Open Writing

The Catholic Church does not recognise civil divorce.

This fact made little difference to me, as long as the government and the laws of the country recognised the fact that my first husband and I were no longer legally bound to each other. He was raised a Catholic, I was not.

Shortly after the divorce, I re-married, my second husband adopted our daughter and I bore him a son.

It was with great surprise that I recognised my first husband’s voice on the phone one evening, about seventeen years after we had separated. He explained that he wanted to apply to his church for an annulment of our marriage. He wanted to marry again and earnestly wanted his second marriage to be recognised by The Church. “Would you be willing to appear before the Catholic Church’s Marriage Tribunal?” he asked.

Annulment is far more comprehensive than civil divorce. Various on-line thesauruses give extreme similes such as ‘obliteration’ and ‘erasure’. More conservative dictionaries, however, agree that to annul a marriage is ‘to declare it invalid; to officially declare that it no longer exists’.

My immediate, emotional reaction was that my first husband, biological father of our daughter, wanted to deny that we had ever enjoyed each other’s company, loved each other, or consummated our marriage, thereby denying the legitimacy of our daughter. No matter what had led to the divorce, he should not be allowed to deny the beautiful fact of our daughter.

On logical consideration of all the facts, however, I realised that by giving our daughter for adoption to my second husband seventeen years earlier, he had already denied his responsibility in creating this miracle of humanity. An annulment would not change anything in her life or mine: there was no legal inheritance waiting, and no need for regular contact with him.

After much deliberation, I agreed to ‘appear before the Tribunal’. The local representative of the Tribunal was a marriage counsellor who worked for the nearby Catholic Church. I arrived for our appointment at her house feeling rather nervous.

She welcomed me warmly and I soon relaxed. Waving a sheaf of yellow pages at me, she explained that the Church required her to fill in a questionnaire, which would be her guide during the interview. The first questions dealt with my childhood, how my parents treated me and how I perceived their marriage. It then examined the romantic relationships I’d experienced before my marriage to my ex-husband and how I’d dealt with conflicts and break-ups at that time. We then spoke in some depth about how I saw my relationship with my first husband at the time that we met, and why we married. Did I love him, did he love me, what other reasons did we have for marrying each other?

In the process of finding these answers, we explored my current understanding of that early marriage and all that was linked to it. As it was many years since the relationship ended, I could examine it objectively. It became a voyage of emotional discovery. I learnt that at the time of our marriage, both of us were trying to escape situations which we could not deal with. At the time, we told ourselves and each other that this was love. In truth it was a relationship of convenience. We were both too young to know ourselves or each other.

I now knew that the marriage could never have survived. It was neither my fault, nor my first husband’s. We made mistakes, learnt from the experience, and continued with our lives.

During the three hours it took to reach this conclusion, the interview became a conversation between loving friends.

For another two hours, we discussed my second marriage. Through gentle and efficient questioning, the counsellor again enabled me to be objective, to realise that I was allowing myself to be a victim of someone else’s behaviour. The longer I remained in this second marriage, the more pain we would inflict on each other emotionally, and we would continue to cause emotional hurt to our children and others close to us. As my second husband’s behaviour was not going to change, I would have to be the one to leave him and begin a new life.

During that long afternoon of questions, answers and tears, the counsellor became my mentor, my guide to forgiveness, my best friend. When I left her I was emotionally exhausted from travelling through my life in her company. A profound change had occurred within me. In spite of my exhaustion, I felt as if a massive weight had left me. In reaching understanding of that first marriage, why it blossomed and died, I also reached a state of forgiveness. After seventeen years, I finally forgave him the hurt I’d suffered. More importantly, I forgave myself for the pain I’d caused him, and released the guilt I’d felt throughout the years since our divorce.

My five hours in the company of the Catholic marriage counsellor were among the most valuable I have ever spent. She was one of those friends who come into one’s life for a specific purpose, and leave it again when her mission is accomplished, my ‘special angel’ sent to guide me when most needed.

I’ve not heard if the annulment was ever granted, or even if the process went beyond my own interview. To me, that is immaterial.

Ten years into my extremely happy third marriage, I know that forgiveness, as I experienced it that day, does not happen overnight. It is a long, complicated and continual process of striving with all one’s consciousness to release years’ of resentment, anger, bitterness, hatred, pain and guilt, that seem pasted onto the soul with super-glue.

Forgiveness is an art which, perhaps, takes many lifetimes to perfect.

Until next time… ‘here comes Treble!’ © Copyright Reserved

By Isabel Bradley Thursday, 24 July 2008