Truer Words Seldom Spoken

Alice: I suppose the conservative ones will say marriage should be for ever.

Nick: I think they'll all say marriage should be for ever as far as a priest is concerned, but I know what I'm going to say to them in reply. . . . I shall say that although I wanted above all else to heal the relationship and keep the marriage alive I had to recognise in the end that no healing--no cure, I should say--was possible; I shall remind them that cures don't always happen, because God doesn't operate by waving a magic wand. But what he does try to do constantly is to redeem what goes wrong, and in redemption is the healing. That's why I've got to accept what happened and learn from it. It's because the learning will in the end become part of the redemption.

Alice Fletcher and Nicholas Darrow in The Wonder Worker by Susan Howatch