J. Randall Nichols, Ph.D.
Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ 08542

Critically examines the notion of the "friendly divorce" and finds it woefully inadequate on personal, biblical, and theological grounds. Contrasts "friendly divorce" with "divorce with freedom" and observes that the idea of shalom is a suitable description for the healthy divorce. Argues for the abandonment of friendly divorce and urges the church and divorcing persons to aim instead for civility and peace-making in which authentic reconciliation can take place.

The subject of this article is pastoral ministry to divorced people, but from an angle I have not often seen taken in either writing or talking about the subject. True enough, those of us who work with churches and/or the divorced—especially if we ourselves are divorced— frequently lament the relative lack of creative ministry to those people. We ruefully note how the church's emphasis on the family can subtly and unintentionally, but still cruelly, exclude the single and divorced. We observe with both compassion and some horror how "singles ministries" seem to attract the walking wounded but sadly leave them unchanged, while the more functional of our single folk would not be caught dead in such programs.

"Program" is, of course, the key: we devote endless and often creative energy toward devising programs for ministering to such troubled and troublesome populations as divorced people. In fact, "program," as I have been fond of saying in other contexts, has nearly replaced theology as the lodestar of our pastoral work. I believe it is possible, however, that one of the things responsible for our typically lackluster results with single and divorced ministry is a neglect of some basic pastoral theological thinking about the subject, in favor of the more common programmatic emphasis. Pastoral programs, after all, are guided by our theological assumptions and values whether we are aware of them or not, and it is to that foundational zone that I wish to turn in the subject of ministry to the divorced.

A note about procedure: while I have already rather loosely used the terms "single" and "divorced," my focus here is on the latter. I am wanting to question what I perceive to be some common basic assumptions about divorce in theological perspective, in service to the ultimate aim—itself outside the framework of this article—of ministering to those people more understandingly and more effectively. My thesis can be stated simply and bluntly: I believe that because in certain key respects we have poorly understood divorce on theological grounds we have predictably fallen into traps of ineffectiveness in developing ministerial programs and strategies in that area. The way out of those traps is not more headscratching about programs, but rather more critical probing of some of the theological thinking That provides our basic orientation in the first place.

To do that I want to exhume and reexamine two of the most common and influential concepts currently at work in our understanding of divorce. One of them is predominantly secular, the other mostly theological, but they work in tandem to direct and misdirect us when dealing with divorce. The first is the notion of friendliness and the second that of reconciliation. Basically what I am arguing is that because we have often misunderstood the theological meaning and implication of each for divorce situations we have quite naturally been limited in what we could do pastorally.

Two kinds of experience provide the data for much of what I am saying. One is my work as a psychotherapist with individuals and couples, including a great deal of marriage and divorce counseling. I am more than a little haunted that while many if not most of the maritally troubled people I have worked with were concerned, in one way or another, with the spiritual and valuational dimensions of their experience, not one that I recall found significant help or support from either the church or a pastor. In fact, the most typical ecclesiastical by-product of divorce is an exit from the church and its ministry. The other source for these thoughts is my own experience of divorce several years ago, which suddenly put me in the position not only of being a teacher and critic of pastoral care but now its recipient, such as it was.

One of the most useful hooks about divorce, Bernard Steinzor's When Parents Divorce: A New Approach To New Relationships, is now unhappily out of print. It was a heretical book at the time and still is because in it Steinzor argued persuasively (and successfully) against one of the most enduring bad ideas of marital separation: the myth of the "friendly divorce." Instead he was articulating a very different objective, what he called "divorce with freedom." While I will not make any effort to summarize Steinzor's whole book, I do want to be sure his basic idea stays in circulation, because I believe it is one of the most helpful insights available to the divorcing person on both psychological and theological grounds.

The friendly divorce myth takes many forms. Perhaps its purest expression would run something like this: "We are ending a marriage that was plagued by unhappiness and even destructiveness of one kind or another, and in various ways we feel badly about that—about the hurt we have caused and suffered, about the conflicts the children have endured, about the feelings and behavior we had which are so uncharacteristic of us in our better moments, about the lost ideal of our marriage. The least we can do now is be friendly towards each other, certainly for the sake of the children, laying aside the old issues and feelings that need no longer plague us since we are no longer married."

There are many variations on that theme. At one extreme is the person whose anger at the former spouse is unabated and who would just as happily push his or her ex-mate over the nearest cliff if it could be done without repercussions but who nevertheless promises to go out of his or her way to speak well of and be friendly to the other, especially for the sake of the children. Way over at the other extreme is the former spouse who while acknowledging that the marriage is well and truly over still wants to be "best friends" with the departed wife or husband. In between are any number of other positions, all sharing the basic idea and value that one degree or another of friendship between the ex-spouses is the right and good thing to aim for.

Few of these people are cynics or hypocrites. Most of them genuinely try to reach their goal, often with agonizing dedication even when their deepest feelings are straining to go in exactly the opposite direction. They are simply responding to a social and religious value so deeply rooted, at least in American culture, that even wondering out loud about it as Steinzor did and I am doing runs the risk of incredulity. Steinzor himself describes it well:

The ideal of a divorce lived out in friendliness is an attractive one, embodying as it does the parents' wish to stop fighting and to show the child that though they could not get along while married, each parent now wants the child's relationship to the other to be as good as possible. This approach urges on us the reasonableness of brotherly love, of forgetting the past, and of salvaging from a sweet dream broken by nightmare the fragments that remain warm on awakening. Such advice appeals to us because we arc all taught in school and by our parents to be good sports, to be good losers; after a fight we should always shake hands and make up. No argument or no difference is so irreconcilable as to make a permanent rupture.

Steinzor points out that the friendly divorce is counseled by nearly all workers in the field both in writing and in counseling practice. Ministers, priests and rabbis are especially strong on it because so much of the friendliness ethic springs from religious roots. "Sunday School behavior" may be a cartoon image in some contexts, but it also reflects seriously held values, among them the need to love even enemies, not repay evil with evil, and work toward the other's well-being no matter what he or she has done. We have gathered all that commitment and more up in the idea of friendliness, which certainly seems a manageable way to keep the whole ethical package more or less together, even if the friendship image itself is not originally ethical or theological (you virtually never find it in the Bible, for instance). If divorcing spouses are managing at least on the surface to have reasonably friendly dealings with each other, their friends and relatives will almost universally applaud them. No one, by contrast, roots very strongly for people who loathe the idea of having anything to do with their ex-mates.

As a goal for marital ending, however, the friendly divorce no matter how well vouched for by church and culture runs smack into three major problems: (1) for most people it is, emotionally impossible; (2) it can be harmful for children; and (3) it may derail the necessary emotional process of divorce. I want to talk about each of those difficulties in turn, and then propose another way to look at divorced relations on both psychological and theological grounds, something akin to but not quite the same as Steinzor's earlier "divorce with freedom" idea.

Steinzor wrote quite bluntly and categorically,

I don't think it is possible for a person to live in friendly divorce unless he (sic) is adept at hypocrisy and self-deception, or has left a marriage that has been a friendly, shallow one, short-lived in emotional investment if not in years.

Think about it for a minute. Why should we expect a couple who were not able to get along well enough with each other to sustain a marriage suddenly to be able to be friendly simply because they are no longer married? Or why should we expect parents who had serious reservations about each other's ways of handling the children now to make it a business to support and even praise the ex-spouse to their kids? Or when an unhealthy dependency of one spouse on the other was one of the main things wrong with the marriage, how realistic is it now for the formerly more dominant partner to bind him or herself to the goal of continuing to "take care of" the person in friendliness when the whole point of the divorce was to eliminate that relationship? To make matters worse, the actual process of divorce has a potentially healthy way of surfacing buried anger and dissatisfaction so that one can sec more clearly why the marriage was irreparably troubled. Most of us would say that is to the good; but it makes the goal of friendliness even more impossible to reach.

In point of fact, one of the commonest problems I see among divorcing people who come for counseling is their difficulty trying to bring off the friendly divorce which their milieu so badly wants them to achieve. One man, for example, ended a marriage of long standing, but in the interest of friendliness continually responded to his ex-wife's "emergencies" around the house. The calls for help were the wife's attempts to re-involve him in her own dependency needs needs, and they left him emotionally exhausted and angry and left her bitterly defeated again and again. When it became clear to the man that each of these events could easily have been handled by someone other than himself, conceivably someone who genuinely was feeling friendly toward his ex-wife, he experienced an enormous gain in freedom. A woman was relieved to be out of a marriage in which, having put in twenty years as dutiful wife and mother, she could finally acknowledge that she did not love her husband and felt constantly drained and belittled by his crudeness. At the same time, she felt obliged by the myth to be as accommodating as possible to him during the separation period, patiently fending off his attempts to make love to her, enduring his sabotage of her efforts to buy a home of her own, and wearing herself thin telling the children what a good man their father "really" was, among other things. She was paying an enormous price in guilt because of her underlying anger at these antics, to the point that her church participation had dwindled out of sight and the new career on which she had embarked was threatened by her increasing inability to work. The problem was not her anger; it was her long-conditioned attempt to be friendly when that was not at all what she felt or what the situation warranted.

The second difficulty—that the "friendly divorce" may be harmful for children—may come as a surprise, so steeped are we in the idea that pleasantly intimate relationships—even between divorced parents—are the only kind really worthy of positive acclaim. The mischief caused here, though, is emotional hypocrisy, plain and simple. It is one thing for me to be able to acknowledge the positive qualities of a person I otherwise do not especially like; it is something else again for me to try to pretend to be that person's champion. The first makes me a decent human being, while the second leaves me a hypocrite. The same is true for parents in divorce. I have found that the children who seem most dedicated to tying their divorcing parents in emotional knots about such things as child support, different disciplinary standards, or who loves whom the most are the children of parents trying for friendly divorce. When the parents themselves call a halt to the mythology, the children rasher quickly seem clearer about the whole situation and far better adjusted to it.

The reason is not hard to find. Children are especially keen at picking up lying on the part of grown-ups, and for divorcing parents to maintain a facade of friendliness when the emotional basis for it is not there is a rather clear species of lying. Smaller children may also be mystified, feeling, but not being able to express, a sense of bewilderment because their unconscious sense of the emotions involved tells them one thing while Mom's or Dad's words are saying something quite contradictory. If we want our children to learn to hide their feelings and not deal as candidly its possible with circumstances as they encounter them, this is one good way to teach them.

Richard Gardner, a child psychiatrist who has written helpfully for children of divorce, provides a good illustration of what is at stake. Imagine a father who having left the marriage now neglects his young child, does not write or call, visits only sporadically, forgets birthdays, and the like. Mother is quite naturally enraged by such dereliction, while the child is upset and sad. If the mother is committed to the friendly divorce pattern, however, the rules of the game call for her to defend the child's father no matter how reprehensible his behavior. "You know that your father loves you, dear, but he sometimes is too busy to come by. We just have to understand." I worked with one divorced mother who had bought birthday presents for her children in her ex-husband's name for eleven years rather than let the hard truth surface that their father evidently didn't think them important enough to remember their birthdays. Gardner's advice to parents in this situation is astringent but refreshing. He suggests telling the child that sad as it is the father for some reason does not show his love for the child and perhaps does not love it, and that is a fact we are going to have to adjust to.

The third chief difficulty with the friendly divorce is that it works against the psychological divorcing process, for both parents and children. Again and again I have found that the first strategy divorcing people can follow is to have as little as possible to do with each other once the separation has occurred. (The one exception is the fairly rare situation where a carefully structured separation period has been made a part of professionally supervised marital therapy, with explicit objectives and rules.) One objection will now be quickly raised, and we had better look at it: "What chance, then, is there for a couple to reconsider and learn that they want to stay married after all, if they are not having much of anything to do with each other?" The most honest answer I can give to that question is to say that there is very little chance a couple will reconsider their divorce decision if they are not having much to do with each other, but as these things go there is very little chance they would do so anyway. Moreover I would argue that it is healthier spiritually and psychologically to learn enough from one failed marriage so that one has an even chance of making a better one in the future than it is to stay enmeshed in a marriage that for very good reasons ought to end. What is happening is that the divorcing process is being sabotaged by the American dream of "never say die" even when it comes to failed marriages.

Here is a subtle and in my view insidious piece of the friendly divorce picture: it sows the seeds of chronic doubt that divorce is ever a permissible, right, or good thing to do. Steinzor more than half suspected that one reason so many of his colleagues prescribed friendly divorce was "perversely punishing them for being antisocial in wanting to divorce." The covert message of the friendly divorce myth is that real, psychological divorce is inappropriate, and that the partners should stay "stuck" with each other emotionally if not legally by attempting to achieve in their divorcing relationship what they manifestly could not in their married one. Hence the part of the myth that says, in effect, "If we stay friendly there is a chance we will grow to likc each other well enough and repent of this decision to divorce."

What is at issue here is the matter of psychological boundaries, a familiar enough phenomenon in all mental health and relational work, but nowhere more critical than in the divorcing situation. For bare survival, let alone healthy relationships, all of us need to be able to recognize, set, and defend what we usually call our personal boundaries. Boundaries are those expectations, rules, standards, and values that reflect who we are as individual human beings, and in turn govern how we will relate to each other. When our boundaries arc violated by a person or a circumstance we feel psychological pain, and if we are healthy we will act to protect what has been broached. All social behavior, including intimate relationships. relies on the establishment and preservation of appropriate personal boundaries. It is one of the most significant things a child has to learn in growing up, and it starts very early on as the infant slowly emerges from its blissful initial narcissism, in which the whole world exists only for its immediate gratification. A world of objects—people, events, things—comes slowly into focus, and the child learns that all those things, including itself, have shape and definition—stopping places, so to speak, in a word, boundaries.

Boundaries govern behavior. We all learn what is acceptable and what is not, what works in one situation but not in another, what one person will tolerate but not everybody will, what we ourselves require for well-being and what we can live without. Boundary-setting is wide-ranging and never-ceasing activity, as picky and mundane as teaching a child that its clothes and toys may not be strewn all over the house, as highly charged as a new lover deciding how close she can allow her significant other to get just now, and as global as achieving self definition in the face of familial, vocational, or physical threats to the outer perimeter of one's identity.

I do not mean to lecture on and on about a concept that is at root as much a part of all our daily lives as food and drink, as well as familiar on professional grounds to most readers of this piece. The point I am wishing to make at this moment is that one of the things wrong with the friendly divorce is simply that it blurs and confuses boundaries all over the place, for both children and adults, leaving everyone to one degree or another at risk of impairment and dysfunction, as is ever the case when boundaries are under assault. A divorcing couple is drastically redefining the boundaries of their relationship as spouses and perhaps also as parents, occasionally too as work partners and various other roles. There is a lot of pain in that, because boundaries are what serve to keep the chaos of life at bay, and we give up even hateful boundaries only with reluctance. It is imperative when we give up one boundary that we build another at the same time, lest we find ourselves exposed to the psychic elements, so to speak, and thereby imperiled. It is a primitive, basic, and inherently true phenomenon. Divorcing people are in process of forming those new boundaries both for themselves and for their children. We should take as a basic axiom that anything which interferes with or distorts that forming process is counterproductive to achieving a healthy recovery from the trauma of divorce. Where the friendly divorce myth works its mischief is precisely here, because it tells people that they should be "bound together" as friends when in fact what they are trying to do is learn how to bound themselves separately as no-longer-married. Achieving a genuine emotional divorce is a process of re-drawing one's relational boundaries from married to single, and what Steinzor doubted was that the process could ever be achieved as long as psychic and social energy were being diverted into the contradictory project of being "friends."

So far this section has been empty of my own experience, for the basic reason that the myth of friendly divorce has been something I myself have struggled with long and hard. I am, after all, a Christian pastor, and trying to be kind is near the top of the list of things I seek to embody in my own spiritual odyssey. Years ago, before my own marriage was at least consciously in jeopardy, I read Steinzor's book and used it enthusiastically in my counseling practice. His lean advice to get away clean, so to speak, and be responsible without trying to be friendly made as much sense then as it does to me now. When it came time to negotiate the treacherous waters of my own divorce, however, I came to some heavy going.

My wife and I had worked hard at the marriage and were then working equally hard at the divorce. "Damage control," I believe it is called in naval circles, when a ship has been attacked. Our aim was to get the job done with as little disruption as possible, for the boys' sakes as well as our own. We were grateful, and still are, that at least we were not suffering from the acrimony and suspicious secrecy that seemed to surround so many of the divorced people we knew. I did not want a "friendly divorce," but neither did I want to be unkind or uncaring. I did not love my wife any more in the way one would have to to sustain a marriage, and there were times when in my fantasy I could cheerfully have throttled her for not being the kind of person I had tried to make her be! But even then I took seriously the difference between getting divorced (as a state one finally achieves) and divorcing (as a process that technically speaking never ends for a once-married couple, especially when children are involved), and I accepted in my heart that I would always have some sort of connection to this woman, which in turn would mean that I would always be willing to care about and for her as best I could within the limits appropriate to our situation as divorced people.

I confess I probably tried for the friendly divorce for a time, even while I was arguing consciously and vocally for "divorce with freedom." Slowly, though, a distinction began to emerge to my great relief, and it is the note on which I want this section to end. It happened while working with my anger—which was immense. I kept wanting to be kind, decent, responsible, honest, and the signals that kept corning from my upbringing and from my culture, especially its religious part, was that meant being friendly. At the same time I was all too acutely aware just how wounded and angry I was, and that was most assuredly not "friendly." Then one day "the penny dropped," so to speak, and I realized that what I wanted had a far better image than friendliness; I wanted simply to be civilized.

Now it came clear what had always bothered me about the concept of divorce with freedom as an alternative to the friendly divorce myth. Without friendliness the relational landscape looked pretty inhospitable. Divorcing with freedom sounded antiseptic if not downright mean by comparison. Did it mean we cut off all ties and responsibilities and stalked away in self-righteousness? Of course not. Did it mean we hung up the phonc briskly whenever the ex-spouse called, or declined any request for information or assistance? No, I couldn't accept that. Freedom surely was not meanness or even quarantine. What was it, then?

Years ago I came across one of those funky epigrams that you find turned into calligraphy or needlepoint and can never quite find a place to display. As imperfectly as I remember it, it read something like, "If a man first indulges himself in murder, he will soon come to think nothing of robbery; then he will decline to lying, [and so on through a long list] until he is finally reduced to procrastination and incivility." Here was what I was searching for. My closely held values of kindness, decency, responsibility, and honesty added up to what I would from then on call civility, and the difference between that and "friendship" as the myth used it was simply immense. The trick was that friendship as an image and a goal involved a blurring of boundaries in the divorce situation, while civility did not. Civility was a different animal altogether; it implied no particular kind of relationship, bondedness, or commitment to the other beyond what the concept itself implied; namely, that anyone who sought to act it out would be as kind, decent responsible, and honest as possible. Civility establishes a code of interaction, not a relationship. That is the key distinction. That famous poetic line of Frost's comes to mind, "Good fences make good neighbors." It was meant partly in irony, but also in deep earnest. It is only when boundaries are clear and adequately protected that neighborliness flourishes, for the psychologically basic reason that it is only when our individual selves are adequately defined and protected against the onslaughts of outer chaos that we are able to enter into relationships of any kind—marrying or divorcing or any point in between. Civility may or may not lead to friendship; with divorcing people it probably will not, and all to the good. It may, however, lead to a clarity and leanness of interaction which on spiritual and religious grounds is the sort of thing gathered up again and again in religious thinking as peace, shalom. Civility is a great respecter and cultivator of boundaries, whatever they may be, and it is what gave "freedom" the dimension of humaneness it had not quite had before in my thinking.

Now at least I was comfortable with an alternative to the friendly divorce. What we would seek was divorce with freedom, nurtured through boundary-respecting civility. Whether we are angry or happy, fighting or cooperating, working toward a common end or seeking our own welfare, it is possible to seek divorce with civility. No, it will not always be easy; and no, civility is certainly not an insulating blanket to throw over the strong feelings of the experience. But I offer it as a better way than the friendly divorce myth of putting into some theologically acceptable perspective the complicated and emotion-laden process of divorce.

It is for another time and place to apply this re-thinking to our approach to ministry with divorcing people. Here suffice to say that the church's pastoral care would go a lot further toward both meeting people's needs and embodying the love of which the Gospel speaks if it could help divorcing people understand the difference between shalom as I have described it and the by- comparison anemic secular image of "friendliness." People in great pain have a remarkably low tolerance for emotional dishonesty, Too often, I fear, the price the church has put on its ministry for people experiencing the pain of divorce is acceptance of this emotional deceit of the friendly divorce, and they flee from us because deep down somewhere in the reality of the experience, at some level they know it is a sham. Either that, or they arc irretrievably weighed down by guilt at simply not being able to do what they mistakenly believe—and what the church too often encourages—is necessary on theological grounds [if one is] to be both divorcing and acceptable in God's eyes.

When we shift our thinking toward making peace instead of being friends we come a step closer to a more explicitly theological way of taking. To one of the most misunderstood, troublesome, but potentially helpful concepts in the Judaeo-Christian tradition we now want to turn.

"Reconciliation" is a concept you hear a lot about both in religious circles and in marital separation and divorce. It is one of the few terms I know which seems to be both thoroughly theological and thoroughly secular, with roughly the same meaning, in either setting. Being a divorcing clergyman, therefore, gave me a double dose of it, and it was not easy.

My own separation came about after months of agonizing effort on both my wife's and my parts to be "responsible" both in and out of marriage counseling. That in turn had been preceded by years of worry and work on a relationship that, in the best hindsight I can muster, was doomed almost from the beginning. With the actual separation, therefore, came an almost euphoric burst of newly freed energy. Yes, I was deeply hurt and torn in a dozen different directions, scared, lonely, guilt-ridden, and all the rest. But this separation was no impetuous flinging away from each other; it had been achingly chiselled out, and the relief I felt now that it was accomplished was simply enormous. One day not long after it had happened a teaching colleague asked solicitously how I was getting along. He was an older minister of more conservative bent than I, but one of the gentlest and most caring people around. The idea of divorce, particularly among clergy, was I imagine quite upsetting to him. After we had exchanged a few words walking along, he stopped, lowered his voice, and asked earnestly "Is there any chance of a reconciliation?" Anyone observing us would have seen and heard no more than my brief reply, stern-faced, "No, I don't think so."

What I was feeling inside, however, 1 am grateful was not on public view. I was almost laughing, saying to myself, "My God! If you only knew how much hard work it took to get that relationship finally untangled! Who in his right mind would want to go back into the fray and lose it all?" I knew what my colleague intended, of course, and I was moved by his concern, which is probably what gave me enough unexpected self-control to keep what I was thinking inwardly to myself. Much later my lawyer asked me exactly the same question, and part of the ritual legal language of the divorce itself required him to announce to the court that there was no possibility of a reconciliation.

And so, both theologically and socially, those of us who divorce have failed at reconciliation, publicly struck out. Somehow the kindliness with which that obvious judgment is passed these days made it sting even more—sufficiently so that I quietly began to wonder if it was even right. As time went by I grew convinced that in fact it was not. I am now wanting to argue that contrary to what our popular idea has been, reconciliation has taken place, and can for thousands of divorcing people who arc now clogging the lists of the unreconciled failures at marriage.

Reconciliation does not at first seem to be such a difficult concept, in either theological or everyday use. We assume it means an end of conflict and differences, and the establishment of an agreeable and positive relationship. Maritally speaking, it means that the rupture of separation, either physical or emotional, has been repaired and a couple is back together again on good terms. The picture of reconciliation most of us carry in our heads is therefore something like joining hands again, united in newly established commonality.

What I have come to believe, however, is that that is not what reconciliation means at all, and that our slightly romantic picture is simply wrong. To begin with, reconciliation is a concept that comes from the Bible, and the Bible is just not a very democratic or romantic document. The biblical meaning of the concept is nothing like holding hands and walking into the sunset. Reconciliation means instead putting an end to mutual destructiveness and hostility. It signifies the beginning of what in modern terms we might call a new "contract" among people in which something has happened so that they are not killing each other any more. The boundaries of a relationship have been redrawn, in other words, so that destruction ceases. That is "reconciliation."

The important thing to see is that such reconciliation can take many forms. It may, true enough, mean a new "joining" together; but it may also mean a conflict-free agreement to go our separate ways in peace. It may mean agreeing to disagree; it may mean fighting hard—but justly—for honestly held differences of conviction; it may mean giving up sadistic pleasure in fighting and retiring to separate corners. The essence of the thing is the end to the mutual destruction, the recontracting of personal boundaries so they arc no longer on a war footing. Whatever arrangement works toward achieving those goals is in service to reconciliation, on biblical and theological grounds. That is precisely what happens when a bad marriage ends and a "good" divorce, anchored in peace and civility, takes its place. Oftentimes, in other words, divorce is a way of reaching reconciliation.

To some that will come as a new, or perhaps unbelievable, notion. What has happened, after all, to the friendliness, the warm feeling, the camaraderie, the love that we have associated with reconciliation? The answer is simply that it was never there to begin with so for as the meaning reconciliation is concerned. We added those in ingredients to the idea, romanticized it if you please, for the perfectly understandable reason that some forms of reconciliation do indeed also carry with them good and loving feelings. Some forms, but not all; that is the point.

The "additives" never had anything to do with the basic concept, but over a period of time confusion set in. It might he helpful to know, for instance, that the Greek word which the New Testament uses as "reconciliation" in classical times originally meant simply "exchange," as in the exchange of money. That continues to be its meaning in theological terms: the exchange of destructiveness for a new relationship which is not destructive, "thereby bringing the hostility to an end," as it is explained in Ephesians 2: 16. Even the only time Jesus himself uses the word has nothing to do with feelings, but rather with establishing a non-destructive contract with one's brother or sister (Matthew 5:24).

It should also be clear that a living arrangement alone has as little to do with the heart of reconciliation as feelings of warmth or affection. To take two extremes, it is quite possible for long-divorced people not to have achieved reconciliation because they are still in effect living and acting destructively toward each other, whether deliberately or not; and it is equally possible for once-separated couples who have gotten back together again and seem "reconciled" in the social arrangements sense not to be any closer to real reconciliation than when they started. Reconciling in this sense is a process, sometimes quite a long one. What I am trying to push for here is our seeing reconciling as a process that goes along with divorcing; and may for some people even be synonymous with it, rather than the popular image of it as one which by definition undoes divorcing.

Let me illustrate this whole way of thinking with a brief case study of rethinking reconciliation, in a non-marital situation:

Let me return to the story with which I began this section. If I were able to replay the encounter with my minister friend I would now do it much differently. I would like to be able to reply something like this to his question whether reconciliation was possible: "Yes, my friend, it is possible and that is what we are working on now. We have decided that in this most basic, spiritual sense we cannot be reconciled so long as we are married. We have separated in order to achieve reconciliation, for our and our children's sakes, and though it is a process which is not complete yet, we are making good, though painful, progress. In time we will make it, and the destructiveness which our married relationship sadly created will not exist in our new relationship—which is what it is, all right—as divorcing people."

In that reply I would be trying to say three things. One is that the end of a marriage does not necessarily or maybe even possibly mean the end of a relationship between the former spouses. It will be a divorcing relationship, and in time there will probably be no contact between the two at all. But one of the odd things that seldom gets talked about in the subject of divorce is that particularly after a long marriage the former partners, no matter how "well" divorced, remain in a certain kind of relationship, at least on historical and emotional grounds. I have yet to meet a divorced person whose life did not at least in some degree include a sense of relationship to his or her former spouse, and I am thinking now of what I would regard as the healthy situations where the marriage has well and truly ended all across the board, not the troubled ones where the ex-mates are still in some undesirable ways hooked into each other. Divorce brings a radical change in relationship, but apparently not a complete end of it. We may wish it were different, but in those parts of the human drama I have witnessed thus far, it does not seem to be in the script. The question, therefore, is whether my divorcing relationship can be a more reconciling one than my married relationship was, in the sense of ending mutual destructiveness. I would want my friend to sec that.

A second thing I would be saying is that while we acknowledged we had failed to make the marriage we wanted, we were not accepting the label of "failure" at being responsible, loving human beings, certainly in a general sense even to each other. Part of the inescapable grief in divorce comes from having to acknowledge that at the very least we have lost the dream once held for what that marriage might be; we have failed to bring it off, for whatever reasons. There is failure enough in divorce, God knows, and I believe divorcing people have a right to claim the area of reconciliation as one in which they do not fail. There is as ironic sense in which if I have been able to sever connections with and stop flailing my former spouse, to give up that destructive agenda, then I can credit myself with leaving succeeded at something important, and politely decline society's labcl of "failure" at reconciliation.

The third thing I would be trying to say in my reply is that reconciliation is not an end in itself, even on biblical, theological grounds, but only a means to the end of being able to love again. When energy that was locked up by destructiveness is released in reconciliation it is available to be invested, and that is the objective, whether one sees it ill explicitly theological or more broadly spiritual terms. Working with divorcing people I notice a certain turning point somewhere in the process which seems crucially important but is often missed. It happens when the motivation for ending a marriage shifts from flight to reinvestment, when a person is not propelled so much by the need to get away from a painful situation as by the desire to give him or herself in new ways that a failing marriage is making impossible: to children, to other friends, to work, to one's own growth and development, eventually to a new lover. Divorcing people who do not reach that turning point tend to remain. in my experience, embittered sad, and locked into mourning for lost dreams. People who are able to reach it and go beyond are also quite entitled to anger, sadness, and grieving, but the trajectory of it, so to speak, is different. It is like the difference between withdrawing my money from a sour investment and putting it into something more promising rather than stuffing it fearfully under the mattress. We would do far better in helping divorcing people if we saw reconciliation as a means to reaching that turning point even in and through divorce.

We can return briefly here to the previous section's subject, and the mischief done by the stereotype of the "friendly divorce." Perhaps one source of that enduring myth is our misconception of reconciliation. Because we have thought to be once divorced we had by definition failed at reconciliation, we may have sought to salvage at least something that the social and religious world would approve of by being "friendly." Keep in mind that the popular image of reconciliation was not too far from "friendliness." Perhaps the friendly divorce was the best we could come up with as a pinch-hit for what we (mistakenly) thought of as the real reconciliation we could not achieve. Ironically, of course, exactly the reverse may be true as I was arguing earlier; couples who are locked into a destructive interaction because they are striving against impossible odds to be friends are not only not making up for a failure at reconciliation, but are rather actively making matters much worse.

If we give up the myth of the friendly divorce and aim, as I am hoping, for civility and peace-making, then reconciliation can become a goal of the divorcing process. In fact, the kind of freedom from interaction we strive for in a "civilized" divorce will do far more for the end of destructiveness than the impossibly mixed messages of the friendly divorce.

In this article I have wanted to accomplish two things—one reassuring and the other perhaps mildly inflammatory. On the reassuring side I want those of us who arc divorcing and trying to maintain a pattern of responsibility based on spiritual, theological commitments to sec even our ending marriages as potentially a form of what both theological and secular worlds value so highly, reconciliation. The word "potentially" means of course, that we have to be willing to identify and then to give up our own destructiveness, which is never an easy task. My hope is that we will find it more manageable once we arc also freed of the burden of the friendly divorce myth, so that the alternative to destruction does not have to be coziness.

On the inflammatory side, I believe we who are divorcing have both room and responsibility to say as forcefully as we can to the church, to our associates, to families, and to society that reconciliation is not reserved for the happily together, and that we want to claim it too, to be judged by our own behavior. On the other hand, I myself have seen too many marriages in which some sort of armed truce has been reached, leaving the partners unable to extend themselves in love or concern to anyone or anything else, so caught up are they in maintaining a tense status quo. If these unions have been certified as "reconciled," I think it is time their license was revoked. The concept reaches too deeply and importantly into the human spirit for us to tolerate its abuse, and perhaps that is a message those of us who know first-hand the ache of divorce have to give.