Let us handle some cold facts carefully here like brilliant knives.
About 240,000 Australians are born every year. We have a sacrament to welcome them.
About 130,000 Australians die every year. We have a sacrament to say farewell.
About 100,000 Australians get married every year. We have a sacrament to celebrate their nutty courage.
About 50,000 Australians get divorced every year. We have no sacrament for them.
Something crucial and wonderful and holy and sweet and salty between that man and that woman sickened and withered and died, without public mourning or witness or ritual, without communal attention and respect.
It dies shivering the souls of the formerly married and their children and their friends, and the Church has nothing to say, turns and looks away, frowns and castigates, and everyone shuffles forward into the muddled future, trying to repair their shattered hearts.
Maybe there should be a sacrament for the end of a marriage. Maybe we should gather as a people to witness and mourn the death of love and hope. Maybe we should create a ritual by which we honor their brave attempt, and formally conclude their failed endeavor.
Maybe we should offer the people we love and respect a day of dignity to close an immensely painful chapter, to publicly offer our support to women and men and children, in the same way that we publicly offered our support and witness on the day they vowed to honor each other all the days of their lives.
I do not say we should celebrate divorce. No death deserves celebration, as death is loss, hole, emptiness. But in the same way we celebrate the life lived, and the life to come, when we conduct funerals, why not celebrate the love loved, and the love to come, with a funeral for a marriage?
I hear wailing and the gnashing of teeth — by publicly acknowledging divorce, by public prayer for the deceased marriage, we acquiesce to divorce! we make it normal! we make it acceptable! in fact, gasp, we promote it!
Nonsense. Do we promote death by offering witness at a funeral? No — we face what is, we deal with real, we go deep into the ancient magic of the human heart, we soak the mundane with the sacred, and rise healthy and hopeful from the rubble.
One of the great subtle geniuses of the Catholic Church is the way it makes