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BY ROBERT KIRBY
The Lord is breaking up my friend's marriage. After 24 years of marriage, Boone's wife has decided that he isn't going to the celestial kingdom. She's threatening divorce.
Trouble started about a year ago, when Boone began having serious doubts about religion. He kept going to church, but didn't exactly keep his concerns to himself.
I've known Boone for years. He doesn't beat his wife, insult her, cheat on her, get drunk and/or blow all their money. He's a good father and provider. If he has any serious faults, it's the Jazz.
But the more Boone talked, the more alarmed his wife became. Last week, she decided that the devil had possessed her husband. She makes both of them sleep in the basement.
Boone has a choice. Either he stops his heretical musings and gets back on track or his wife will divorce him. Put another way, he can lie to his wife or be honest to himself.
This sort of thing probably happens a lot. You marry someone who shares your beliefs, but something happens along the way. They grow, they change, maybe they go a little nuts. Meanwhile, you're a rock.
Yeah, right. Here's a news flash. Everybody changes, even if it's just to become even more insecure and inflexible and dogmatic about their original beliefs.
Assuming that everything else in the relationship is cool, it's the height of irony to divorce someone over God, particularly since faith in him is supposed to be all about patience, forgiveness and love.
Frankly, who better deserves this kind of treatment than the person you vowed to love forever?
I think this happens because, for some people, exercising their religion is simply another way of exercising control over others. And life only makes sense if their loved ones stay in the box.
It doesn't happen just in marriage. When one of my relatives left the LDS Church several years ago, it produced angry and bitter words from his immediate family. Rather than letting him know they still loved him, their knee-jerk reaction only widened the rift.
Remember the part about people changing? Life is a process, not a status. Keeping that in mind, maybe it makes sense not to nail the door shut just because someone leaves the room for a few minutes.
When it comes to faith, what we say matters far less than what we do.
Nowhere is this truer than it is with children. People will make mortal enemies out of their children under the guise of saving their eternal souls.
Unless your kids are drones, it's reasonable to expect that they will at some point express considerable doubt about the merits of church. Any kid who doesn't was probably born old in the first place.
So how do you handle things when your teen-ager says he or she doesn't believe and doesn't want to go?
You try reasoning, then you yell, then you ground them. Maybe you whack them, or tell them that they're risking your love in the great "families are forever" scheme of things.
Want to know what else is forever? Shame. Yeah, good old-fashioned family guilt has probably produced more apostates and heretics than any external form of deliberate evil.
The amazing thing is that since emotional coercion and extortion wouldn't work on us, where do we get the idea that they would work on those we love?