Spiritual environmental factors in marital disorder

What might be called “the spiritual climate of marriage” has a very profound (but not easy to describe) influence on marriage, and in trying to give some account of it one must consider not so much the spiritual attitudes of the partners, as the general spiritual attitudes of the community.

It seems reasonable, at the risk of superficiality, to suggest that such spiritual values as love, generosity, and consideration have been to some extent replaced by utilitarian values and matters of expediency. This is not to underestimate the generosity of millions of people in the face of calamity and need, and the unassuming “good neighborliness” of people everywhere. But many of the disorders of marriage stem from the fact that partners allow selfish interests to take priority over the mutual interests of the partnership, the family, and the wider interests of the community. One reason for this in many cases is that they have grown up in a spiritual climate in which the values that are most essential to sound marriage and family life are largely ignored or even discredited. When children are brought up wisely, fully aware of the love of two parents who love each other and accept each other-even when the parents do not “understand” each other-the children yet receive the most essential spiritual nourishment for the growth of their own personalities. Such outgoing unselfish love, which radiates outward also from the family into the community, can only be sustained and deepened when it is continually nourished through some adequate kind of worship, whether this be according to conventional patterns or not.

In many ways the Church has lost some of its leadership in the community to secular organizations, and it has all too often failed to rise to the newest needs of the community. For example, its general emphasis on the indissolubility of marriage would seem to imply a sacred obligation to take a much more vigorous lead in the community towards better preparation for marriage. At the same time such leadership in the promotion of better home and family living would constitute the greatest possible contribution that could be made in these days towards the prevention of mental illness, and such “social illness” as delinquency, vandalism and crime. If it be true that the most influential of all known and controllable causes of mental and social illness is the deprivation of the right kind of love and security in childhood in the home, then the Church has a greater potential contribution to this great social project than any other body, the medical profession included.
This would seem to call for full consideration at the highest level-offering one of the greatest opportunities for united creative leadership that has ever been open to the Church.

There are many signs of growing interest and greater cooperation between the different branches of the Church, in what could be the most effective evangelistic opportunity of all time, the strengthening of the home life of the nation.
When the family is strengthened in these different ways it will soon recover much that has been lost with regard to its vital work of preparing people for future marriage. The homes of the future are in a very real sense being made or marred in the homes of today. With the recovery of family traditions the family itself will provide, as it used to do, some of the most influential and enduring preparation for sound marriage, and the influence will go on into the next and still more of the future generations.

Tags: Counseling