To mourn or not to mourn?

I was in a prayer meeting this week with a lady who asked us to pray for her relationship with her parents. They were getting divorced after having been married for several decades. She doesn’t live at home anymore, and she talked about the whole thing quite matter-of-factly. I told her that that was really sad, and the sharing of prayer points moved on to the next person. A few days later at church, she came to me and said, “Thank you”. I asked her why. She told me that no-one else had acknowledged that it would be a painful thing, and she had found it helpful that I had.

It’s a profoundly sad story in lots of ways. What must it be like to be married for over half your life and then get divorced? Why do we live in a world where this woman is unable to grieve what ought to have been grieved? Ultimately, it shows the tyranny of political correctness and relativism. But before we see the tyranny, let’s understand why our world thinks like this.

We live in a world that increasingly refuses to call anything bad. Divorce happens. Pornography’s okay if it doesn’t cause you problems. Abortion is just removing a scrap of tissue. Family is whatever you have. (Let’s make sure we don’t ‘privilege’ the nuclear family.) Everything’s okay.

I want to say that, at one level, part of the motivation for this has been a good one. If divorce is associated with great stigma, what happens when you go through it? You get ostracized by the community and you end up without support when you need it most. If single motherhood is associated with moral failure, what happens if you find yourself a single mother? Often you and your child are left without support. So in an attempt to make sure that people aren’t marginalized, we have started saying that everything is good. If you’re divorced, that’s good for you. If you’ve fallen pregnant outside of marriage, that’s good for you. Our world talks like this because it wants to make life better for people.

My question is, does it really make life better?

My problem with this relativism is that it becomes oppressive. If something is good, it shouldn’t be mourned. If divorce just happens, you shouldn’t get upset about it—particularly if you’re not living at home anymore.

But of course, the fact that sin so besets a relationship that divorce becomes its end is profoundly sad; it’s sad for the people involved, it’s sad for their friends and it’s sad for their children. When a young woman is a single mother because of her failure and her boyfriend’s failure, that too is a sad reality. God created families with two parents for a reason, and therefore it’s good to raise children in a nuclear family wherever possible. What we need is a way of acknowledging that sin is real and damaging, without then leaving people with nowhere to find comfort, confess their sins and seek real help.

It seems to me that the gospel is a real answer to these problems. God doesn’t say to us, “There, there. It’s okay; you didn’t really do anything wrong because there is no right and wrong.” He says, “Yes, you have failed, and sin is terrible. That’s why I sent Jesus to die for sin—to bring you forgiveness. You are my child. I love you. And I will accept you and care for you in spite of what you’ve done.”

Jesus offers us a way of both saying that sin is awful and that we must love each other. It’s much better than the tyranny of relativism, which refuses to let us grieve what needs to be grieved. True joy isn’t found in pretending nothing is wrong; true joy is found in deep forgiveness, which allows us to acknowledge wrong and to love all the same.