The Healing Power of Obedience

A Reflection on the Gospel for October 3rd, 2021:
​Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

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​Mark
10.2-12 (shorter)
(For the longer version, see the print edition of Living with Christ.)

Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. Jesus said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
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As a woman who has experienced divorce, this Gospel hit home. I recall the first time I came across this reading in the days after the marriage broke up when I had not yet contemplated the healing process of annulment. I received the reading literally and felt like a failure. I did not feel as though I should continue attending Mass and definitely didn’t feel worthy of receiving Eucharist. After all, wasn’t this reading coming straight from Jesus and saying that if God had joined us together, no one should allow that union to be separated?


What I wasn’t considering was the question of whether it was my will or God’s that had joined us together.


I had married quickly, without a lot of prayer or discernment. I vividly remember thinking the night before the wedding that I needed to call this off, but my pride wouldn’t allow me to cancel. The Church teaches that a valid and sacramental Catholic marriage has four elements, among them the intention to marry for life, and to be faithful to one another. I would say that the thought of being joined for life was not seriously contemplated before we planned our “church wedding” and there certainly was no shared understanding of what it meant as a sacrament.


Shortly after receiving a civil divorce decree, I met who is now my amazing husband. I knew to the core of my being that he was the partner God had intended for me. God had a plan all along, and I believe He loved me enough to let me stumble along, led by my willfulness and pride, so that when the man He intended for me came along, I could fully appreciate the Sacrament of Marriage.


I desperately wanted to have a marriage that was fully blessed by the Church and so I petitioned for an annulment. I entered the preliminary consultation with a gentle nun, fearful, and if I’m being honest, determined to marry regardless of what the Church said. I remember this beautiful sister telling me that the tribunal’s job was to determine if the issues in that marriage were in fact my cross to bear, and if by leaving, I was simply abandoning my cross. A few short months later, after the legal proceedings of the tribunal were finished, I received a notice that the marriage had been annulled. A wave of healing washed over me.


The day my husband and I entered into the Sacrament of Marriage was a holy experience. We both felt the true presence of Christ as we declared our commitment to one another for life before the priest in persona Christi, and perceived every other human being in the physical church fade away in that moment. That holy experience has carried us through some tough times over the last 20 years, and I now fully understand that God never asks me to carry my cross alone.


When God has truly joined two together as one, He will be fully present in this relationship every time He is invited. His healing mercy and grace prevails. I have learned that when I truly live in God’s light and within His teachings, my path, while still bumpy, is much easier to navigate.


“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesians 5:21)




Sandy Graves

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