Most priests know far more about marriage than most married people do

[Edward_H]

Nope. You read into it what you wanted.

 

[steido01]

I had 3 combat tours in Iraq and fought through gunfire. But tks for the condescension.

You misread me. There is no condescension here. I have stated only a simple truth, which I will repeat: you’ve only experienced something if you’ve experienced it.

By the way, thank you for your service – I appreciate your sacrifices. The sacrifices made by your family are not unfamiliar to me. My sister is a CWO3 in the Marines. She served several tours in Iraq as well.

Nope. You read into it what you wanted.

Then, please, tell me how I am supposed to read into a post that literally called me a name, as if I were on a playground.

 

[stpurl]

Not to jump in here for Edward, but can a divorce lawyer only advocate properly for a divorcing couple if he has been divorced himself?

Can a doctor only treat a disease if he or she has experienced it personally?

Can a parent who has not taken drugs educate a child about not taking drugs? After all, he’s ‘never experienced their use himself’ Conversely, can a parent who HAS taken drugs educate a child NOT to take them? After all, the parent has never ‘not taken drugs’ himself. . .

Personal experience is one thing, but it is not necessary with regard to most things that we must have personally experienced them in order to be capable of understanding thoroughly AND to educate others.

Here’s another thing. How is a happily married couple who has never experienced conflicts in marriage going to be able to authoritatively communicate what it’s like for couples to undergo not just the rough stuff–like a spouse cheating, turning to drink, the illness or death of a child, etc-- but the ‘little things’ as well? If Harry Happy and Julie Joyful always think alike and are each perfect little beings, how will they communicate how to deal with something as mundane as one spouse never picking up after himself or herself–not because he or she is mean or lazy, but just because it doesn’t matter to him/her, didn’t in the FOO (family of origin), and never WILL matter?

 

[Edward_H]

You misunderstand human experience and learning.

By your own argument, I could quickly and effortless chop away at what you think your own experience tells you it does, and what you pretend to know.

For instance, I could say that unless you’ve experienced what it’s like to try to nurse triplets, then you haven’t experienced breastfeeding demands, or unless you’ve tried to nurse children with breasts that have undergone lumpectomy you haven’t experience breastfeeding. And on an on.

So I don’t accept your standing here.

But a more serious approach - if you’re interested in being serious and not just “internet-debate lite”, is this:

Humans can abstract from difficulties.

Sleep deprivation in one setting can give us a very good inkling of it in another.

Waking up in the middle of the night to tend to one’s child reacting to chemotherapy (I have that experience) is transferable to understanding parents undergoing demands on them in other circumstances.

Sleep deprivation, food deprivation, dysentery, dodging bullets, chaotic environments, IED blasts, marathon running,…all off these experiences can help a person have deep insght and bone-deep appreciation for other types of struggles.

So this “special claim/special knowledge” claim you make is worth squashing.

 

[steido01]

Again, with emphasis;

Now, can a priest who hears confessions and counsels the burdened come to great knowledge on the subject? Of course. Can he give useful spiritual and even practical advice? Of course! But he cannot truly have empathy with others if he has not shared in their experience. And that’s fine.

Personal experience is one thing, but it is not necessary with regard to most things that we must have personally experienced them in order to be capable of understanding thoroughly AND to educate others.

Exactly. I agree. But we don’t have to pretend non-married clergy with incredible textbook and observation knowledge are necessarily ‘street smart’ when it comes to marriage. They haven’t experienced it. This needn’t be quartered explicitly in the ‘blessing’ or ‘curse’ camps; the Church has, after all, permitted both disciplines in different times. That’s all.

 

[steido01]

Dude, I’m not your enemy here. My approach is reasonable, and needn’t be taken to the extremes. I won’t defend something I’m not condoning, anyway. You needn’t twist my words into abstraction just to make a point. I’m extending that same courtesy to you.

 

[Edward_H]

To contend that you have unique and special knowledge is a form of Gnosticism.

I am happy that I undid that claim.

 

[stpurl]

You’re jumping around the question a bit. The bottom line, as I reinforced with other examples, is that, per the original post and others, one can know more about a very broad concept like marriage (no couple’s marriage is exactly like another couple’s) without having to get married oneself, just as one can know more about the effects of disease on the human body without experiencing the disease.

Again, say you have Harry and Julie above, nice comfortable middle class affluent white mid 40s couple, 2 well-mannered happy children, nice home, nice jobs. They can speak quite authoritatively of what THEIR marriage is like, one possibility out of literally millions and millions and millions of variables.

Now say you have Sam Stuggling and Nellie Neurotic. . . also mid 40s, one kid on drugs, bouncing from apartment to apartment, several jobs between them, none of them working out, terrible family struggles, toxic situations, little money, little education. They’ve kept their marriage and even to an extent thrived, but it took unbelievable effort, and even now, they’re constantly tumbling into crisis after crisis, each one harder and harder to get out.

Couple #1’s counseling is going to differ radically from couple #2. And both couples are going to give good (and bad) advice. And of those who are counseling, there are going to be a fair number for EACH who wind up getting NOTHING from the counseling because their own situations are going to be such that the counselors had completely overlooked as it was not germane to their EXPERIENCES.

Meanwhile good old Father Singleton, who saw his grandparent’s marriage destroyed by booze, while his parents made great efforts to provide a stable home, who has several cousins with all kinds of different trials and triumphs, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, with all their differences, classwork, conferences with brother priests and religious sisters, not to mention experts, and who is not unduly influenced by having just one PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, can look impartially at all the many many differences and assess impartially.

See my point?

 

[PetraG]

But he cannot truly have empathy with others if he has not shared in their experience. And that’s fine.

This implies that Our Lord could not “truly” have empathy with sinners, because He never sinned Himself.

It is the priest, after all, whom Christ chose to act in persona Christi in the joining of two married people by God. God is a very necessary component in a Christian marriage. The priest, appointed to be physician of souls, is also appointed by God to be a physician of marriages. The demanding nature of this role is one of the reasons priests are asked to submit to the discipline of foregoing marriage themselves. It asks so much of priests that their own marriages would not be expected to bear both the sacrifice of marriage and the sacrifice of shepherding the married.

 

[steido01]

To contend that you have unique and special knowledge is a form of Gnosticism.

I am happy that I undid that claim.

I never made such a claim. Now you break the 8th Commandment against me.

The equally-erroneous position of denying that we, as individuals, have different experiences and separate crosses to bear would fall right into some sort of Monism or Pantheism, each heresy. I will not accuse you of over-correcting into that camp. I wish you would’ve afforded the same courtesy to me.

This implies that Our Lord could not “truly” have empathy with sinners, because He never sinned Himself.

Good thing the writer of Hebrews notes that Christ had sympathy with us then. Christ 100% experienced the effects of our sin. Anyone who’d deny this is no Christian. But Christians are not Christ; we did not have the exact same experiences. You were not literally nailed to the Cross (though your “Old Adam” and his sins were). You did not raise the Lazarus from the tomb. You did not heal the soldier’s ear or tell Peter he’d deny you three times. You weren’t Peter, either. Nor were you Paul. “Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

See my point?

Of course. And I agree with it. One needn’t have experienced something to be knowledgeable on it, or to offer spiritual counsel. I’m just saying they haven’t experienced it. That’s a difference, isn’t it?

 

[Xantippe]

Priests as much or more about self-denial, sleep deprivation, dealing with sorrow, etc,. as any parent.

Does that mean that parents know exactly what it’s like to be a priest?

That seems doubtful.

 

[Xantippe]

I had 3 combat tours in Iraq and fought through gunfire.

So you’ve had an experience that others here might find it difficult to adequately imagine or understand.

That’s not unlike other experiences we’ve discussed in this thread.

If your unique experience gives you cred, other people have different experiences that you may not be able to fully understand.

It works both ways.

 

[Edward_H]

Where to begin, looks like a block of swiss cheese. I’ll pass.

 

[Edward_H]

Back to the center.

My argument is that being married doesn’t give married people any uinque knowledge about the married lives of others which a priest can’t glean from a number of sources.

So it boils back down to the fact that a married person has knowledge of marriage that’s quite limited, limited to N = 1.

I also argue that owing to the priests role as Confessor, he can actually gain an enormous amount of information on marriage that a married person will never get. We don’t know what the norm for sin is!

A priest does.

Further a priests hears the excuses, the covering ups, the admissions, the justifications, the resentments, the reasons for the resentments, the stories, and on and on and on.

Married people will never GET NEAR that sort of knowledge.

And this knowledge is very useful as a priest tries to help the prodigal children “come to their senses” and attempt to begin again with God and with this spouse, family.

The core problems that start marriage problems aren’t unique to marriage, they just surface within a marriage context.

The core problems all trace back to a proper understanding of the effects of original sin: the loss of perfect dominion over our appetites and passions, a will and an intellect not fully in charge.

**And this is something the priest has been taught about…the nature and progression of sin, the effects of sin on the integrality of faculties of person, etc. Deep and good stuff. **

All married problems - all human problems - are traceable and understandable through the lens of human nature and its limits and tendencies.

 

[Xantippe]

Here’s another thing. How is a happily married couple who has never experienced conflicts in marriage going to be able to authoritatively communicate what it’s like for couples to undergo not just the rough stuff–like a spouse cheating, turning to drink, the illness or death of a child, etc-- but the ‘little things’ as well?

It’s a really dicey business giving advice to people who are in the middle of experiences we haven’t had. Sometimes it’s necessary (like with a cardiologist), but support groups of people with similar experiences are a vital resource. Either one or the other isn’t good enough.

I think dealing with children with disability is a pretty good example of something you can hear about, but not really understand unless you’ve done it, and different disabilities are quite different. It can be a very, very lonely thing to have a child with a disability, because other people (even those who love us) simply do not understand the experience or what the demands involved are.

 

[Xantippe]

My argument is that being married doesn’t give married people any uinque knowledge about the married lives of others which a priest can’t glean from a number of sources.

So, I could get a reasonable facsimile of your combat experience by playing enough Call of Duty?

Further a priests hears the excuses, the covering ups, the admissions, the justifications, the resentments, the reasons for the resentments, the stories, and on and on and on.

Married people will never GET NEAR that sort of knowledge.

How about a married therapist?

 

[TheOldColonel]

I get the distinct impression that your own experience of marriage, your own or that of your parents, weighs heavily on the immense negativity you seem to attach to it. Is that why you glorify the one class of people in the church who do not marry as somehow superior? After so many negative comments about married people, it’s a logical question to ask.

 

[Xantippe]

I get the distinct impression that your own experience of marriage, your own or that of your parents, weighs heavily on the immense negativity you seem to attach to it. Is that why you glorify the one class of people in the church who do not marry as somehow superior? After so many negative comments about married people, it’s a logical question to ask.

I suspect that a lot of happily married people barely talk at all about their marriages in confession.

So there’s a selection problem, in that priests see disproportionately more unhappy married people and don’t necessarily know a lot about the mechanics of how to have a peaceful, harmonious home.

There’s a lot of know-how to marriage that is more a skill, rather than having to do with vice or virtue. Not that virtue is unnecessary, but the know-how is just as important.

 

[AugustTherese]

But he cannot truly have empathy with others if he has not shared in their experience. And that’s fine.

Wow! So, Our Blessed Lord cannot have empathy with married couples because ‘he has not shared in their experience’?

 

[Xantippe]

Wow! So, Our Blessed Lord cannot have empathy with married couples because ‘he has not shared in their experience’?

Being the second person of the Holy Trinity is helpful here.