of all these breakups and reconfigurations of families, with the concomitant deep-seated hurt feelings and lifelong instability, is to my mind one reason why our Lord completely outlawed divorce in the New Covenant. But the people have despised His reign in general, so especially in the area of their relationships, they are determined to get what they want, without regard to the feelings of their children. For even if no one ever dares say it to themselves or one another, you know everyone involved in one of these reconfigured “families” knows this: what is here today may well be gone tomorrow. So it was with their actual parents, so it may well be with the current version of the “family” — and so often that’s exactly what happens. I’ve seen it for myself first-hand. I’ve worn those shoes as a youth. This (along with abortion, of course) is a form of child-abuse no one wants to acknowledge.

Now, if you’ve read the article all the way through, I hope you’ve guessed what this “elephant in the room” is: the unquestioning assumption that the divorces just had to happpen in the first place. If the parents can get along with each other for a day’s occasion, or especially if they actually get along anyway, then they owe it to their children to reunite and find a way to make the marriage work!

Randy Fuerst admits that on more than one occasion after he and Susan first split, he slipped away from the table to have a good cry alone in the bedroom, grieving for the irreparable fissure in his family. “You don’t long for the other person,” he says. “It’s about belonging to a whole family … You long for the completeness.” Even for amicably divorced people like Fuerst and Susan Arnold, the ghosts of dashed dreams linger. [Emphasis added]

Yes, Mr. Fuerst, that is exactly what marriage is about, first and foremost: belonging to a whole family. So why have you and “Ms. Arnold” ripped yours asunder? Because while you say you miss the integrated family, you and your “ex” have bought into the lie that marriage is nothing more than the passionately romantic union of two people, all else being optional and accessory. For all your tears, your mutual selfishness still wins in the end. And your children know it, even if only deep down in the back recesses of their minds.

St. Jacinta of Fatima told us what our Lady said around 1920: that many marriages will not be of God. Isn’t that the truth!