Tag Archives: Divorce

“Christians Make You Earn Your Divorce”

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I’ve been emailing back and forth with an old friend who is going through a divorce. My friend is a Christian who married young and had children early; she and her husband were enmeshed in what was, for a time, a warm and nurturing community of fellow believers. But for a variety of reasons which are not the point of this post, she and her husband found their marriage first in trouble, then irreparably damaged. And after a great deal of private anguish and almost-as-private counseling, they have gone “public” with their intent to divorce.

In a recent email to me, my friend included the line that is the title of this post. In as much as it is possible to laugh empathetically in a Facebook message, I chuckled with her as I read it. My friend has been besieged by well-meaning people, mostly from her church home, who have taken it upon themselves to do everything they can to “save” her, her husband, and their children from the disaster of a divorce. These friends are convinced that my friend is being too hasty; and as a result, keep asking the same sort of questions over and over again: “Have you really, really tried to make it work?” But have you seen a Christian therapist?” “Have you thought about what sort of impact this will have upon the kids?” And there have been a few reminders of that tired old slogan “God hates divorce”. My friend is very tired of feeling as if she has to build a legal case for her “right” (in the spiritual sense) to divorce.

I remember this well. My first two weddings were in churches (a Roman Catholic and an Episcopal one, in that order). But when these ended, few folks tried to stop the divorces. In my first two marriages, we weren’t churched; our friends were largely secular and liberal. My first wife and I were so young when we wed that in the eyes of many, our divorce was a foregone conclusion. The second marriage ended when after a period of sobriety, I relapsed on alcohol, drugs, and sexual infidelity. No one tried to talk wife #2 out of filing for a divorce! But my third divorce was very different.

My third wife and I met on Matchmaker.com in early 2000. We were both online looking for a serious relationship with a fellow Christian. I was already 18 months sober, and nearly eighteen months into my “conversion.” E and I met, had an immensely hasty courtship, and were engaged within weeks. I wanted finally “to do it right”, sure that my sobriety and my faith would at last ensure a successful marriage. E, a graduate student at Fuller Seminary, was on the cusp of 30. Virtually all of her fellow students in her program were already married, and many were parents. Evangelical Christian culture, with its hostility to pre-marital sex, often turns marriage into an idol (despite Paul’s lukewarm endorsement of the institution in 1 Corinthians 7). And for different reasons, we each felt pressured to get married. Continue reading →

The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow

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After ten days of “all election, all the time” posting, I’m ready for something different.

I’ve got a remarkable number of friends going through divorces or break-ups right now. And a week or so ago, one of those friends asked me a question I often get: “How did you survive three divorces?” The question is usually half-facetious, half-serious. I have the quick and facetious answer down pat: “I’m the King of Starting Over”, something I’ve blogged about in the past. I know better than most how to move out of a shared space and begin a new life with rented furniture! Three divorces before my 36th birthday (still, and one hopes always, a standing family record) have given me a great many interesting stories about “new beginnings”.

But last week, my friend asked me a question I get far more rarely: “How, Hugo, do you deal with having been in love with so many women? Where do they all ‘go’ in your head and your heart?” My friend is an evangelical cradle Christian; his soon-to-be-ex wife was his first love and his first lover. He can’t imagine ever being as intimate with anyone in the future as he was with her. He’s worried that memories of his first marriage, and his first romance, will haunt any future relationship. He repeated his question: “Where do all these past lovers ‘go’?”

There’s a great line in Jane Hamilton’s otherwise over-wrought A Map of the World (which was turned into an underrated Sigourney Weaver/David Strathairn film). I don’t have the book or the movie handy, so I’ll quote it as I remember. Near the end, the lead character (who has gone through unspeakable tragedy piled on unspeakable tragedy) says of her past loves: “They’re always with you, just not consciously. They’re right beneath the eyelids.” I may be misquoting the line, but the point is reasonably clear: the past is something you heal from, something you get over, but also something you carry with you. And the lovers and exes whose bodies you knew and whose lives you shared are gone — and in some sense, need to be gone — but their influence on your own life continues.

One of the Apostle’s loveliest images is of a “cloud of witnesses” urging us on. Whatever St. Paul meant, I’ve long cherished the idea that I am watched over, and perhaps in some sense even protected, by those who have gone before. I think of my father, my grandparents, and countless other friends and relatives who have “gone to join the great majority” on the other side. As a Christian, I believe not only in a life to come but also in the promise of being reunited with deceased loved ones. I also believe, based on Scripture and on hope, that I am watched over and cared for by these witnesses. I’m not practicing some sort of ancestor worship, never fear — but though my great hope is in Jesus, my quiet comfort is also in the presence of those who cheer me on. (I know this isn’t a comforting image for everyone. I had a friend who was raised with the belief that the dead could see you, and she grew up with a genuine phobia about going to the toilet, worried that dead people were going to watch her poop.)

In any case, I don’t just apply the “cloud of witnesses” image to the dead. Continue reading →

Reprint: September 11, marriage and divorce

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This post originally appeared on September 12, 2006.

In yesterday’s New York Post (a paper I’ve never actually held in my hands, despite many visits to Manhattan), conservative commentator John Podhoretz wrote a personal commentary on 9/11: The antidote to horror is love.

Podhoretz tells the story of his rapid engagement to his wife, Ayala, in the aftermath of 9/11:

Within two months of 9/11 I was engaged to be married, within 13 months I was married, had a baby 19 months after that and another one due to be born in a months’ time.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be for me. I had only met Ayala in June, and I was determined not to think about marriage for at least a year in any relationship. I had nearly ruined my life getting married precipitously after a 10-day romance in 1997, and I simply could not trust myself.

But I couldn’t be bothered with learning to trust myself. Getting married was an urgent, all-consuming need.

I took Ayala aback with the ferocity of my determination. At every turn I brought up what it would mean to be married. I was so determined that I proposed to her at 9 in the morning sitting in the living room of my Brooklyn Heights apartment, through whose window we had seen the black gash of the sky above Ground Zero every night since 9/11. She accepted – and then informed me we had to come up with a more romantic engagement story to tell her family and friends.

I’m telling the story now for the first time because I think it is romantic. I fell in love more deeply with Ayala and had to marry her because I had witnessed the worst and needed the best. Something deep and elemental within me needed to supersede the evil of 9/11 with the purest affirmation of existence – unconditional hope for the future and new life in the form of children whose presence on this earth would be the most crushing blow a middle-aged man like me could deliver to the cult of death that sought to tear out America’s heart.

I’m inclined to be charitable towards Podhoretz, even if his final sentence seems a bit over-wrought and self-congratulatory.  Too often, the "traditional family" crowd, in their desperation to affirm what they see as an institution under attack, paint the exceedingly common acts of marrying and reproducing as heroically counter-cultural deeds.  It certainly flatters the sensibilities of those who do choose to marry, stay married, and make wee ones.  But it reminds me of those who suggested, five years ago, that the best response to 9/11 was to go shopping.  I mean, I get the principle of the heroism of everyday life, but it still makes me wince to read about how a middle-aged man’s decision to reproduce was a "crushing blow" to Al Qaeda.  ("Honey, let’s make a baby!  That’ll show Osama!")

Continue reading →

“Teaching May Be Hazardous to Your Marriage”: Social scientists and the myth of male weakness

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Reader and blogger Treifalicious sends me a link to this PDF file of a 1999 study on college professors and divorce. Published in the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, it’s melodramatically entitled Teaching may be hazardous to your marriage.

The abstract:

Kenrick et al.’s experiments demonstrate that men who view photographs of physically attractive women or Playboy centerfolds subsequently find their current mates less physically attractive and become less satisfied with their current relationships. What then would be the
cumulative effect of being exposed to young, attractive women on a daily basis? Would there be any real consequences to the men’s dissatisfaction with their relationships? Secondary school teachers and college professors come in contact with more young women at the peak of their reproductive value than others do. The analysis of a large, representative data set from the United States indicates that, while men in general are less likely to be divorced than women, and secondary school teachers and college professors in general are less likely to be divorced than others, simultaneously being male and being a secondary school teacher or college professor statistically increases the likelihood of being divorced We contend that the contrast effect that Kenrick et al. find in their experiments is cumulative and has real
consequences.

It’s an almost laughable study, save for the fact that it’s, well, so bloody infuriating. Here’s the initial premise:

Few occupations and professions afford greater opportunities to come in contact with
women in their teenage years than teachers in secondary and postsecondary schools. These
teachers experience the cumulative effect of exposure to young, attractive women who are at
their peak reproductive value more acutely than people in most other occupations.

I suppose that’s true enough, though I can’t say I think much of the term “peak reproductive value.” No offense intended to teenage moms out there, but in my experience, those who choose to make babies in their thirties often (not always) have more “valuable” resources (time, patience, finances) than those in their “peak” reproductive years.

But then the study’s authors lose me completely. They note that those who teach are slightly more likely to stay unmarried after they divorce, though the difference with the general population is barely significant. But then this whopper:

We believe that there are two possible interpretations for this finding. First,
subsequent to divorce, male teachers and professors may remain unmarried because they prefer
to pursue a series of affairs with female students without marrying them. Second, they may remain unmarried because, due to the cumulative contrast effect, any adult woman they might meet and date after their divorce would still pale in comparison to the young attractive women with whom they come in daily contact.

“Pale in comparison”? Continue reading →

Three divorces, four successful marriages

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Ariranha has a blog post up that, very kindly, quotes at length from my old essay on being the King of Starting Over. Ariranha is going through a painful divorce herself (the subject of my original post), and mapping out her own short and long-term responses to the end of a fifteen-year marriage. It’s difficult and painful work, and she makes this excellent point:

And while in one sense I want to “keep looking forward and not look back,” as my mother says, I cannot escape the conclusion that I absolutely must spend a great deal of time “looking back.” I must do the autopsy, conduct the postmortem of this marriage. How else will I know what in me must be improved? How else will I get a handle on the dynamic and challenges I bring to a relationship? How else will I avoid dooming myself to the exact same situation, years down the road? There is a difference between honest reflection on your past, and becoming mired in the bitterness and pain of it. There is more ambiguity than the false dichotomy of looking forward or looking back. I think you have to look back. And even once you have spent enough time surveying the past, I think you still have to check it from time to time. I think it boils down to this: Attend to the road ahead, but don’t forget to check your rearview mirror.

Bold emphasis mine. She’s absolutely right. To one degree or another, we chose the partners we married, and we chose to stay with them up until whatever point one or the other of us (or both) decided to leave. Marriage, I’ve often felt, is like a movie with two directors, two screenwriters, two lead actors, and no editors. In the end, there’s a reason why you chose to write this other person into the movie of your life, and a reason why he or she did the same. Put another way, while we can be momentary victims of abuse or infidelity in a marriage, those of us who enjoy a reasonable degree of prosperity are more often volunteers for the suffering we both endure and inflict in the course of what will be an unhappy marriage. Learning how to break that cycle for ourselves, and how to make better romantic and sexual decisions, is a vital part of any post-mortem.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve been divorced three times. That doesn’t mean I’ve had three failed marriages. Marriage is, in the modern world, a particularly effective vehicle for personal growth. (That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other excellent vehicles.) A marriage is a failure if it inhibits the growth of either party; it is a success if it becomes the catalyst for individual and mutual transformation. Though all three of my divorces were painful, all three of my former marriages were, to my mind, ultimately successful in accomplishing the goal of facilitating the personal growth of the two parties involved. None were failures. I was not and am not a failure, and neither were my ex-wives. As loth as I am to buy into the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, in the case of my fourth, final, and happiest marriage I can say that my happiness and my maturity are in no small way directly due to the lessons I learned as a consequence of the first three.

Three divorces, four successful marriages. That’s how I see my past.

Grief, Remorse, and Judgment: the myth of a “right response’ to abortion

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In response to my post on Tuesday, I got an e-mail from a reader who wrote that while she had come to the point where she no longer believed in banning abortion, she still considered herself pro-life. Reflecting on how she had been raised (in a conservative Christian household), she noted that she had always been taught that women who undergo abortion will invariably experience regret and depression. Faced with the reality that that is not always the case, my reader writes that she finds it harder not to judge women who don’t experience regret.

One of the hallmarks of traditional sexism is its insistence that “good women” feel certain feelings and not others. “Good girls” are expected to be interested in romance, but not in sex — especially not the latter when it is disconnected from the former. Good girls are allowed, even encouraged, to daydream about marrying their handsome boyfriends; they are discouraged (via shame) from lusting after the hot water polo players in their Speedos. These messages about what the right emotions are for women (compassion, tenderness, romantic longing) and what the wrong emotions are (ambition, horniness, anger) are taught early, usually long before puberty. And the grip of this dichotomy of good and bad feelings can be intense, lingering for a lifetime, passed on to the next generation.

I know a lot of folks who feel as my reader does. In this world view, shaped both by sexism and popular Christian teaching, remorse and regret are prerequisites for forgiveness and understanding. A young woman who has had an abortion will have no trouble finding sympathy in even the most conservative circles if she says the right words. For example, this will do nicely:

“Oh, I was so confused and scared! I had no idea what to do. I I just wanted it all to be over with, and I had nowhere else to go, so I called up the clinic and I went and ‘took care of it.’ I cried afterwards for hours; it hurt so much. At first I felt numb, and then I felt relief, and then I felt this awful sense that I had done something terrible. Every day I ask God to forgive me. I regret it so much, and I wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling so horrible.”

Say that in private — or better yet, tearfully in front of the congregation — and you can expect the outpouring of warmth and forgiveness given to a Prodigal Daughter. The pastor will use you as an example, mingling admonition with a reminder about God’s grace and a wildly inappropriate but inevitable reference to Rachel the Matriarch weeping for her children. Folks will hug you and pat you and say soothing words. “We’re praying for you, sweetheart.” “Jesus loves you.” “You are forgiven.” “Thank you for speaking out; you may have saved another girl’s baby today.” And on and on it goes. Continue reading →

On “settling” and the indispensability of passion: a reply to Lori Gottlieb

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The March 2008 issue of The Atlantic has one of those sure-to-start-a-heated-discussion pieces: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. The author, Lori Gottlieb, is exactly my age: forty, on the nose. She’s a single parent, having conceived her young son with donor sperm. Lori begins:

About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

Gottlieb anticipates that this last sentence will arouse howls of indignation, but she pushes blithely ahead. She’s writing, it seems for younger women, and she’s offering what is only a slightly different spin on the by-now ubiquitous bromide that “feminism hurts women by suggesting that happiness is possible without a man.” I mean, it’s not as if there aren’t dozens of books and articles out there aimed at headstrong young women warning that if they don’t get hitched and start breeding early, they’ll miss their chance at the deepest and most satisfying source of happiness that the be-ovaried can ever know. It’s an old trope: the wiser older sister figure presenting her own story of woe as a cautionary tale. (And yeah, I know I sometimes do a similar thing here on this blog.) What’s interesting — and particularly galling — is Gottlieb’s hook: she urges smart young women to marry “Mr. Good Enough”. Continue reading →

A note on Blair’s conversion, and on missing Rome

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Like most who have followed the life and career of Tony Blair, I was not surprised in the least by his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, a decision made formal in a private ceremony last week. Long-affiliated with the fine old Christian Socialist Movement, his theology seemed to have been moving towards Rome for some time. (When Blair’s son Leo was born in 2000, a number of years younger than his other children with his wife, Cherie, there were very public rumors that the couple did not practice any form of artificial birth control, in keeping with Catholic teaching.)

I’ve had mixed feelings about Tony Blair for years now. But I wish him well, of course, as he moves forward on his spiritual journey. A great many Englishmen and women before him have “returned to Rome” before him, and he goes in fine company.

A little bit of me — just a little — is envious. My own religious peregrination has been fitful and dramatic, but it started with a late adolescent conversion from the atheism of my parents to Roman Catholicism. I was baptized and confirmed at the 1988 Easter Vigil, where I took the confirmation name Thomas. For a brief time, I seriously considered the priesthood — so great was my enthusiasm for the Church. My first marriage was solemnized with a full mass at St Paul the Apostle in Westwood, one of the larger Catholic parishes in West Los Angeles. During the first year of that marriage, I was a regular and enthusiastic communicant.

It was the end of my first marriage that, for me, made staying a Catholic untenable. Though we agreed on little else during the divorce process, my first wife and I were committed to not seeking an annulment, despite pressure from some of her Catholic relatives to get one. What had been done might now be undone, but we weren’t going to deny it had been done in the first place! And with the divorce came the bar from the eucharist. No more wafer and wine made into bread and blood for me, at least not in the Roman style.

I drifted away from Christ for the next few years after that 1992 divorce. When I came back, it was as a Protestant of one kind or another: an Anabaptist, a non-denominational charismatic, an Episcopalian. But here’s the rub: often, whether I’m at a Mennonite, Episcopal, or evangelical worship service, I find myself feeling as if what I’m participating in is somehow incomplete. There are churches, and then there is The Church. And while all the churches are somehow part of the Body of Christ, there is still for me a sense that the truest Church is Roman. Though I very rarely attend Mass any more, I admit that I feel something when I do that I have not felt anywhere else — and I have worshipped in more than my share of elsewheres.

I’m blissful in my fourth marriage. The chances of reconciling with my first wife are zero. I would never dream of raising our future children in a church community that didn’t see their parents’ marriage as being as licit and good as any other. As I understand it, the price of being allowed to become a regular communicant in the Catholic church would mean leaving my wife — or enduring a chaste marriage for the rest of our lives. I’ve checked this out with a few of my friends who know their canon law: without an annulment of my first marriage, or without a commitment to chastity within my current one, I’m going to have a hard time gettin’ to the communion rail. That price is much too high to pay.

It’s odd — I was a Mass-going Catholic for less than five years. That’s not even an eighth of my life. And yet Rome has a hold on me that nothing else has. And when I see the once-married Tony Blair received into the Church, my happiness for him is not untinged with envy.

Anesthesia is not recovery: a note on breaking up and healing

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I have a weak spot for the sort of pop psychology studies that end up being spread around by the internet; I justify that interest by telling myself that regardless of their reliability, many folks clearly believe in them — which makes them worth reflecting on for that reason alone.

In reality, breaking up doesn’t feel that bad is this week’s attention-grabber:

“We underestimate our ability to survive heartbreak,” said Eli Finkel, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University, whose study appears online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Finkel and colleague Paul Eastwick studied young lovers — especially those who profess ardent affection — to see if their predictions of devastation matched their actual angst when that love was lost.

“On average, people overestimate how distressed they will be following a breakup,” Finkel said in a telephone interview.

That makes good sense.

What I wonder is, how much of that “ability to survive” is a testament to the reality that the relationship wasn’t particularly significant? How much is attributable to our ability to grow emotional scar tissue? After all, as any veteran of divorce will tell you (and I am a thrice-decorated veteran of that agonizing process), it’s often tough to distinguish between numbness and recovery.

Folks often ask me about how I “survived” three divorces. I get that question a lot, especially from those who are in the midst of their first (and, one hopes, their final) divorce. “How could you go through this again and again and not be permanently devastated?”, they inquire. Some of that resilience and willingness to begin again is a result of grace, surely. And some of it is also attributable to stubbornness. (See my post last year on “the king of starting over”.)

But let’s be honest: ending a marriage (or any other significant, long-term relationship) is desperately painful. It’s agonizing, crazy-making, soul-scarring. When I was going through my second and third divorces, I remember thinking to myself “How could I ever have put myself back in this situation? How did I forget how much this hurts?” (It’s a question I also ask myself around mile 23 of every marathon, and I’ve heard from some of my female friends that they ask themselves the same thing when they give birth for the second or third time.) And of course, the answer is that most of us have not only a great capacity to endure pain, but a great capacity to forget. Time is just slow-acting Percoset, sweet anesthesia coming at its own maddening pace.

But anesthesia and real recovery aren’t the same thing. The absence of pain is not always a reliable indicator of good emotional health. I know plenty of young people who move serially from relationship to relationship, and I know them well enough to know that their post-break-up insouciance isn’t an act. But for many, the real pain comes months or even years later. Sometimes, we need a shot of anesthetic to get us out of an unhealthy relationship. Two or three weeks after the break-up, we’re smiling and laughing and feeling on top of the world; three months later, we’re curled pathetically on the couch, sniffling in misery. The lag time between the separation and feeling the hurt is often quite substantial (and, in my experience, it’s a good deal longer for men than for women.) And during that lag time — the period between leaving the dentist’s chair and the novocaine wearing off — it’s easy to underestimate just how much the loss of a love really did hurt.

Do I feel today the pain of three divorces and a half-dozen other serious break-ups? No. But in order to move forward, I had to go back (in therapy, in spiritual retreats, in writing) and look carefully at each of those many past relationships. I needed to feel the pain — and cop to the pain I inflicted. It took a lot of work to make sure that I wasn’t mixing up numb forgetfulness with genuine healing.

And I suspect that some of the folks in this little study will discover that they’ve been mixing up those very things.

“Why not rather be cheated?” A note on lawsuits, divorce, and Anglican court battles

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In a rather surprising ruling, the 4th Circuit of the California Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles yesterday. For those not in the loop, three conservative parishes within our diocese have broken away over the issue of homosexuality; in opposition to same-sex unions and the ordination of non-celibate gay clergy, these parishes have sought to leave the diocese — and take their church property with them. Yesterday, reversing a lower-court ruling, the appellate justices said that the church buildings belong to the diocese, not to the rebel parishes. Y’all can leave, in other words, but the bricks and mortar stay.

It’s a setback for the break-away traditionalists in California, and perhaps nationwide. Though the Times reports that the rebels haven’t decided on whether to appeal to the state Supreme Court, I can’t imagine that they won’t. The stakes are much too high to let things come to a tidy end here.

I have mixed feelings, of course. On the one hand, I’m a strong supporter of same-sex blessings and of the full integration of non-celibate gays and lesbians into holy orders and into the full, rich life of the Anglican Communion. I’ve also known Bishop Bruno for years, going back long before his stunning upset victory in the 1999 bishop coadjutor election. (You’d have to know a lot about dull diocesan politics to know what a shocker that was. He beat the favored candidate of All Saints Pasadena, and it took a couple of years to patch things up between the new bishop and the largest parish in the diocese. Let’s just say that there were some very, very disgruntled people at All Saints when Jon was elected; they’ve become “gruntled” since.) So as the bishop’s friend and admirer, I support him in his decision to do battle.

On the other hand, I know a thing or two about divorce. And having managed to get through three divorces without any serious legal fights, I know that the smart thing to do is to be generous towards those with whom you are ending a covenanted relationship. In the end, as my third wife and I agreed when we split, “it’s just money.” And no, neither of us had so much cash that we could afford to be recklessly cavalier about the subject — we just both knew that new houses could be bought, new silver patterns selected, new retirement accounts opened. Adding my three divorces together, I’ll reckon I walked away from somewhere around half a million dollars (most of it in real estate, of course). Could I find good use for $500,000 today? No doubt! Would it have been worth a nasty court battle, or two, or three? No.

I love what Paul says about lawsuits in 1 Corinthians 6:5. It was a great comfort to me during my last divorce, which was amicable and kind and generous on all sides:

The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?

So many people say “I’m not going to court over money, it’s the principle of the thing.” But Paul is truly subversive here; he calls on us to allow ourselves to be wronged and cheated rather than turning to secular courts to resolve our disputes — particularly our disputes with fellow Christians.

Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? That’s the question I ask equally to both sides in the property dispute between the church and its traditionalist rebels. It’s the question I would pose to Jon Bruno, and to the vestries of the three renegade parishes. I would urge the rebels to abandon their property rather than sue to keep it; I would urge my friend Jon to let the dissenters take that same property rather than sue to get it back. If both sides act with glorious generosity, who knows what good might come of it?