The Bishop of Rome has made an excellent address as part of the RC World Youth Day, and I highly recommend it to all: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/wyd08/index.shtml
Here are some excerpts from the Holy Father's speech at Barangaroo:
life is not governed by chance; it is not random. Your very existence has been willed by God, blessed and given a purpose (cf. Gen 1:28)! Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this - in truth, in goodness, and in beauty - that we find happiness and joy. Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.
Christ offers more! Indeed he offers everything! Only he who is the Truth can be the Way and hence also the Life. Thus the "way" which the Apostles brought to the ends of the earth is life in Christ. This is the life of the Church.
[...]
Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises. Our hearts and minds are yearning for a vision of life where love endures, where gifts are shared, where unity is built, where freedom finds meaning in truth, and where identity is found in respectful communion. This is the work of the Holy Spirit! This is the hope held out by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is to bear witness to this reality that you were created anew at Baptism and strengthened through the gifts of the Spirit at Confirmation.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Monday, June 09, 2008
Marriage
The "Sunday Forum", my parish's form of adult sunday school, is focussing on the nature of marriage right now. I've been doing some thinking about the nature of marriage recently, sparked by the engagement of a family member to his longtime partner, and the oft-cited quote in liberal Anglican circles: "I can bless their pets but not their relationship."
Here's where I am right now: marriage is a sacrament, therefore what it symbolizes is as (or more) important than what it effects, namely the union (and love) of Christ and human. My question now is whether male and female are somehow necessary for this symbol, and if so, in what way is the difference required for the content of the symbol to be indicated?
Here's an essay I found helpful from Fr George Sumner of Wycliffe Toronto. I like Fr Sumner's thinking, and very much enjoyed his visit to Holy Faith a few years back.
Money quotes:
"A doctrine of law is required, precisely because grace needs law to make sense, and law cannot save."
"But there is also a way in which real-life parishes in their good moments, in their complexity and their folk wisdom, embody a principled generosity. There is teaching, and yet people are allowed space to constellate themselves around it. As any priest knows, their stories are messy, not in one way but in many ways. As the real point of the early chapters of Romans make clear, all of us, in our varied disorders, need the word of grace. I fear that this conflict has actually shrunk that space of tolerant and patient incongruity in the real lives of local communities. The disciples congregated around Jesus in our reading, are also messy and incongruous lot."
The whole sermon:
George Sumner: A Sermon on "The Nuptial Mystery"
Written by The Very Revd Dr. George Sumner
Friday, 06 June 2008
A sermon preached by the Very Rev. Dr. George Sumner, Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto, on April 22, 2008, St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, Winnipeg, on the occasion of a conference on “The Nuptial Mystery”
It was a moment of clarity, and I convey it to you with permission. I was a tagalong at a meeting of Windsor bishops in Texas a year and a half ago, and it was the turn of Bishop Mark McDonald, then of Alaska, now of indigenous Canada, (and I would proudly add, a Wycliffe College graduate), to speak. He began by telling us that, during debates on the same-sex issue, Gwitchen Anglicans would sometimes whisper to one another “white people are crazy.” He went on to explain why. The Gwitchen want to say three things, actually. First of all, in the village we have ways to make room for those who are unusual. Second, the male and the female are the two tentpoles God put up to support his creation. And thirdly, in the frozen western Arctic, to leave is to die. And I would add, editorially, the genius of the quotation is in saying all three at once.
It is an interesting question to ask why this crisis has occurred over this issue. One explanation is the latent prejudice against homosexual people, and this factor is not to be discounted. I do sometimes wonder, why not abortion, which to its opponents is hardly a small matter. And of course, there are other issues that could, and may yet, disrupt our common life: open communion, lay presidency. When it comes to potential conflict, hold on to your hats. But in fact, it was this issue, and the struggle therein is not over one thing, but several at once: what should the nature of marriage be in our changing Western culture, by what authority shall we address these theological disputes, and how thereby shall we hang together as a Church? Seen in this way, it turns out to be no accident that it was this issue. For the body in marriage, and the body politic, and the body of Christ catholic, and finally the larger body of truths, and of words, which are Scripture, have everything to do with one another. And it is to this connection between them, to what the anthropologist Mary Douglas calls the homology, to the way they line up, that our Gospel reading attests this afternoon.
As my wife the marriage therapist will attest, human wants and needs and relational struggles are one complicated hairball, and while the Pharisees’ motive in bringing the question up in Mark 10 is not a pure one, the human problems and the human woe underlying their question are nonetheless real. What are we to do when the circumstances simply do not fit the model? Jesus’ answer is ringingly simple, and our first task is to hear it is so. The male and the female and their being joined together are built into the very fabric of God’s creation. Animal behaviorists can find all the gay penguins they like, geneticists can study all the Swedish twins separated after birth they wish, cultural anthropologists all the varied polygamies they care to, but it all can prove nothing conclusive. For the question remains whether these are data of creation in the divine intention, or its fallenness, and that is a theological question. Jesus appeals to the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis in making the clear and comprehensive claim of Mark 10. The impossibility of homosexual marriage is not some isolated proof-texting, for it follows from this declaration on the nature of marriage from the mouth of our Lord, and it is tethered to the doctrine of creation itself. All our theological reflection either moves from this grounding truth, or it is sophistry. Ethically there are still sticky wickets, but the pitch is defined.
One can see this word of Torah quoted by Christ as a deadly legalism, and so it can become for us, but the word of law is first, in this case as elsewhere, a map of the contours of God’s creation, a pattern of God’s will for our weal. We diverge from it to our own pain. And so, our culture, and our government can define marriage as it wishes, and even a synod can follow suit, they can legislate for all they are worth, but marriage’s contours are already given. As a sidebar, we are now at the very nub of the conflict in our Church, from a systematic theologian’s point of view. For what we have been struggling over all along in this conflict has been the place, if any, of the theological category of law in our life and thought. On the one hand, some say that Jesus is all about acceptance as we are, and rules are the stuff of the stern Old Testament. But without a doctrine of law, grace becomes a permissive I-and-you-are-OK-ism. On the other hand, and at the same time, where the accompanying categories of sin and forgiveness are abolished, what remains on the left is a Pelagianism of social enlightenment, and on the right, its twin, a conservative moralism. The Church comes to be populated by what Bishop Fitzsimons Allison for some time has been calling the Pharisees and Sadducees of the sexuality debate. A doctrine of law is required, precisely because grace needs law to make sense, and law cannot save.
The larger context of this discourse is the instruction of Jesus’ own disciples, and of the Gospel of Mark as a whole, the instruction of us as disciples, our formation and articulation as His Body. While Ephesians 5, which David helped us with so eloquently, is more directly apposite here, marriage as sign and gift for the Body of Christ is not absent from this passage. For God’s work in creation and in salvation is one. Marriage’s rooting and its outreach are connected. The question of the marriage of man and woman, and the question of marriage of Christ and his church, and as a result the question of our baptismally avowed marriage one to another as Church, are inextricable.
How do we know it to be so? Because we are bound, married you might say, to these words, witnessing as they do to this one work of God. We are so bound, even when they dissonant and conflictual, even when we all, liberal to conservative, have had more than enough years of this disagreement. It is so even when we feel how attractive it would be to create separate zones, untroubled by certain words, a functional local option for an edited canon, a amicable divorce from uncomfortable texts.
But what of that word about making space in the village for those who are unusual, who are different? How does that fit with the sheer clarity and simplicity of Jesus’ word? The cliché I hear in the Church goes this way: the Church should be hard at the center and soft at the edges. That can be a way to avoid this issue and all the conflict it brings, to talk around it. And there were times when, as a parish priest, I was avoidant. But there is also a way in which real-life parishes in their good moments, in their complexity and their folk wisdom, embody a principled generosity. There is teaching, and yet people are allowed space to constellate themselves around it. As any priest knows, their stories are messy, not in one way but in many ways. As the real point of the early chapters of Romans make clear, all of us, in our varied disorders, need the word of grace. I fear that this conflict has actually shrunk that space of tolerant and patient incongruity in the real lives of local communities. The disciples congregated around Jesus in our reading, are also messy and incongruous lot.
It is at this point that the third and final gnomic utterance from the Gwitchen, to leave is to die, rings in our ears. The male and the female bound together in fidelity is a gift to the Church which bespeaks our bond, one with another, in the Body of Jesus Christ, until we too are parted by death. The conservative who says, “I can bear this corruption no more” and leaves, is deaf to this word. The revisionist who says “we can wait no longer, justice demands this remedy now, whatever the rending,” is deaf to this word. To our fallen minds, in the presence of strife, another child of the fall, bonds are to be loosed. But marriage is a sign of the love of God by which he covenantally binds himself to his people and to his world, and is ready sacrificially to suffer for her.
It is a curious fact of North American Anglicanism that most of our brothers and sisters, of the most divergent points of view, nod their heads in vehement approval when it is suggested that the post-modern and post-Constantinian Church must now be countercultural. It sounds curmudgeonly to some, sixties-ish to others, but it sounds good and bold to us all. Counter-cultural is another way to say we are indeed bound to the culture, to the world around us, for we and they need one another for definition. But we are bound in ways that neither they nor we will find easy. Still we welcome the notion. But as with most vows of fidelity, they work themselves out over the long haul to be something harder, and yet more gracious, than we reckoned. “Peter, do you love me? Yes Lord you know I love you…” What if counter-cultural means hanging together in this three-pronged Qwitchen Christian wisdom? All would be counter-cultural, and so all shall have surprises. For the social conservatives, there is making room and welcome for gay Anglicans. For the revisionists, there would be the hard admission of the logic: blessings have promises, so blessings are marriages, and gay marriages are, from the foundations of creation, impossible. With that admission would come what Anglicans fear most, opprobrium in elite and progressive society. And, for the fed-up on both sides, there is the interminable putting up with one another in a very prolonged family argument. What if all that together is a part of what counter-cultural actually looks like? As with marriage itself, that would be the day when the glamour and romance had worn off, and reality sets in. Our fraying, individualist, gratification-oriented, impatient, balkanized society needs to see real marriages of man and woman, and it needs equally to see that real marriage which is the Church in its protracted unity-in-conflict. As is real marriage, of the no-no-fault kind Jesus describes in Mark 10, so is our counter-cultural witness, as a bound and avowed Body, to the costly, covenantal, enduring grace of God in Jesus Christ.
Last Updated ( Friday, 06 June 2008 )
Here's where I am right now: marriage is a sacrament, therefore what it symbolizes is as (or more) important than what it effects, namely the union (and love) of Christ and human. My question now is whether male and female are somehow necessary for this symbol, and if so, in what way is the difference required for the content of the symbol to be indicated?
Here's an essay I found helpful from Fr George Sumner of Wycliffe Toronto. I like Fr Sumner's thinking, and very much enjoyed his visit to Holy Faith a few years back.
Money quotes:
"A doctrine of law is required, precisely because grace needs law to make sense, and law cannot save."
"But there is also a way in which real-life parishes in their good moments, in their complexity and their folk wisdom, embody a principled generosity. There is teaching, and yet people are allowed space to constellate themselves around it. As any priest knows, their stories are messy, not in one way but in many ways. As the real point of the early chapters of Romans make clear, all of us, in our varied disorders, need the word of grace. I fear that this conflict has actually shrunk that space of tolerant and patient incongruity in the real lives of local communities. The disciples congregated around Jesus in our reading, are also messy and incongruous lot."
The whole sermon:
George Sumner: A Sermon on "The Nuptial Mystery"
Written by The Very Revd Dr. George Sumner
Friday, 06 June 2008
A sermon preached by the Very Rev. Dr. George Sumner, Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto, on April 22, 2008, St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, Winnipeg, on the occasion of a conference on “The Nuptial Mystery”
It was a moment of clarity, and I convey it to you with permission. I was a tagalong at a meeting of Windsor bishops in Texas a year and a half ago, and it was the turn of Bishop Mark McDonald, then of Alaska, now of indigenous Canada, (and I would proudly add, a Wycliffe College graduate), to speak. He began by telling us that, during debates on the same-sex issue, Gwitchen Anglicans would sometimes whisper to one another “white people are crazy.” He went on to explain why. The Gwitchen want to say three things, actually. First of all, in the village we have ways to make room for those who are unusual. Second, the male and the female are the two tentpoles God put up to support his creation. And thirdly, in the frozen western Arctic, to leave is to die. And I would add, editorially, the genius of the quotation is in saying all three at once.
It is an interesting question to ask why this crisis has occurred over this issue. One explanation is the latent prejudice against homosexual people, and this factor is not to be discounted. I do sometimes wonder, why not abortion, which to its opponents is hardly a small matter. And of course, there are other issues that could, and may yet, disrupt our common life: open communion, lay presidency. When it comes to potential conflict, hold on to your hats. But in fact, it was this issue, and the struggle therein is not over one thing, but several at once: what should the nature of marriage be in our changing Western culture, by what authority shall we address these theological disputes, and how thereby shall we hang together as a Church? Seen in this way, it turns out to be no accident that it was this issue. For the body in marriage, and the body politic, and the body of Christ catholic, and finally the larger body of truths, and of words, which are Scripture, have everything to do with one another. And it is to this connection between them, to what the anthropologist Mary Douglas calls the homology, to the way they line up, that our Gospel reading attests this afternoon.
As my wife the marriage therapist will attest, human wants and needs and relational struggles are one complicated hairball, and while the Pharisees’ motive in bringing the question up in Mark 10 is not a pure one, the human problems and the human woe underlying their question are nonetheless real. What are we to do when the circumstances simply do not fit the model? Jesus’ answer is ringingly simple, and our first task is to hear it is so. The male and the female and their being joined together are built into the very fabric of God’s creation. Animal behaviorists can find all the gay penguins they like, geneticists can study all the Swedish twins separated after birth they wish, cultural anthropologists all the varied polygamies they care to, but it all can prove nothing conclusive. For the question remains whether these are data of creation in the divine intention, or its fallenness, and that is a theological question. Jesus appeals to the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis in making the clear and comprehensive claim of Mark 10. The impossibility of homosexual marriage is not some isolated proof-texting, for it follows from this declaration on the nature of marriage from the mouth of our Lord, and it is tethered to the doctrine of creation itself. All our theological reflection either moves from this grounding truth, or it is sophistry. Ethically there are still sticky wickets, but the pitch is defined.
One can see this word of Torah quoted by Christ as a deadly legalism, and so it can become for us, but the word of law is first, in this case as elsewhere, a map of the contours of God’s creation, a pattern of God’s will for our weal. We diverge from it to our own pain. And so, our culture, and our government can define marriage as it wishes, and even a synod can follow suit, they can legislate for all they are worth, but marriage’s contours are already given. As a sidebar, we are now at the very nub of the conflict in our Church, from a systematic theologian’s point of view. For what we have been struggling over all along in this conflict has been the place, if any, of the theological category of law in our life and thought. On the one hand, some say that Jesus is all about acceptance as we are, and rules are the stuff of the stern Old Testament. But without a doctrine of law, grace becomes a permissive I-and-you-are-OK-ism. On the other hand, and at the same time, where the accompanying categories of sin and forgiveness are abolished, what remains on the left is a Pelagianism of social enlightenment, and on the right, its twin, a conservative moralism. The Church comes to be populated by what Bishop Fitzsimons Allison for some time has been calling the Pharisees and Sadducees of the sexuality debate. A doctrine of law is required, precisely because grace needs law to make sense, and law cannot save.
The larger context of this discourse is the instruction of Jesus’ own disciples, and of the Gospel of Mark as a whole, the instruction of us as disciples, our formation and articulation as His Body. While Ephesians 5, which David helped us with so eloquently, is more directly apposite here, marriage as sign and gift for the Body of Christ is not absent from this passage. For God’s work in creation and in salvation is one. Marriage’s rooting and its outreach are connected. The question of the marriage of man and woman, and the question of marriage of Christ and his church, and as a result the question of our baptismally avowed marriage one to another as Church, are inextricable.
How do we know it to be so? Because we are bound, married you might say, to these words, witnessing as they do to this one work of God. We are so bound, even when they dissonant and conflictual, even when we all, liberal to conservative, have had more than enough years of this disagreement. It is so even when we feel how attractive it would be to create separate zones, untroubled by certain words, a functional local option for an edited canon, a amicable divorce from uncomfortable texts.
But what of that word about making space in the village for those who are unusual, who are different? How does that fit with the sheer clarity and simplicity of Jesus’ word? The cliché I hear in the Church goes this way: the Church should be hard at the center and soft at the edges. That can be a way to avoid this issue and all the conflict it brings, to talk around it. And there were times when, as a parish priest, I was avoidant. But there is also a way in which real-life parishes in their good moments, in their complexity and their folk wisdom, embody a principled generosity. There is teaching, and yet people are allowed space to constellate themselves around it. As any priest knows, their stories are messy, not in one way but in many ways. As the real point of the early chapters of Romans make clear, all of us, in our varied disorders, need the word of grace. I fear that this conflict has actually shrunk that space of tolerant and patient incongruity in the real lives of local communities. The disciples congregated around Jesus in our reading, are also messy and incongruous lot.
It is at this point that the third and final gnomic utterance from the Gwitchen, to leave is to die, rings in our ears. The male and the female bound together in fidelity is a gift to the Church which bespeaks our bond, one with another, in the Body of Jesus Christ, until we too are parted by death. The conservative who says, “I can bear this corruption no more” and leaves, is deaf to this word. The revisionist who says “we can wait no longer, justice demands this remedy now, whatever the rending,” is deaf to this word. To our fallen minds, in the presence of strife, another child of the fall, bonds are to be loosed. But marriage is a sign of the love of God by which he covenantally binds himself to his people and to his world, and is ready sacrificially to suffer for her.
It is a curious fact of North American Anglicanism that most of our brothers and sisters, of the most divergent points of view, nod their heads in vehement approval when it is suggested that the post-modern and post-Constantinian Church must now be countercultural. It sounds curmudgeonly to some, sixties-ish to others, but it sounds good and bold to us all. Counter-cultural is another way to say we are indeed bound to the culture, to the world around us, for we and they need one another for definition. But we are bound in ways that neither they nor we will find easy. Still we welcome the notion. But as with most vows of fidelity, they work themselves out over the long haul to be something harder, and yet more gracious, than we reckoned. “Peter, do you love me? Yes Lord you know I love you…” What if counter-cultural means hanging together in this three-pronged Qwitchen Christian wisdom? All would be counter-cultural, and so all shall have surprises. For the social conservatives, there is making room and welcome for gay Anglicans. For the revisionists, there would be the hard admission of the logic: blessings have promises, so blessings are marriages, and gay marriages are, from the foundations of creation, impossible. With that admission would come what Anglicans fear most, opprobrium in elite and progressive society. And, for the fed-up on both sides, there is the interminable putting up with one another in a very prolonged family argument. What if all that together is a part of what counter-cultural actually looks like? As with marriage itself, that would be the day when the glamour and romance had worn off, and reality sets in. Our fraying, individualist, gratification-oriented, impatient, balkanized society needs to see real marriages of man and woman, and it needs equally to see that real marriage which is the Church in its protracted unity-in-conflict. As is real marriage, of the no-no-fault kind Jesus describes in Mark 10, so is our counter-cultural witness, as a bound and avowed Body, to the costly, covenantal, enduring grace of God in Jesus Christ.
Last Updated ( Friday, 06 June 2008 )
Thursday, June 05, 2008
JK Rowling's Address to Harvard's Alumni Association
A really rather remarkable speech, worth the 23 minutes to watch:
http://video.the-leaky-cauldron.org/video/1027#share
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
Harvard University Commencement Address
J.K. Rowling
Copyright June 2008
As prepared for delivery
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,
The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
http://video.the-leaky-cauldron.org/video/1027#share
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
Harvard University Commencement Address
J.K. Rowling
Copyright June 2008
As prepared for delivery
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,
The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Book Meme
What we have below is a list of the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise[sic]) [aka the Divine Comedy]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
[So, of the 47 I haven't read at least in part, a good 22 I have no intention of ever reading. Sorry, Toni Morrison. I tag Nathanael, Lisa C, and Mr Guptill, though I don't think he reads The Blogs.]
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise[sic]) [aka the Divine Comedy]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
[So, of the 47 I haven't read at least in part, a good 22 I have no intention of ever reading. Sorry, Toni Morrison. I tag Nathanael, Lisa C, and Mr Guptill, though I don't think he reads The Blogs.]
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Interesting Article on Problems in Marriage
From The Sunday Times
April 13, 2008
Marriage problems through the years
For 70 years the Marriage Guidance Council, now Relate, has acted as honest broker in the love wars. Now it opens its archives for the first time, revealing intimate details of marital strife. Some problems have stayed the same, but the remedies have changed beyond recognition
Yvonne Roberts
Slough, like every other town in Britain in the late 1940s, was attempting to deal with the aftermath of war: relationships reduced to rubble by affairs forged in haste, eroded by poverty and often prematurely cemented into marriage by an unplanned pregnancy. In April 1949, in an attempt to restore some health to matrimony, the Marriage Guidance Council (MGC) – which had been formed in 1938 – opened its first local branch.
Mr J H Wallis, apparently unshockable and astute, became one of a rare species at the time, the male marriage-guidance counsellor. One of his first cases involved a husband and wife, both 34, with three children. She said her husband had been unfaithful and had “changed since demobilisation”.
“He was quite open and honest about the affair and said he regretted the whole thing,” Mr Wallis reports. “The incident had not meant much to him.” The man said of his wife: “I think the world of her.” Wallis concluded: “In spite of what has been going on, I think he is right.”
Although the prevailing belief was that the onus lay on the wife to ensure “a home sweet home”, Mr Wallis appears remarkably even-handed. He reports, for instance, on a not very satisfactory talk with a young man who had abandoned his 19-year-old wife and returned to his mother after only six weeks. Mr Wallis writes: “The husband’s attitude is simply, ‘I don’t love her any more and nothing can make me.’ He struck me as something of a spoilt child with not much idea of the kind of co-operation on which any marriages must be founded.”
All that is known about Mr Wallis, an unpaid “marriage mender”, is that he was a Slough factory owner who spent Mondays as a voluntary counsellor. A defender of fidelity, again and again he finds himself chronicling adultery. Over a two-year period, he records the tragedies, banalities (in one case the family cat eats a husband’s hamster, causing further friction) and frustrations taking place under the eiderdowns and behind the net curtains of post-war suburban Britain, plagued by a chronic housing shortage and sexual ignorance (“Poor old mum told us nothing”).
It’s unclear why these preliminary interviews escaped the routine cull that, under MGC rules, required clients’ files to be destroyed every seven years, but the notes make desperately poignant reading. They flag up the casual acceptance of domestic violence, the tyranny of the mother-in-law, and the perhaps surprising tolerance of some husbands towards wives who had acquired a taste for extramarital freedom during the war.
Mr Wallis reports, for instance, in case No 67, on a young artist of 26, with two children, whose wife has had an illegitimate child that he fully accepts by a naval officer who was the lodger: “The husband does not in the least resent what has happened, likes the other man and is very attached to his wife.” Mr Wallis adds that the husband has suffered from “a sexual perversion” that stopped intercourse.
“I was able to help both of them take an objective view of this serious difficulty. I think it is better for psychiatric treatment to go ahead first and then we will tackle the problem of the baby, more complicated and difficult than the couple realise,” Mr Wallis writes. He mostly refrains from moralising. In case No 7, a 32-year-old driver, married for eight years and with two children, said he had been wounded and in hospital for six months. His wife had visited only three times, “which he feels rather sore about”. Wallis says: “He had anonymous letters about her relationships with other men, some of them German prisoners. He said, ‘She only drinks beer, can’t dance and doesn’t like the pictures. Then what does she go out for?’ ”
Mr Wallis continues: “He admits that he? formed a liaison with an old flame and they were discovered in her room together? The husband’s attitude is rather self-righteous and dogmatic towards his wife, as though she were a dog who would not behave properly. There is no doubt that the husband’s attitude will have to change if the marriage is to be successful.”
The majority of counsellors recruited to the MGC were middle-class females, “lumpy women in tweeds” with time on their hands, since, once married, they were expected to give up paid work. Like Mr Wallis, they attended 48 lectures spread across 24 “winter’s evenings”. (Marjorie Hume, a founder member of the MGC, writing 30 years later, said of the lectures: “The marriage customs of the Trobriand Islanders had very little bearing on the actual troubles of Mrs Jones in her interview next day, but it was all very interesting.”)
Mr Wallis’s cases were overwhelmingly working-class. His anger at the conditions some families were expected to survive in leap off the page, as does his urge to give practical help. Case No 86, for instance, involves a wife of 35, married for four years to a husband of 34. She has a girl of 15 and a boy of 11 from her first marriage. She is referred by a welfare officer because her husband has “hit her and broken her jaw”.
“The family are living in appalling conditions,” Mr Wallis writes. “They have one room with no heating and no electric [sic] or gas. The girl of 15 and the couple sleep there and the room serves as a passageway to another bedroom used by a young man of 25. The boy of 11 sleeps downstairs, sharing a bedroom with the landlord? The place is little better than a slum dwelling. I have seen [the couple] together and separately several times and referred the wife to the Married Women’s Advisory Clinic, as obviously a pregnancy would be disastrous.”
Mr Wallis and his colleagues place the 15-year-old in a youth club and endeavour to secure better accommodation for the family. “The couple feel much encouraged by our combined efforts,” Mr Wallis concludes.
If the original purpose of the MGC was to prepare engaged couples for married life, “save” matrimony and promote premarital celibacy, it has failed dismally. The latest figures show that marriage is at its lowest level for over 140 years. In England and Wales, in 2006, there were 236,980 marriages; 66% were civil ceremonies. In 1940, in the midst of war, marriages had peaked at almost double that figure: 470,549.
In 1947, the year before Mr Wallis was recruited, there had been another peak, this time in divorces: 47,041, which dropped to 28,767 in 1951. Over the next 13 years, for every 1,000 marriages there were approximately 2.4 divorces. By 1993, that rate had increased sixfold to over 14 divorces per 1,000 marriages – a high of more than 180,000 divorces. In 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number had declined to 132,562 divorces (a drop of 7% on the previous year, reflecting the decrease in marriage).
In the 1940s, a birth out of wedlock was often disguised by a “shotgun marriage”. Now, 43% of children are born to mothers who are unwed and 2.2m people cohabit. The British Social Attitudes survey published in January reported that 70% of people thought there was nothing wrong in sex before marriage.
The traditional chronology of relationships – courtship, marriage, sex, children – has been turned upside down. Marriage was once a young person’s route out of the parental home, a rite of passage that happened, on average, in their early twenties. Now, men marry, on average, at 31, women at 29. Yet, according to survey after survey, inside or outside matrimony, the majority of people still desire a successful long-term relationship. Self-help books, agony aunts and magazines overflow with advice as awareness has grown that, without help, love – fragile and delusional – may not be sufficiently robust to weather parenthood, an individual’s “right” to happiness and all the difficulties involved in trying to live as a couple, “happily ever after”.
In the 1930s, similar anxieties about the fragility of unions, even when supported by the prop of Christianity, were being expressed by a group of vicars, doctors and lawyers. In 1938 the MGC was born from the British Social Hygiene Council, aimed at tackling venereal disease and promoting sex education. The council’s marriage committee was also in favour of contraception, but since this did not appeal to the Roman Catholic community that helped fund it, the committee broke away and became the MGC (changing to the National Marriage Guidance Council in the late 1940s).
One of the MGC’s founders, Dr E F Griffith, a leading sexologist and author of the bestseller Modern Marriage, held radical beliefs that included giving a woman a medical before marriage during which the hymen was stretched to make sex less painful – a practice critics believed would provoke premarital intercourse.
Interrupted by war, the MGC opened for business again in 1943, led by David Mace, a former Methodist minister who found himself “in the centre of a stage, dazzled and confused by the limelight”. The MGC’s championing of monogamy and chastity, while never outrightly condemning divorce, endured for the next 40 years in spite of profound social changes taking place outside the counsellor’s room.
Mace and his wife established themselves in London above a chemist’s and below a “dubious maisonette” that housed a busy “working girl”. Over the next two years, they acted as counsellors to 800 people, proving, Mace said, that there was a need for a new “social and personal service”. “If the divorce court is the mortuary for dead marriages,” he wrote, “the guidance centre is the hospital for sick ones.”
The National Marriage Guidance Council, renamed Relate, celebrates its 70th birthday this year. It now deals annually with over 150,000 clients in 600 locations, including Relate Centres, schools, children’s centres, Connexions, Sure Start and GP clinics. It offers counselling, family therapy and sex therapy and teaches children social skills so they are better equipped to forge successful relationships as adults. Once, it would accept only married couples. Now, individuals, families and young people, gay and straight, are counselled via face-to-face meetings, telephone, e-mails and webcams. Help is given not just to improve relationships but also to make divorce or separation a less wounding process.
Today, Relate’s counsellors (more than 80% female and the majority paid) are drawn from all classes and ethnic groups and may spend several years training. The do-gooding bored housewife is no more. In the 1990s, when the world’s most famous divorcee, Diana, Princess of Wales, became Relate’s much-photographed patron, the charity signalled its public acceptance of a life beyond marriage.
Ironically, given its Christian roots, atheists now figure strongly among its clients. “Initially, it was twinset and pearls, something worthy and sixpence in the saucer for tea,” says Nick Turner, 52, a Relate counsellor since 1991, who now heads the Relate Institute, responsible for training and research. “Today, it’s about robust professional training and a paid career.”
As part of the birthday celebrations, the charity’s archives have been opened for the first time, allowing a fascinating glimpse of how the “treatment” of love, sex and marriage has evolved since the 1940s. The archives include three decades of the monthly Marriage Guidance Bulletin. Subjects covered include marriage after mastectomy, juvenile delinquency, “problem” families, stepfamilies, sexually frustrated wives, marriage in later years and a not very insightful look at “coloured” marriages.
An editorial in the late 1940s entitled Civil War Amongst Women” reported that counsellors “have been disconcerted and appalled at the unscrupulous cunning of the ‘other woman’ who with high predatory skill will entice a man away from his ‘pitiful’ wife and children?”
In 1954, writing on Homosexuality in a Man, Dr Clifford Allen reported that homosexuality “is a phase through which we all pass”. In protecting children, he advised: “Every effort should be made to avoid assaults by abnormal adults. Scout masters should be recruited only from normal men.”
Homosexuality did not figure in any of Mr Wallis’s cases, at least not overtly, but what does emerge is the influence of mother. One not unusual case, for instance, involves a husband, 29, wife, 25, married for three years and living with his mother. “No honeymoon and no holidays without mother? His mother? refuses to allow them to start a family? The situation seems to be so dominated by the mother that, without her elimination, I do not think much can be done.”
The Slough files throw up a paradox. Again and again, wives are reported as having a sexual “handicap” , “sexual difficulties” or “intolerance of intercourse”. Yet in 1945, using the registrar-general’s data on premarital conceptions for 1938-43, the MGC estimated that one woman
in six had sex before marriage. A disgruntled editorial in the bulletin concluded that there must be “a vast amount of premarital and extra-marital intercourse”.
How could a charity dedicated to preserving premarital chastity cope with such transgressions? In the 1920s, the work of sexologists saw sex emerging from the “mists of shame”. A woman’s fulfilment could come not just from marriage and motherhood but also “loverhood” – a satisfying sexual partnership within marriage. Traditionalists could see the rocky road ahead.
If sex was so good, why wait for a husband?
The Rev Herbert Gray, a Presbyterian minister and one of the founders of the MGC, believed that sexual passion was “the driving force in life” in a partnership of “equals”. Equal in that the husband was the breadwinner, the wife the dependent mother and homemaker. Gray saw women’s work as “knitting, embroidery, making dresses, etc” . Men desired physical gratification; female sexual fulfilment was enhanced by home and children. Somehow, out of that mix would come orgasm. Or would it?
In the 1940s, the bulletin published a survey, the first of its kind, of 1,000 “maladjusted” couples under the title Research on Marital Disharmony. “One quarter showed gross ignorance of sex and only 25 were known to have read some book of instruction. Nearly 300 of the wives were unsatisfied,” it reported.
Many counsellors took Gray’s message to heart and moved ahead of their time. In 1948, for instance, an unnamed counsellor enthusiastically reviews The Sex Factor in Marriage, by Dr Helena Wright, which advocates the clitoral over the vaginal orgasm in the early years of marriage.
By 1971, Dr Wendy Greengross, a GP and MGC member, while pointing out the dangers of premarital sex, was reminding counsellors that traditional attitudes required updating. “No longer will young people accept their parents’ attitude that only ‘bad girls’ enjoy sex before marriage. They realise that this attitude unfairly degrades? girls with ordinary normal impulses.” Jenny North, Relate’s head of public policy, explains: “Counsellors were trying to create a mainstream movement, so they had to dress up radical ideas in the cloak of respectability in public while not being opposed, for instance, to sex before marriage in private.
“Eventually, the progressive view won out, but Relate can never be progressive enough for some, because in a time when more and more people are living alone, we continue to say that being part of a couple matters.”
This interest in the sex lives of others didn’t help counsellors’ public image. The millionaire Samuel Courtauld, who became the MGC’s treasurer, said in the early 1950s: “When you say the words ‘marriage guidance’, it conjures up for most people a picture of a group of nosy parkers.”
In the same decade, in the Sunday Express, John Gordon criticised “the whole army of pestiferous nuisances invested with the delusion that it is their mission in life to go around fussing, interfering and prying into neighbours’ lives”.
But in 1957, in an anonymous tribute on the BBC’s Light Programme, one woman recounted her positive experience of the NMGC, as the council was now called. She had a child of three and was four months pregnant when her husband informed her that he would be leaving as soon as the child was born. A friend suggested marriage guidance. “I have not seen my husband since the baby was four days old, but the counsellors did save my reason and my health,” she said.
The bulletin (renamed the Journal in the 1970s) shows how the NMGC struggled to comes to terms not just with women’s growing emancipation and their move into paid work but with the shift in marriage itself. Once secured by women’s economic dependence and the shame and stigma attached to divorce, marriage was becoming – in an era of sexual permissiveness, individualism and liberalised laws – a relationship negotiated by two individuals.
By the 1970s, several studies highly critical of the NMGC found that waiting times were too long, training was inadequate, and counsellors were getting rather more out of the transaction than the clients, over one-third of whom were dissatisfied. A report in 1980 said that training amounted to “a mental-health programme” for those selected, with little benefit to the clients.
The urgent need to “professionalise” was belatedly heard. The NMGC became Relate because, according to Dorlands, the advertising agency, “that’s what you teach the consumer to do”. Two years ago, the process went a step further when the Relate Institute was established. It offers accredited courses up to a master’s degree; 200 counsellors were trained in its first year.
A recent survey shows that Relate’s clients now come from all classes, yet its middle-class image sticks, as does the belief that its work is the preservation of marriage. “Our biggest asset is that two out of three people know who we are,” North says. “That’s our brand? The middle classes were the first to embrace counselling and ideas such as ‘time for me’. Yet research shows that the reason clients come to Relate isn’t directly for themselves – it’s to save their relationships with other people.
“Counselling is seen as part of materialism and selfishness, but often it’s about care for others. It’s about preserving the ties that bind.”
Relate has what it calls a “non-directional” approach to therapy. As early as 1952, a frustrated counsellor asked in the bulletin: “Is the counsellor never to give advice? While we must avoid laying down the law, blaming those who have made mistakes, or seeking to impose a solution, there are surely limits to the non-directive doctrine if it’s not to confine the counsellor to the role of a parrot or a tailor’s dummy.”
Peter Bell, 60, Relate’s head of practice, has an answer. “The better the rapport between the counsellor and the clients, the better the outcome,” he says. “Whatever the faith, and we do have Muslim and Sikh and Hindu couples, the healing comes out of the conversation between the counsellor and the clients. It’s not about the counsellor providing a solution.
“What still exists is the shame and guilt,” he adds. “As a sex therapist I see clients who have a deep Victorian sense of shame. Often it will be the most surprising couples. For instance, a very successful head teacher and a solicitor. They seem happily married but their sex life is a disaster.”
“Some people come expecting us to bestow a wisdom that’s going to make everything all right,” says Nick Turner, “but there’s a discipline in making a relationship work. There’s no point in just pitching up once a week to see that nice counsellor. You have to be self-reflective about what you’re doing in the relationship. It’s like learning the piano. It’s not the lessons that really matter. It’s the practice.”
“People have deep reasons why they choose each other,” Peter Bell points out. “That even applies to ‘cat and dog’ relationships. Sometimes, through counselling, they come to the realisation that the emotional cost of breaking up is greater than the price of staying together.”
In one area in particular, he adds, there has been a significant change. “In the last 10 years, the number of men who say they have ‘gone off’ sex has risen dramatically. Men used to come to us with impotence, now known as erectile insufficiency, but Viagra has sorted some of that problem. What we have is a lot of men who, as women did in the 1950s, say, ‘I can have sex but
I don’t want to. It’s not rewarding.’ I think that’s because women are more aware of what they want sexually and are prepared to ask for it. Male confidence, as the gender who knew how to have sex – always an illusion – has been blown.
“For women, relationships are a serious business, full stop. Men are getting better at asking for support. Feminists have helped men to think about what part they play in a relationship.”
The government emphasises the importance of supporting relationships. Nevertheless, Relate and others in the field are concerned that, while funding is going into children’s services and parenting support, too little is directed into counselling for adults, whether single or in couples, yet they are the key to healthy family life.In 2004 the Treasury estimated that relationship breakdown and its aftermath costs England and Wales £22 billion annually. Last year Relate’s grant from central government amounted to a paltry £2m. Government has also announced funding changes to mature students that mean the Relate Institute will unexpectedly lose funding worth half a million pounds. “That’s devastating,” Nick Turner says.
The truth about counselling is that it is used by only a minority of the population, many of whom go too late. But numbers are growing, prompted in part by the fact that it is a staple of daytime television and the celebrity culture. For those who do seek help, does it work?
The answer appears to be yes. A study, published in 2002, for the Department of Social and Family Affairs in Ireland with Accord, the Catholic marriage service, discovered two remarkably consistent findings. They emerged from more than 50 reviews of 2,500 controlled studies of all types of counselling. The first is that counselling works for those who wish it to; the second is that all therapies – and there are at least 250 different therapeutic models – are equally effective.
The client is the common denominator.
Some relationships improve as soon as a couple is on the waiting list to see a counsellor: the new ingredient is hope. “Intervention to support relationships above all [depends on] restoring faith and hope in the couple’s capacity to overcome [their] problems,” the Irish report concluded.
Large numbers of people in relationship difficulties find their own solutions. Others look for advice from people they know well – friends, health visitors, GPs, midwives. Relate would like schools to have a statutory duty to offer counselling, as private schools already do voluntarily. “If you are asking for help,” Jenny North says, “there is no wrong door.”
Perhaps that is infantilising a swathe of the population, or perhaps it’s simply replacing the wise ear in the withering extended family. As the writer J Needleman, said in On Love, “The act of consciously attending to another person? can become the centre of gravity of the work of love.”
Arguably, Mr Wallis in his Slough office might not have seen his contribution as “the work of love”, but he invested time and interest in people often starved of both. In case No 90, for instance (wife, 26, husband, 28, married four years, boy of 2) , “The couple live as housekeepers to a widower and share a flat with him. No money passes either way? The landlord is continually finding fault? The wife has been told by the housing authority, if they are ‘turned out’ of their one room, there is nothing for them but ‘the Institution’.”
Mr Wallis arranges for the wife to see a psychiatrist, tries to find a nursery for the child, and encourages the husband to request another room from the landlord. “With luck,” he writes in his report, “I think we can all combine in a very useful job here.” It’s not quite “happily ever after” but, in the circumstances, it amounts to a small miracle.
Rules for marriage
By the Rev Louis A Ewart, Vicar of Earls Barton, Northants
1) Always tell the truth
2) Love, goodwill, wisdom and understanding are absolutely required
3) A sense of humour is quite necessary
4) Respect each other and each other’s desire for privacy
5) Be tolerant — outward appearances are often deceptive
6) Be patient; it is foolish to fuss about small things
7) Never let the sun set on your anger, no matter what may happen during the day; never forget the goodnight kiss
8) Avoid self-consciousness and false pride. Both are stumbling blocks on the road to married happiness
9) Remember that marriage is a game that must be played on a 50-50 basis; in other words, give and take, bear and forbear
10) Always be companionable and do not forget to smile — this is of vital importance
© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
April 13, 2008
Marriage problems through the years
For 70 years the Marriage Guidance Council, now Relate, has acted as honest broker in the love wars. Now it opens its archives for the first time, revealing intimate details of marital strife. Some problems have stayed the same, but the remedies have changed beyond recognition
Yvonne Roberts
Slough, like every other town in Britain in the late 1940s, was attempting to deal with the aftermath of war: relationships reduced to rubble by affairs forged in haste, eroded by poverty and often prematurely cemented into marriage by an unplanned pregnancy. In April 1949, in an attempt to restore some health to matrimony, the Marriage Guidance Council (MGC) – which had been formed in 1938 – opened its first local branch.
Mr J H Wallis, apparently unshockable and astute, became one of a rare species at the time, the male marriage-guidance counsellor. One of his first cases involved a husband and wife, both 34, with three children. She said her husband had been unfaithful and had “changed since demobilisation”.
“He was quite open and honest about the affair and said he regretted the whole thing,” Mr Wallis reports. “The incident had not meant much to him.” The man said of his wife: “I think the world of her.” Wallis concluded: “In spite of what has been going on, I think he is right.”
Although the prevailing belief was that the onus lay on the wife to ensure “a home sweet home”, Mr Wallis appears remarkably even-handed. He reports, for instance, on a not very satisfactory talk with a young man who had abandoned his 19-year-old wife and returned to his mother after only six weeks. Mr Wallis writes: “The husband’s attitude is simply, ‘I don’t love her any more and nothing can make me.’ He struck me as something of a spoilt child with not much idea of the kind of co-operation on which any marriages must be founded.”
All that is known about Mr Wallis, an unpaid “marriage mender”, is that he was a Slough factory owner who spent Mondays as a voluntary counsellor. A defender of fidelity, again and again he finds himself chronicling adultery. Over a two-year period, he records the tragedies, banalities (in one case the family cat eats a husband’s hamster, causing further friction) and frustrations taking place under the eiderdowns and behind the net curtains of post-war suburban Britain, plagued by a chronic housing shortage and sexual ignorance (“Poor old mum told us nothing”).
It’s unclear why these preliminary interviews escaped the routine cull that, under MGC rules, required clients’ files to be destroyed every seven years, but the notes make desperately poignant reading. They flag up the casual acceptance of domestic violence, the tyranny of the mother-in-law, and the perhaps surprising tolerance of some husbands towards wives who had acquired a taste for extramarital freedom during the war.
Mr Wallis reports, for instance, in case No 67, on a young artist of 26, with two children, whose wife has had an illegitimate child that he fully accepts by a naval officer who was the lodger: “The husband does not in the least resent what has happened, likes the other man and is very attached to his wife.” Mr Wallis adds that the husband has suffered from “a sexual perversion” that stopped intercourse.
“I was able to help both of them take an objective view of this serious difficulty. I think it is better for psychiatric treatment to go ahead first and then we will tackle the problem of the baby, more complicated and difficult than the couple realise,” Mr Wallis writes. He mostly refrains from moralising. In case No 7, a 32-year-old driver, married for eight years and with two children, said he had been wounded and in hospital for six months. His wife had visited only three times, “which he feels rather sore about”. Wallis says: “He had anonymous letters about her relationships with other men, some of them German prisoners. He said, ‘She only drinks beer, can’t dance and doesn’t like the pictures. Then what does she go out for?’ ”
Mr Wallis continues: “He admits that he? formed a liaison with an old flame and they were discovered in her room together? The husband’s attitude is rather self-righteous and dogmatic towards his wife, as though she were a dog who would not behave properly. There is no doubt that the husband’s attitude will have to change if the marriage is to be successful.”
The majority of counsellors recruited to the MGC were middle-class females, “lumpy women in tweeds” with time on their hands, since, once married, they were expected to give up paid work. Like Mr Wallis, they attended 48 lectures spread across 24 “winter’s evenings”. (Marjorie Hume, a founder member of the MGC, writing 30 years later, said of the lectures: “The marriage customs of the Trobriand Islanders had very little bearing on the actual troubles of Mrs Jones in her interview next day, but it was all very interesting.”)
Mr Wallis’s cases were overwhelmingly working-class. His anger at the conditions some families were expected to survive in leap off the page, as does his urge to give practical help. Case No 86, for instance, involves a wife of 35, married for four years to a husband of 34. She has a girl of 15 and a boy of 11 from her first marriage. She is referred by a welfare officer because her husband has “hit her and broken her jaw”.
“The family are living in appalling conditions,” Mr Wallis writes. “They have one room with no heating and no electric [sic] or gas. The girl of 15 and the couple sleep there and the room serves as a passageway to another bedroom used by a young man of 25. The boy of 11 sleeps downstairs, sharing a bedroom with the landlord? The place is little better than a slum dwelling. I have seen [the couple] together and separately several times and referred the wife to the Married Women’s Advisory Clinic, as obviously a pregnancy would be disastrous.”
Mr Wallis and his colleagues place the 15-year-old in a youth club and endeavour to secure better accommodation for the family. “The couple feel much encouraged by our combined efforts,” Mr Wallis concludes.
If the original purpose of the MGC was to prepare engaged couples for married life, “save” matrimony and promote premarital celibacy, it has failed dismally. The latest figures show that marriage is at its lowest level for over 140 years. In England and Wales, in 2006, there were 236,980 marriages; 66% were civil ceremonies. In 1940, in the midst of war, marriages had peaked at almost double that figure: 470,549.
In 1947, the year before Mr Wallis was recruited, there had been another peak, this time in divorces: 47,041, which dropped to 28,767 in 1951. Over the next 13 years, for every 1,000 marriages there were approximately 2.4 divorces. By 1993, that rate had increased sixfold to over 14 divorces per 1,000 marriages – a high of more than 180,000 divorces. In 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number had declined to 132,562 divorces (a drop of 7% on the previous year, reflecting the decrease in marriage).
In the 1940s, a birth out of wedlock was often disguised by a “shotgun marriage”. Now, 43% of children are born to mothers who are unwed and 2.2m people cohabit. The British Social Attitudes survey published in January reported that 70% of people thought there was nothing wrong in sex before marriage.
The traditional chronology of relationships – courtship, marriage, sex, children – has been turned upside down. Marriage was once a young person’s route out of the parental home, a rite of passage that happened, on average, in their early twenties. Now, men marry, on average, at 31, women at 29. Yet, according to survey after survey, inside or outside matrimony, the majority of people still desire a successful long-term relationship. Self-help books, agony aunts and magazines overflow with advice as awareness has grown that, without help, love – fragile and delusional – may not be sufficiently robust to weather parenthood, an individual’s “right” to happiness and all the difficulties involved in trying to live as a couple, “happily ever after”.
In the 1930s, similar anxieties about the fragility of unions, even when supported by the prop of Christianity, were being expressed by a group of vicars, doctors and lawyers. In 1938 the MGC was born from the British Social Hygiene Council, aimed at tackling venereal disease and promoting sex education. The council’s marriage committee was also in favour of contraception, but since this did not appeal to the Roman Catholic community that helped fund it, the committee broke away and became the MGC (changing to the National Marriage Guidance Council in the late 1940s).
One of the MGC’s founders, Dr E F Griffith, a leading sexologist and author of the bestseller Modern Marriage, held radical beliefs that included giving a woman a medical before marriage during which the hymen was stretched to make sex less painful – a practice critics believed would provoke premarital intercourse.
Interrupted by war, the MGC opened for business again in 1943, led by David Mace, a former Methodist minister who found himself “in the centre of a stage, dazzled and confused by the limelight”. The MGC’s championing of monogamy and chastity, while never outrightly condemning divorce, endured for the next 40 years in spite of profound social changes taking place outside the counsellor’s room.
Mace and his wife established themselves in London above a chemist’s and below a “dubious maisonette” that housed a busy “working girl”. Over the next two years, they acted as counsellors to 800 people, proving, Mace said, that there was a need for a new “social and personal service”. “If the divorce court is the mortuary for dead marriages,” he wrote, “the guidance centre is the hospital for sick ones.”
The National Marriage Guidance Council, renamed Relate, celebrates its 70th birthday this year. It now deals annually with over 150,000 clients in 600 locations, including Relate Centres, schools, children’s centres, Connexions, Sure Start and GP clinics. It offers counselling, family therapy and sex therapy and teaches children social skills so they are better equipped to forge successful relationships as adults. Once, it would accept only married couples. Now, individuals, families and young people, gay and straight, are counselled via face-to-face meetings, telephone, e-mails and webcams. Help is given not just to improve relationships but also to make divorce or separation a less wounding process.
Today, Relate’s counsellors (more than 80% female and the majority paid) are drawn from all classes and ethnic groups and may spend several years training. The do-gooding bored housewife is no more. In the 1990s, when the world’s most famous divorcee, Diana, Princess of Wales, became Relate’s much-photographed patron, the charity signalled its public acceptance of a life beyond marriage.
Ironically, given its Christian roots, atheists now figure strongly among its clients. “Initially, it was twinset and pearls, something worthy and sixpence in the saucer for tea,” says Nick Turner, 52, a Relate counsellor since 1991, who now heads the Relate Institute, responsible for training and research. “Today, it’s about robust professional training and a paid career.”
As part of the birthday celebrations, the charity’s archives have been opened for the first time, allowing a fascinating glimpse of how the “treatment” of love, sex and marriage has evolved since the 1940s. The archives include three decades of the monthly Marriage Guidance Bulletin. Subjects covered include marriage after mastectomy, juvenile delinquency, “problem” families, stepfamilies, sexually frustrated wives, marriage in later years and a not very insightful look at “coloured” marriages.
An editorial in the late 1940s entitled Civil War Amongst Women” reported that counsellors “have been disconcerted and appalled at the unscrupulous cunning of the ‘other woman’ who with high predatory skill will entice a man away from his ‘pitiful’ wife and children?”
In 1954, writing on Homosexuality in a Man, Dr Clifford Allen reported that homosexuality “is a phase through which we all pass”. In protecting children, he advised: “Every effort should be made to avoid assaults by abnormal adults. Scout masters should be recruited only from normal men.”
Homosexuality did not figure in any of Mr Wallis’s cases, at least not overtly, but what does emerge is the influence of mother. One not unusual case, for instance, involves a husband, 29, wife, 25, married for three years and living with his mother. “No honeymoon and no holidays without mother? His mother? refuses to allow them to start a family? The situation seems to be so dominated by the mother that, without her elimination, I do not think much can be done.”
The Slough files throw up a paradox. Again and again, wives are reported as having a sexual “handicap” , “sexual difficulties” or “intolerance of intercourse”. Yet in 1945, using the registrar-general’s data on premarital conceptions for 1938-43, the MGC estimated that one woman
in six had sex before marriage. A disgruntled editorial in the bulletin concluded that there must be “a vast amount of premarital and extra-marital intercourse”.
How could a charity dedicated to preserving premarital chastity cope with such transgressions? In the 1920s, the work of sexologists saw sex emerging from the “mists of shame”. A woman’s fulfilment could come not just from marriage and motherhood but also “loverhood” – a satisfying sexual partnership within marriage. Traditionalists could see the rocky road ahead.
If sex was so good, why wait for a husband?
The Rev Herbert Gray, a Presbyterian minister and one of the founders of the MGC, believed that sexual passion was “the driving force in life” in a partnership of “equals”. Equal in that the husband was the breadwinner, the wife the dependent mother and homemaker. Gray saw women’s work as “knitting, embroidery, making dresses, etc” . Men desired physical gratification; female sexual fulfilment was enhanced by home and children. Somehow, out of that mix would come orgasm. Or would it?
In the 1940s, the bulletin published a survey, the first of its kind, of 1,000 “maladjusted” couples under the title Research on Marital Disharmony. “One quarter showed gross ignorance of sex and only 25 were known to have read some book of instruction. Nearly 300 of the wives were unsatisfied,” it reported.
Many counsellors took Gray’s message to heart and moved ahead of their time. In 1948, for instance, an unnamed counsellor enthusiastically reviews The Sex Factor in Marriage, by Dr Helena Wright, which advocates the clitoral over the vaginal orgasm in the early years of marriage.
By 1971, Dr Wendy Greengross, a GP and MGC member, while pointing out the dangers of premarital sex, was reminding counsellors that traditional attitudes required updating. “No longer will young people accept their parents’ attitude that only ‘bad girls’ enjoy sex before marriage. They realise that this attitude unfairly degrades? girls with ordinary normal impulses.” Jenny North, Relate’s head of public policy, explains: “Counsellors were trying to create a mainstream movement, so they had to dress up radical ideas in the cloak of respectability in public while not being opposed, for instance, to sex before marriage in private.
“Eventually, the progressive view won out, but Relate can never be progressive enough for some, because in a time when more and more people are living alone, we continue to say that being part of a couple matters.”
This interest in the sex lives of others didn’t help counsellors’ public image. The millionaire Samuel Courtauld, who became the MGC’s treasurer, said in the early 1950s: “When you say the words ‘marriage guidance’, it conjures up for most people a picture of a group of nosy parkers.”
In the same decade, in the Sunday Express, John Gordon criticised “the whole army of pestiferous nuisances invested with the delusion that it is their mission in life to go around fussing, interfering and prying into neighbours’ lives”.
But in 1957, in an anonymous tribute on the BBC’s Light Programme, one woman recounted her positive experience of the NMGC, as the council was now called. She had a child of three and was four months pregnant when her husband informed her that he would be leaving as soon as the child was born. A friend suggested marriage guidance. “I have not seen my husband since the baby was four days old, but the counsellors did save my reason and my health,” she said.
The bulletin (renamed the Journal in the 1970s) shows how the NMGC struggled to comes to terms not just with women’s growing emancipation and their move into paid work but with the shift in marriage itself. Once secured by women’s economic dependence and the shame and stigma attached to divorce, marriage was becoming – in an era of sexual permissiveness, individualism and liberalised laws – a relationship negotiated by two individuals.
By the 1970s, several studies highly critical of the NMGC found that waiting times were too long, training was inadequate, and counsellors were getting rather more out of the transaction than the clients, over one-third of whom were dissatisfied. A report in 1980 said that training amounted to “a mental-health programme” for those selected, with little benefit to the clients.
The urgent need to “professionalise” was belatedly heard. The NMGC became Relate because, according to Dorlands, the advertising agency, “that’s what you teach the consumer to do”. Two years ago, the process went a step further when the Relate Institute was established. It offers accredited courses up to a master’s degree; 200 counsellors were trained in its first year.
A recent survey shows that Relate’s clients now come from all classes, yet its middle-class image sticks, as does the belief that its work is the preservation of marriage. “Our biggest asset is that two out of three people know who we are,” North says. “That’s our brand? The middle classes were the first to embrace counselling and ideas such as ‘time for me’. Yet research shows that the reason clients come to Relate isn’t directly for themselves – it’s to save their relationships with other people.
“Counselling is seen as part of materialism and selfishness, but often it’s about care for others. It’s about preserving the ties that bind.”
Relate has what it calls a “non-directional” approach to therapy. As early as 1952, a frustrated counsellor asked in the bulletin: “Is the counsellor never to give advice? While we must avoid laying down the law, blaming those who have made mistakes, or seeking to impose a solution, there are surely limits to the non-directive doctrine if it’s not to confine the counsellor to the role of a parrot or a tailor’s dummy.”
Peter Bell, 60, Relate’s head of practice, has an answer. “The better the rapport between the counsellor and the clients, the better the outcome,” he says. “Whatever the faith, and we do have Muslim and Sikh and Hindu couples, the healing comes out of the conversation between the counsellor and the clients. It’s not about the counsellor providing a solution.
“What still exists is the shame and guilt,” he adds. “As a sex therapist I see clients who have a deep Victorian sense of shame. Often it will be the most surprising couples. For instance, a very successful head teacher and a solicitor. They seem happily married but their sex life is a disaster.”
“Some people come expecting us to bestow a wisdom that’s going to make everything all right,” says Nick Turner, “but there’s a discipline in making a relationship work. There’s no point in just pitching up once a week to see that nice counsellor. You have to be self-reflective about what you’re doing in the relationship. It’s like learning the piano. It’s not the lessons that really matter. It’s the practice.”
“People have deep reasons why they choose each other,” Peter Bell points out. “That even applies to ‘cat and dog’ relationships. Sometimes, through counselling, they come to the realisation that the emotional cost of breaking up is greater than the price of staying together.”
In one area in particular, he adds, there has been a significant change. “In the last 10 years, the number of men who say they have ‘gone off’ sex has risen dramatically. Men used to come to us with impotence, now known as erectile insufficiency, but Viagra has sorted some of that problem. What we have is a lot of men who, as women did in the 1950s, say, ‘I can have sex but
I don’t want to. It’s not rewarding.’ I think that’s because women are more aware of what they want sexually and are prepared to ask for it. Male confidence, as the gender who knew how to have sex – always an illusion – has been blown.
“For women, relationships are a serious business, full stop. Men are getting better at asking for support. Feminists have helped men to think about what part they play in a relationship.”
The government emphasises the importance of supporting relationships. Nevertheless, Relate and others in the field are concerned that, while funding is going into children’s services and parenting support, too little is directed into counselling for adults, whether single or in couples, yet they are the key to healthy family life.In 2004 the Treasury estimated that relationship breakdown and its aftermath costs England and Wales £22 billion annually. Last year Relate’s grant from central government amounted to a paltry £2m. Government has also announced funding changes to mature students that mean the Relate Institute will unexpectedly lose funding worth half a million pounds. “That’s devastating,” Nick Turner says.
The truth about counselling is that it is used by only a minority of the population, many of whom go too late. But numbers are growing, prompted in part by the fact that it is a staple of daytime television and the celebrity culture. For those who do seek help, does it work?
The answer appears to be yes. A study, published in 2002, for the Department of Social and Family Affairs in Ireland with Accord, the Catholic marriage service, discovered two remarkably consistent findings. They emerged from more than 50 reviews of 2,500 controlled studies of all types of counselling. The first is that counselling works for those who wish it to; the second is that all therapies – and there are at least 250 different therapeutic models – are equally effective.
The client is the common denominator.
Some relationships improve as soon as a couple is on the waiting list to see a counsellor: the new ingredient is hope. “Intervention to support relationships above all [depends on] restoring faith and hope in the couple’s capacity to overcome [their] problems,” the Irish report concluded.
Large numbers of people in relationship difficulties find their own solutions. Others look for advice from people they know well – friends, health visitors, GPs, midwives. Relate would like schools to have a statutory duty to offer counselling, as private schools already do voluntarily. “If you are asking for help,” Jenny North says, “there is no wrong door.”
Perhaps that is infantilising a swathe of the population, or perhaps it’s simply replacing the wise ear in the withering extended family. As the writer J Needleman, said in On Love, “The act of consciously attending to another person? can become the centre of gravity of the work of love.”
Arguably, Mr Wallis in his Slough office might not have seen his contribution as “the work of love”, but he invested time and interest in people often starved of both. In case No 90, for instance (wife, 26, husband, 28, married four years, boy of 2) , “The couple live as housekeepers to a widower and share a flat with him. No money passes either way? The landlord is continually finding fault? The wife has been told by the housing authority, if they are ‘turned out’ of their one room, there is nothing for them but ‘the Institution’.”
Mr Wallis arranges for the wife to see a psychiatrist, tries to find a nursery for the child, and encourages the husband to request another room from the landlord. “With luck,” he writes in his report, “I think we can all combine in a very useful job here.” It’s not quite “happily ever after” but, in the circumstances, it amounts to a small miracle.
Rules for marriage
By the Rev Louis A Ewart, Vicar of Earls Barton, Northants
1) Always tell the truth
2) Love, goodwill, wisdom and understanding are absolutely required
3) A sense of humour is quite necessary
4) Respect each other and each other’s desire for privacy
5) Be tolerant — outward appearances are often deceptive
6) Be patient; it is foolish to fuss about small things
7) Never let the sun set on your anger, no matter what may happen during the day; never forget the goodnight kiss
8) Avoid self-consciousness and false pride. Both are stumbling blocks on the road to married happiness
9) Remember that marriage is a game that must be played on a 50-50 basis; in other words, give and take, bear and forbear
10) Always be companionable and do not forget to smile — this is of vital importance
© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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