sensation of oneness; but that is all. So it seems that when people speak about husband and wife being one flesh, if they mean anything at all and are not just repeating some incantation, then they mean that the spirit which inhabits the flesh of each is the same. They use the phrase, not literally, but metaphorically. An illustration may make clear what I mean. When Christ said, “A man who goes to bed with a prostitute becomes one flesh with her”, he was not announcing a new moral proposition; he was making a brutal statement of fact. Who hasn't felt the horror that a normal young man feels about going to bed with a tart; the deep instinctive knowledge that his flesh would be contaminated by her promiscuity? The horror that makes him shudder at the thought of it. That is what is meant by the phrase “being one flesh with a prostitute”; the horror of awakening to find that in one's own eyes at least one's flesh (almost one's most precious possession in this world) is unclean. In other words, if husband and wife are ever one, it is a spiritual oneness which is meant, of one sort or another. Even oneness of flesh is spiritual.
Did Emma and her husband have this oneness? I doubt it. Of course I realise that it is not sufficient to say that she never felt that they were one; feelings are almost always deceptive, and never reliable. A person may not feel any love for a spouse, when present; and feel desperate loss when that spouse is taken away. If Emma and her husband had been reconciled before the end, it would have made sense to say that they had all along been one at heart, even if they lost the awareness of this for a time. Does it make sense to say that they were one, notwithstanding that they were not aware of it, notwithstanding that they were never reconciled, and notwithstanding that marriage is generally regarded as ending with death, both in church teaching and popular imagination? I doubt it. Does it make sense to say that whatever her misdeeds she was one flesh with her husband? Well if she was, she was also one flesh with her…