INSIDE OUT MORALITY

INSIDE OUT MORALITY

Supports structures, whether from traditional culture or church teaching, are no longer so influential in helping people stay in their marriages when the going gets tough. In what we sometimes call “developed” countries people often enter into relationships and marriage with unexpressed conditions – the main one being, ‘so long as it works.’

But then I came across an article (by Sally Read in the Tablet, 13 June) in which she spoke of a friend of hers, “who got divorced during our peer group’s whirl of divorces. But while everyone else has since remarried or at least co-habited, she has remained alone.” Read explores this outcome and writes, “it is clear this does not come from any human ruling. When she prays, she feels with certainty that if she can’t be with her husband she should remain alone. It is as though the indissolubility of her marriage is written in her blood.”

I was moved by this story because it goes “behind the scenes” of all our anxious discussion about the erosion of culture and religion. Yes, it is true that many people, whether they live in “developed” or “developing” countries, are not so much moved by “human rulings” as they are by personal feelings. But what if personal feelings were to go full circle and come, as it were, from the inside, to the same conclusion as human rulings? In other words, could it be that we are moving towards a personal morality which is more sensitive to the inner voice in all of us?

“No one can come to me unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me” (John 6:44). I always find this a powerful statement. What is it, “to be drawn by the Father”? It has certainly nothing to do with human rulings or traditional culture. It is that powerful attraction of love that we know in our own relationships and which is always faithfully and permanently present in God’s relationship with us.

The woman referred to above listened to her inner stillness and discovered that she is not faithful to her ex-husband because she is “emotionally hooked” on him. Rather she is faithful to the covenant she made with him even though the covenant is broken. Her friends go on at her, “get over it and find someone new.” But she prefers to wait and meanwhile “God seeps deeper and deeper into her” and while she is pained by her broken state she often feels “calmed by joy.”

What we glimpse here is morality, that is, the way we live, as it were coming from the inside out. It is not imposed by custom or teaching or fashion. It comes from the heart of a person.   

9 August 2015                        Sunday 19 B

1 Kings 19:1-8                        Ephesians 4:30-5:2                             John 6:41-51