Torn Asunder: Union with Jesus Crucified as a Child of Divorce
The crucifix that inspired the meditation in this article, which is in the convent chapel of the Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus in St. Louis, Missouri. Used with permission from the Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus.
As a child of divorce, I used to struggle to find a connection with Jesus in my pain. It seemed to me that, in His earthly life, Jesus did not experience what I went through in being torn between my parents. After all, His family was the Holy Family. However, in 2016, I had a beautiful experience where Jesus showed me just how deeply He understood my sense of being torn apart. At the time, I was in a difficult place in my vocational discernment. I had been in formation in a religious community. Throughout this time of formation as a postulant and novice, Jesus uncovered painful wounds to which I had previously been blind. As these wounds surfaced, my novice mistress and I both agreed that I would benefit from counseling. However, it was not possible to get counseling and remain in formation, due to the intensity of formation itself and the fact that novices were to be cloistered during the first year of novitiate. We both decided that I needed to leave the convent for a time. She assured me that, if I desired to return after having received more healing and peace, the door was open. After nine months, I asked to re-enter the convent and the date was set for me to re-enter a year to the day after I had left.
One month before this date, I had a conversation with a co-worker who was going through a nasty divorce. As she shared about what she and her boys were going through, it brought back memory after memory from the months leading up to and following my parents’ separation. After talking with her, I felt completely torn open. I had been gradually becoming aware that my parents’ divorce had affected me, but I had no idea just how deep the wound was. It was as if my wound was covered with a neat white bandage and did not look too bad. After the conversation with my colleague, I felt as if someone had ripped the bandage off, uncovering an ugly and infected mess. The false sense of well-being which I had held onto ever since my parents’ separation vanished, leaving my heart exposed but also more fully open to God’s merciful Love and Truth.
The days that followed this conversation were difficult as I faced my grief fully for the first time. During that time, I was on a call with my Mum and she noticed that I was not myself. I gave her a brief explanation of why, but did not want to go into too much detail. Just days later, she was looking something up online and stumbled across the book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, by Elizabeth Marquardt. She immediately thought of me and sent a copy to me. I had never read anything written by a child of divorce before. It made me feel simultaneously better and worse. On the one hand, there was the relief of finding my own interior experience described there and of discovering that I was not alone. On the other hand, it brought up more painful memories. My inner turmoil also led me to question my vocation. I wondered if I was entering the convent with the right motives or if I was simply doing it because I was looking for the security that had been missing in my family.
As I came to prayer during that time, I received light from praying with the daily readings and the reflection from the Magnificat magazine that month. The Gospel of the day was the Parable of the Talents (see Matthew 25:14-30). The reflection was from a priest who compared the struggles in our life to talents. He then used the example of difficulties in the family and said that, if we shy away from these, we are burying a talent. This transformed my perspective on my painful family situation. It seemed that Jesus was reassuring me that my wound would be part of my personal vocation. I felt a new strength entering my soul. In that moment, Jesus also showed me how I could find a point of union with Him in my pain.
As I had been reading Between Two Worlds, an image stuck in my mind. It was an image that Elizabeth Marquardt found on the front of a children’s book:
“I am browsing through a bookstore when I stumble across a charmingly illustrated children’s book. A young girl with silky black hair, dark button eyes, and an impenetrable gaze stares out from the cover. Her arms and legs are outstretched…To her right is an urban scene…To her left are lush green hills…a little house, a barn with a red door. The young girl appears to be stretched, quite literally, between two very different worlds. The book To & Fro, Fast & Slow, is written for young children whose parents are divorced….From the title to the split images throughout, division and opposition are the overriding theme….Even the T-shirt the girl wears pictures both a sun and a moon. The motif is clear: Everything this little girl knows, every aspect of her life, is divided down the center.” [1]
When I read this passage, it echoed my own sense of being divided and torn between my Mum, who had moved to America, and my Dad who had stayed in my home country of Australia. I found it difficult to believe that Jesus understood this struggle, at least on the level of His humanity. Of course, as God, He would understand, but as man He lived in the most perfect family. I did not know how to unite my pain to His suffering. That morning, in the quiet stillness of the chapel, He showed me the way.
Our Lord gently raised my eyes to the life-size crucifix in the chapel where I was praying. As He did this, I saw with new eyes. His arms were outstretched, with the hands pulled in opposite directions and pinned painfully in place. The image of the little girl flashed into my mind. Her arms were also outstretched, pulled between her parents’ two worlds. I could see her likeness with Jesus crucified. In that moment, I knew that Jesus understood the pain of being pulled in two opposite directions. I also knew that He understood my inner struggle to bear the tension of loving both my Mum and my Dad when doing so pulled my heart in two opposite directions. At the same time, I knew that Jesus freely chose not to seek relief from this tension. He refused to listen to the crowd that called out, “come down from the cross!” (Mark 15:30). Even letting down one arm would have relieved some of the tension, but He would not do it, and He was asking the same of me. I was to persevere in loving both of my parents and in maintaining a connection with both of the countries that made up my divided world. Jesus was not offering to take the tension away but was inviting me to unite this struggle of being torn between two worlds to His pain on the cross.
Since that morning in the chapel, I have continued to ponder the meaning of this experience in prayer. At first, I related to Jesus in his physical pain of being literally stretched and torn on the cross. However, as time has passed, my understanding has deepened. He has begun to lift the veil on His interior suffering. This was brought home to me when I read the following lines in Fr. Gregory Cleveland’s book, Awakening Love, where he described Jesus’ suffering on the cross:
Jesus was torn apart, bearing within himself the strife and opposition between a godless world and the love of the holy Trinity….The extension of Christ on the cross in four directions is the hidden meaning of our own being stretched and rent asunder with Christ. [2]
These words immediately took me back to that moment in the chapel where Jesus had shown me that He understood my experience of being torn apart. Now, He was showing me that, as His suffering enabled Him to understand my heart, my experience of my parents’ separation gave me a unique opportunity to understand His Heart as He suffered the tension of loving His Father and loving us sinners who had turned away from the Father.
Jesus also showed me the missionary aspect of my pain, revealing another layer of how my wound could be a talent. Fr. Cleveland referenced Jean Danielou’s book, The Lord of History in his description of Jesus’ experience of being rent asunder. I followed that reference. The section was about how missionaries experience an inner tension between contemplation and action and between loving the Trinity and loving a world that opposes the Trinity. Danielou wrote that, “As missionaries, we find ourselves engaged in two lives at once, and they can even seem to be incompatible.”[3] This immediately resonated with my experience of the incompatibility of my two parents’ lives. Danielou went on to say,
“…this dichotomy we suffer, this strain in our hearts between the love of the most holy Trinity and the love of a world that is alien to the most holy Trinity, is nothing but our share which the only begotten Son invites us to take in His Passion. He bore in himself that duality of opposition and conflict, and brought it to an end in himself, but he only ended it because he had first borne it.” [4]
As I read this, I could see an analogy between the missionary’s experience of “strain” and “duality and opposition” and my own experience of this in bearing the tension between my parents. I believe that, as children of divorce, we can find a missionary character in our suffering. A mentor once told me, “Your family is your mission field.” Both of my parents are devout Christians and yet the layers of division in my family are places where the kingdom of God has not yet fully come. In my own life, my “mission work,” so-to-speak, has taken the form of learning how to see the good in each parent and love both while resisting the temptation to take sides and choose one over the other. In this, my experience mirrors the missionary’s experience of tension. Ultimately, our experiences as children of divorce can mirror Christ’s Passion if we choose to unite the pain of our divided lives with the pain of Jesus on the cross. Danielou said that,
“…the missionary’s job is to live in the heart of the…world, which is away from God: and his personal vocation is to suffer the pain of that separation. If he feels himself torn in two directions, that is…his own free vital response to the scandal and disgrace of mankind’s estrangement from God: it is his participation in the mystery of Christ, the Father’s missionary…the cross is the only means of communication between the…world and the blessed Trinity…We must be conformed to that cross, and…“carry about continually in our bodies the dying state of Jesus”…”[5]
As children of divorce, we did not choose our parents’ separation in the way that a missionary volunteers to go on mission. However, if we choose to embrace our union with Jesus in being torn asunder, then we can begin to experience “the pain of that separation” as a kind of “personal vocation.” In union with Jesus crucified, the pain of being torn asunder can be transfigured. It can be turned from a painful situation that was thrust upon us into a “free vital response” to the love of the God who freely chose to experience our pain and transform it from within.
Prayer:
God our Father, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,” (Ephesians 3:15) look upon your children who suffer the pain of division in their families. You desire our healing and, amid the brokenness of our families, you have “loved us with the greatest love” and sent your Son, Jesus, to reconcile us to you and to one another. “...your Son, who alone is just, handed himself over to death, and did not disdain to be nailed for our sake to the wood of the Cross. …His arms were outstretched between heaven and earth, to become the lasting sign of your covenant…” [6] As we experience the pain of feeling stretched and torn between our parents, pour out the power of your Spirit upon us, that we may have the grace to embrace the cross and, with Jesus, to become lasting signs of the love that heals and unites all that is divided.
“O beautiful Flower of Carmel, most fruitful vine, Splendor of Heaven, holy and singular, who brought forth the Son of God, still ever remaining a Pure Virgin,, you stood at the foot of His cross and witnessed His pain and suffering, letting it pierce your own heart. You alone fully understood the pain Jesus endured as He was stretched between Heaven and earth. Please stand at the foot of our cross today and help us to know that you truly understand our pain and our suffering, as our mother, too. “O Star of the sea, help and protect us! Show us that Thou art our Mother.” Obtain for us the strength to be missionaries of unity and sacrificial love in the midst of our families.
“Mother and Beauty of Carmel, Pray for us!
Virgin, Flower of Carmel, Pray for us!
St. Joseph, Friend of the Sacred Heart, Pray for us!
St. Joseph, Chaste Spouse of Mary, Pray for us!
St. Joseph, Our Patron, Pray for us!
O sweet Heart of Mary, Be our salvation!
Amen.”
(Portions of this prayer, composed by the author, were taken from the Flos Carmeli Prayer, with minor edits, which can be found online here.)
About the Author:
Jessica Littler is an Australian who lives in the United States. She has been a Catholic since she was fourteen and views the Catholic Church as the place that is always home, no matter where she finds herself geographically. Jessica is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she completed undergraduate and graduate studies in theology and catechetics. She wrote her Master’s thesis on the pastoral meaning of St. John Paul II’s description of children from broken homes as orphans of living parents. She loves Carmelite spirituality, especially St. Therese of Lisieux’s offering of herself to merciful love. Her interests are music, baking, handcrafts, and animals, especially goats and guinea pigs.
Reflection Questions for Small Groups or Individuals:
Reflect on this passage and write a response based on your thoughts and feelings: “Our Lord gently raised my eyes to the life-size crucifix in the chapel where I was praying. As He did this, I saw with new eyes. His arms were outstretched, with the hands pulled in opposite directions and pinned painfully in place. The image of the little girl flashed into my mind. Her arms were also outstretched, pulled between her parents’ two worlds. I could see her likeness with Jesus crucified. In that moment, I knew that Jesus understood the pain of being pulled in two opposite directions.”
In what ways could Jesus be … “inviting [you] to unite [your] struggle of being torn between two worlds to His pain on the cross?”
Have you thought of your wounds as a talent before? Consider asking God to show you the specific ways that one of your wounds is a talent rather than a disadvantage.
Take some time to pray, asking the Holy Spirit to show you concretely that Jesus understands the particular pain of your wounds. Then, ask Jesus to unveil the moments in His life where He experienced a pain like yours. You may like to do this as you pray the rosary or read the Gospel. There is no need to strive to come up with an answer immediately. Simply allow Him to reveal it to you in His perfect timing. Share your experience with the group or in your journal.
Endnotes:
Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), 19-20.
Fr. Gregory Cleveland O.M.V., Awakening Love: An Ignatian Retreat with the Song of Songs (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2017), 210.
Jean Danielou S.J., The Lord of History: Reflections on the Inner Meaning of History (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964), 339.
Danielou S.J., The Lord of History, 340.
Danielou S.J., The Lord of History, 339-40.
Just, Basic texts for the Roman Catholic Eucharist Eucharistic Prayers for reconciliation I - II (from the 3rd edition of the Roman Missal, English translation, 2011)
Healing happens when we journey together.
If Jessica’s meditation resonated with you, consider joining a Life-Giving Wounds in our online retreat or a support group this fall. You do not have to carry the darkness alone.
Together, we can walk into the light.