That blog has been visited some 300 times. I have a small blog. 100 views a day is a cause for celebration. No blog ever has had 300 views. Something about that insight into our life as two people who've known each other 49 years and been married 43 of those somehow got a lot of views.
So, since tonight at book group in Higganum (where we're reading chapters of stuff I've written since I retired) we looked at the chapter called "The Pastor's Wife", I'll share that as well with you after I tell you how people tonight told me they admired Bern and my 'marriages' and I'm moved to know that. It's just what we've done and do, with almost 5 decades of relationship and over 4 decades of many marriages (always to each other!)
So, here's the chapter of my work in progress.....
THE
PASTOR'S WIFE
When I was at Virginia
Theological Seminary, my wife wasn't too thrilled. I had, after all,
promised her in solemn oaths that I would never be ordained. She
married me in September after my first year at Harvard Divinity
School and moved to Cambridge with me. But I was simply getting a two
year degree...I had no intention of ever getting an M.Div. (the three
year degree required for ordination). I promised her faithfully that
after that second year I'd be applying for graduate studies in
American Literature. I promised her with all the oaths I could
muster.
There were lots of married
seminarians in my class at Virginia Seminary and all of them were
married to women. The three female seminarians in my class were all
single. This was before the ordination of women was legal in the
Episcopal Church and the women were just going to be ready when it
came, as we all knew it would. Since all the spouses were wives, some
of the faculty wives (only one woman taught at VTS and she too was
single) sponsored a support group called “Coterie”.
Miriam-Webster defines coterie
as “an intimate and often exclusive group of persons with an
unifying interest or purpose.” VTS's “Coterie” was rather
'exclusive' in that the only people welcome were women who would,
sooner or later, be married to Episcopal priests. And that reality, I
suppose, was the 'unifying interest or purpose.”
Bern
went exactly once and left early. She was still fuming when she got
home to our apartment. “Those women are crazy. I think half of them
want to be priests and are living vicariously through their husbands.
The other half are too busy imagining all the bad things that might
happen that they're paralyzed.”
“What kind of bad things?” I
asked, suddenly assaulted by anonymous fears of bad things
myself.
“Oh, here's an example,” she
told me, barely keeping her disgust under control, “one woman
asked, 'what do you do on your son's fourth birthday when you husband
tells you he has to go visit someone who is sick after he promised to
be at the party?'”
I stayed quiet since I knew all
about breaking promises.
“It
gets better, then she says, 'and when you ask him not to go he tells
you he's doing the Lord's work.'”
“Do they have children?” I
asked.
“No!” she said, “She's
imagining that too....”
“So what did the group tell
her?”
“Lots of crap about 'the
sacrifices of a clergy wife' and stuff like that.” She paused,
suddenly smiling, “but I told her what to do.”
I waited, knowing I didn't have
to prompt her.
“I told her to tell the
asshole that when he gets back he can sleep with the Lord from now
on.” Then she chuckled.
*
Bern and I met in Latin class
when I was 17 and she was 14. I had this wild idea that I wanted to
go to Shimer College in Chicago, a “Great Books” school, and I
needed at least a year of a foreign language to apply. So, I was a
Senior in a class made up mostly of Freshmen and Bern was one of
them.
There couldn't have been a more
unlikely pairing. I was from Anawalt, a little town with a Junior
High School, that was almost totally populated by people from the
British Isles with one or two syllable names. Bern was from Filbert,
a coal camp made up of first, second and third generations of
European immigrants—Italian, Hungarian, Polish, even Spanish.
Bern's mother was a first generation Hungarian-American and her
father had come from Italy as an adolescent with his father. My
parents were as white bread as they come. She, of course, was Roman
Catholic while my family was a whole group of rather evangelical and
fundamentalist Protestants.
Add
this to that: not one non-Italian had ever married into Bern's
paternal family and not one non-Hungarian had ever married into her
maternal family. Needless to say, no Roman Catholic or even slightly
ethnic person had married into either side of my family save one. And
that was the exception that proved the Rule: Never Marry Outside Your
Kind. My cousin, Marlin Pugh, married an Italian, Roman Catholic
girl. The family lore was that the marriage didn't last until the
reception, they broke it off in the car leaving the wedding! That may
be apocryphal, but it was deeply believed in my family. “No
Italians and no Roman Catholics” could have been my family's motto.
In addition, imagine the consternation of Bern's family that I was
not only an Anglo-Saxon protestant, I was enrolled in a Divinity
School!
“What chance do
they have?” must have been a question asked a lot within both our
families.
So, Bern and I have
known each other for some 48 years and have been married
42 of those years.
I'd like to attribute that to the power and endurance of our love and
commitment, but in large measure it is a reflection of our
stubbornness and our flexibility and our intention to prove our
families wrong! I've often told people “I've been married four or
five times, just always to the same woman....”
Looking
back neither of us can recognize those two near-children (20 and 23)
we were in our wedding album. (Our first wedding bands were inscribed
Amo,
Amas, Amat.
The
whole romantic thing of meeting in Latin class and all.
Mercifully,
in one of our marriages iterations, we picked out our own rings and
gave them to ourselves.) There
are times we don't quite understand how we survived the ups and
downs, good times and bad times of all these years. And how we
survived the advent of two children, their growing up, their turning
out even better than we could have hoped for is, for the most part, a
mystery to us. Finally, how Bern endured being married to a priest is
(excuse the phrase) a holy mystery to us both.
*
Bern was not cut
out to be “a clergy wife”. Luckily, I was not cut out to have
one!
During
my final year of seminary, the two Bishops of West Virginia came to
have dinner with the seminarians from their diocese. They did this
every year, but always at a restaurant so it was easy to leave right
after dessert due to some commitment or another, true or imaginary.
But that year, George P., one of my classmates, decided we should
have dinner at his apartment, bishops and all. He even called to ask
me if Bern could bring 'chips and dips' and to tell me his wife was
already 'soaking the meat' (I kid you not....) Bern knew enough to
know that in most Western societies, bishops were on a social level
with minor royalty and oil barons. So she scoffed at 'chips and dip'
and made some exotic Italian-Hungarian hors'devours
which
impressed both the bishops, all the wives from Coterie who thought
Bern was a crazy woman and most of all, the other husbands who were
used to 'chips and dip' for a dinner party.
Just as dinner was
over and Bishop Campbell had had a Scotch or four, he announced that
he wanted to talk “with the wives”.
My chest restricted
and my bowels loosened when he said that. “Oh, my God,” I
thought, “what will she say?”
Two or three wives
went before Bern, chattering about how 'since WE'VE been in
seminary...” and how excited they were about “OUR future
ministry...” my anxiety grew exponentially. Finally, it was Bern's
turn.
“Well,
Bernadine,” Bishop Campbell said, slurring just a bit—bishops
back then could hold their liquor, our vanilla
bishops
of today scarcely drink at all--”how has it been since you and Jim
were in seminary?”
I needed my heart
shocked back into beating even before she spoke. Nothing good could
come of her answer.
“Well,
Bishop Campbell,” she began. I noted she had gone into her 'stage
presence'--Bern was a drama major and a professional actress. In
fact, she supported us during our two years in Alexandria doing
summer stock and dinner theater. “The truth is,” she continued,
like a character from Lovers
and Other Strangers,
a show she was in twice and once directed, “we
aren't in seminary. I'm not in seminary at all. Jim is in seminary
and I'm terribly unhappy....”
The oxygen in the
room was sucked out by the other wives and the bishops. I, myself,
couldn't breathe so I didn't contribute to the vacuum. Bishop
Campbell, buzzed as he was, immediately went into 'pastoral mode'.
“Oh, Bern,” he
said, softly, “what can I do?”
“You can't do
anything, bishop,” she said, forcing a tear out of her eye,
something I'd seen her do on stage, “it's up to me to leave my
marriage....Maybe we could talk after everyone has gone home....”
I
glanced around at the faces of the people in the room. It was like
being at Mount Rushmore times five. Twenty faces frozen in stone.
The bishop put down
his drink and started to reach toward Bern. Luckily he wasn't able to
touch her because I swear to God she would have ripped off his arm
and beaten him silly with it.
She suddenly
laughed. The walls shook with the sound.
“Just kidding,”
she said, “just a joke on you all....Jim and I are fine,
really....”
Bishop Campbell
needed another drink and the party broke up shortly thereafter with
strained 'good-byes' all around.
In the car,
half-way back to our apartment, I said, “some performance....”
She smiled at me.
“Think he'll remember me?” she asked coyly.
*
The next day, I ate
lunch with the two bishops—Campbell and Atkinson—in the refectory
at Virginia Seminary. As I was getting up to take my tray to the
window, Bishop Campbell asked me this: “Jim, who will have the
honor of receiving Bern into the Episcopal Church, Bishop Atkinson or
I?”
I decided that
Bern's notion of not catering to bishops was the best course. “You
know,” I said, “I wouldn't hold my breath on that one,” and
scurried away.
While I was at
Virginia Seminary, I had a field work job at Christ Church, Capitol
Hill in DC. It was a great church, made up mostly of people who were
on the staffs of some House Member or Senator and weren't really from
DC. Very laid back and liberal, so Bern had no trouble attending from
time to time. But her harsh, ethnic Roman Catholic upbringing
wouldn't let her come to communion. She and another recovering RC
would go outside during communion and have a cigarette.
By the time we
arrived at St. James in Charleston, she could bring herself to the
rail, but didn't receive the wine since she never had be able to. But
then, when I was Rector of St. Paul's in New Haven, she gave me a
surprise gift like none I've ever had. There was a New Haven wide
Confirmation and Reception Service (New Haven, like most cities, has
too many Episcopal Churches but nobody can agree on which ones are
the 'too many' ones). Totally unbeknownst to me, Bern had gone to
Bishop John Burgess—a retired Bishop who was a member of St. Paul's
and the first Black Diocesan Bishop the church had known—and asked
him to prepare her for 'reception'. The Episcopal Church, being
bigger-hearted than most denominations, recognizes that if someone
has been 'confirmed' in another church, we don't make them do it
again, we 'receive them', as the words go, 'into this
branch of the holy, catholic church.'
I was sitting up in
the chancel at the Episcopal Church at Yale with the other priests,
watching with little interest in who was coming forward to Bishop
Walmsley to be confirmed or received besides the 6 people I
presented. Then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bishop
Burgess and Bern walking toward the front and was dragged to my feet
to go stand beside her as she was received. I think I kissed her on
the mouth in front of all those Episcopalians when it was over.
She pulled her head
around to my ear and whispered, “I only did this for YOU, don't
ever forget that.”
And I never have.
But 'doing it FOR me' made it the most precious of acts. So dear to
me, so supportive of me. Over and over during all the years, she did
things 'for me' that made my life and ministry wondrous and rich.
***
That's how, for me,
Bern was the perfect Pastor's wife by being the anti-Pastor's wife.
She simply had no
interest in 'the church' in any way that didn't affect me or, later,
our son and daughter. If anything 'the church' did threatened me or
would be threatening to our children, Bern was the Mama Bear ravaging
the offending beast. In other words, she was concerned when she
thought the politics or culture of the church was draining me of my
energy and commitment or putting our son and daughter into roles and
situations they did not need to fulfill.
Being a
PK--”preacher's kid”--shines a bright spotlight on a child.
Luckily, I served three remarkable parishes that, most of the time,
didn't put either Bern or our children into untenable positions.
Those three congregations were, by Episcopal...or any
other...standards, remarkably laid back about the role of the
priest's wife or children. At St. James in Charleston, West Virginia,
Bern and Josh and Mimi were not only related to me but ¾ of the
white people, besides me, in the community. Hard not to stand out at
those odds. But the folks at St. James gave all three of them more
than enough room to be in the background. God bless those good and
holy folks for that.
St. Paul's in New
Haven was sold to me as “an activist parish”. Actually, it
wasn't. Instead, it was a parish of 'activists'--people deeply
involved in the social issues of the city and the world. The parish
itself did rather traditional things—a clothing closet, a food
pantry, high powered Church School, broad church worship, adult
education, support groups—that gave a congregation weighed down and
wearied by battling the forces of darkness in their lives, a chance
to simply serve and be comforted and healed to go back into the
world. No one at St. Paul's had the energy to expect much of Bern
besides being part of the Tribe and sharing the road.
Even St. John's in
Waterbury, the most 'traditional' of the three churches I served in
my career (though they would be horrified to know anyone thought of
them as 'traditional'!) put no pressure on the Rector's wife to be
anyone other than who she was, which was a mother of two children who
grew from adolescents to full adults in the almost 22 years I was
there and the best reader of all the good readers who read the
lessons on Sunday. (The girl was an actress, after all....) Bern
would help out with pageants and train readers and organize the
nursery because, at that time she was the coordinator of the
Cooperative Child Day Center in New Haven—the only paid employee
who trained parents to care for their children on a rota. Other than
that, she and the kids (singing the hymns in harmony!) and then she
alone would sit in the fourth row under the balcony on the pulpit
side of the church most every Sunday I was serving there. Oh, and she
and I would host a New Year's Day open house for the parish each year
at which we served food she prepared that dazzled the people who came
and she charmed them as well—merely to make things easier for me, I
assure you.
When I retired from
St. John's, Bern breathed a long and deserved sigh of relief and
'retired from church'.
I have a part-time
job working with three small churches in Connecticut these days. Bern
asked me a few weeks ago, “Do you wish I'd go to church with you?”
I looked at her
like the crazy woman she was sounding like. “Would you come if I
wished you did?”
She frowned. “No,”
she told me.
“Then why on
earth would I wish it?” I asked. And we both had a good laugh.
*
Here's what made
Bern the perfect 'pastor's wife' for me: she simply didn't care about
church. Let me clear that up. She cared profoundly about me and my
role and what I was going through in all these years as a priest. She
simply wasn't invested in the whole melodrama and wasn't concerned
about her place in it.
Most of the 'wives'
at Virginia Seminary would say stuff like 'since WE came to
seminary'. There was never any doubt in Bern's mind or mine that “I
came to seminary”, she came along for the ride and had
a life that had nothing at all to do with the seminary experience.
That was the way she was during my years as a priest. I was the
priest, she just happened to be married to me and would participate
in the life on the parish I was serving to the extent she wanted to
and enjoyed. Beyond that, she just wasn't 'attached' to what I was up
to in my ministry.
(This
brings up an interesting distinction between 'involvement' and
'attachment'. I am a Buddhist in my belief in the holy necessity of
'detachment'. We are, Jesus told us, 'to be IN the world, but not OF
the world'. Christians need to practice 'detachment' more and more.
The way I illustrate this to folks is to take a soft cover book that
folds easily and insert a separate piece of paper. Then I fold the
book, with the paper in it and notice that “involved”
means, literally, “in the volutions”--”in
the folds”. So it is obvious that the free piece of paper can be
“involved” without being attached. That's the way I seek to live
in the church—involved but not attached. The church is a big part
of my life, but it is NOT 'my life'. I am an aging white man who is a
husband, a father, a grandfather and a friend who just happens to be
an Episcopal priest. My greatest guide and mentor for that has, for
over four decades, been Bern, my wife.)
*
Once I was
preaching and the Assistant Rector, Mary Ann Logue, came up behind me
and pulled on my alb. I was totally confused by that. I wasn't sure
if it were a joke or a prank, but when I looked in her eyes I knew
it was something serious. The Senior Warden was there as well and he
led me toward the vesting room telling me Bern was on the way to the
hospital and I should go and meet her there. My son, Josh, happened
to be an acolyte that day and when I heard about Bern, I forgot all
about him. I've been told he vaulted the altar rail and caught up
with me!
Josh and I had come
to church but Bern wasn't feeling well so she and Mimi stayed home.
As Josh and I were about to leave for the hospital, I suddenly
remembered Mimi must be home alone. She was 10 or 11, not nearly old
enough to be at home worrying about her mother all by herself. I went
back into the church to ask a woman Mimi knew well to go to our house
in Cheshire to be with her. Then Josh and I drove like crazy people
to St. Mary's hospital and beat Bern's ambulance to the emergency
room by 10 minutes or so. It had been Mimi, bless her, who called the
church repeatedly until someone went to pick up.
It
was kidney stones, which must be one of those things you never ever
want to experience. Bern was in such pain that she could hardly see
that Josh and I were there. When she realized who we were, she said
only one word...”Mimi....” And I told her, hoping she could hear
through the agony, that someone was already with her and would bring
her to us.
I relate all this
to make a couple of points about my wife of all these years. First of
all, she is better with pain than anyone I know—so seeing her
suffer like that convinced me that kidney stones must be off the pain
scale. And, in the midst of all that pain, nothing mattered to her
like our children. I think that's a 'mom thing'. Studies have shown
that when asked who they would save from the train tracks, men
normally would save their wives before their children. Women—No
Way! The kids get saved, the old man is mashed to bits by the
locomotive! It's just a reality men have to accept. Bern was a mom
for the Guinness Book of records. She really was. And still is.
It's one of the
many things I love about her.
So she made it
clear to me that she would be a mama lion to keep our kids from being
eaten alive by the church.
Interesting, Mimi,
who was a dutiful 'Priest's kid' and got confirmed and all that,
doesn't go to church at all and is in a long term relationship with
the son of Latin Rite Roman Catholics. Tim doesn't go to church at
all except when he's here and he goes with me. Josh, on the other
hand, married a Taiwanese-American who has no religious background
at all and he goes to the Episcopal Cathedral in Baltimore with my
twin granddaughters almost ever Sunday—because Cathy makes
him....Go figure 'church DNA”.
*
There is an acting
theory that Bern told me about that describes the process that goes
into a play. The actor's job, according to this theory, is “to make
the strange familiar and then, make the familiar strange.”
Here's how it
works: an actor is handed a script she's never seen before. The first
job is to make those strange words and stage movements so 'familiar'
that she deliver her lines and move about the stage almost as second
nature. Then comes the really hard part—those oh, so 'familiar'
words and movements must be done and said in such a way that the
audience truly believes it is the first time those words have been
spoken or that stage traversed. The 'familiar' must be made 'strange'
and new to the audience. When the knock comes at the door, the
audience must be convinced that the actor 'doesn't know' who it is
though the scene has been rehearsed a hundred times. That is the
difference between 'being in a play' and acting.
I've adapted that
theory to liturgy and preaching. The oh, so familiar words of the
liturgy must be made new and fresh and strange by the priest
presiding over the sacraments. It's even more important in
preaching—the words of scripture must first be made 'familiar' and
understood by the preacher. Then, through the story telling and
imagination, the 'familiarity' of the passage must be made to be new
and engaging and provocatively 'strange' in the sermon. I've always
believed every seminary should have an actor on the faculty to teach
courses like 'the Drama of Ritual' and 'the Interpretation of
Preaching'. Imagine how Richard Burton would have celebrated the
Eucharist and then imagine Meryl Streep doing a baptism. Everyone
would have their own style, but church would be more interesting if
some acting skills were learned by priests!
*
One of the problems
I have always had in terms of 'evangelism' (whatever that means) is
that I really don't believe the church has a 'franchise' on God.
Instead of the “revealed” religion of the Jews and the
Christians, I am convinced God is everywhere, seeking
us out, nudging us to 'unconceal' the Holy in the mundane. When
someone tells me that they commune with God in nature or in music or
dance, I quite honestly believe them. Bern is like that. She may have
'retired' from church, but she is close to the Holy. You see, she is
a gardener.
For over 20 years
she has been transforming and creating our back and front yards. She
is constantly tinkering with the plants and the rocks and shells we
bring back each September from North Carolina and the layout of
things. I am of no help in all that. I'm not allowed to mess with
“the gardens”. She does all the mowing with her push mower. She
is the one who gets dirty every day. I sit up on the back deck and
marvel at her creation. She is in touch with the earth, with the
soil, the humus that is the root word for “human”.
If we come from earth and return to it, as the burial office tells
us, it might be a vitally profound and holy thing to be intimate with
the soil.
Me, I sit up on the
deck. The God of Israel is a sky god, one met on mountain tops. The
Goddess that was so much a part of most primal religion, is an earth
god, Gaius, the Earth herself. Much of the struggle the
church has had to fully include women is caused by the fact that sky
gods are male and the earth is female. The church did all it could to
obliterate the Goddess, but she will not go away. Yahweh worship,
Father worship, is elevated, wrapped in the clouds, reaching always
upward, always tamed. Goddess worship goes down, communes with our
Mother, stays close to the earth, is organic and wild. I would wish
we could bring the Father-god and Mother-god into harmony and
celebrate them together, worship them both. But the church (even
though we speak of the Church as “she”) is afraid of the mystery
and power of the Mother—just as most hierarchies are masculine and
fear the feminine. Carl Jung would suggest we must bring our feminine
and masculine sides into harmony to be Whole. But the church has not
yet accepted that as a need. Time is running out for the church.
Instead of Gender roles, the church needs to be a community where all
gifts, all natures are welcomed and nurtured.
***
Here's something
Bern taught me and taught me fair well. “You always get what
you get!”
She was the
Co-ordinator of the “Children's Co-op Child Care Center” in New
Haven for 14 years. What she did, as the only paid person, was teach
parents how to care for their children. Each parent had to put in 4
hour turns each week and prepare snacks and lunch on a rota. Bern
showed them what it meant to really 'care' for their children. Most
of them were white-collar professionals—lawyers and professors and
graduate students and such—people who could schedule themselves so
that they could be at the Co-op in the middle of the day. So, a
privileged group, but a concept that I think deserves adopting. Child
Care Centers at major corporations where professionals like Bern
could oversee the child care the parents of the children gave. What a
wondrous concept—parents who work actually being able to give child
care to their children too! I've asked her to write it all down and
send it around to select folks, but she never has.
Being with children
brings out the odd notion of 'fairness'. My granddaughters' are
already experts in what is 'fair'. One's cookie is a quarter ounce
bigger than another and they'll be screaming about 'fair' at the top
of their lungs. But the awful and sobering truth is—Life Isn't
Fair. It just isn't and never will be unless the Kingdom of Heaven
has a way to let everyone get what they want. Because, obviously,
'fair' has to do with 'what I want', not with some objective moral
equation.
So, whenever Bern
would distribute musical instruments or crayons or whatever else she
passed to the kids at the Co-op, one kid would say (probably more
than one, most likely all of them) “I wanted the kazoo...” or “I
wanted yellow...” or “How come Anna got the good one...?”
So Bern developed a
mantra, a chant, an incantation to make what was 'unfair' right or
just or, at least conceivable to those kids between 2 and 5. This is
what she would sing to them:
“Sometimes
you get what you want, and
sometimes you get what you don't want,
but you always GET what you GET....”
And
the kid who 'wanted' the kazoo said, “I GOT a tambourine!” And
the kid who 'wanted' yellow would say, “I GOT green!” And all
would be well, all would be well and all manner of things would be
well.
I can't think of a
better way of facing life as it is—unfair and random—than
celebrating that we always 'get what we GET'. That's just the way
things are. That is simply the way to live into and lean against Life
as it comes towards us. I don't always get what I want. I often get
what I don't want. But, always, always, forever and a day, I get what
I get. Like that. Period. Full stop.
***
For over a quarter
of century, Bern has been a member of Group. Group meets every
Thursday, no matter what. It is never more than six women who gather
to talk. They celebrate birthdays together and sometimes do Feminist
rituals. The group began long before Bern joined it. Originally, it
was a group of women who figured out how to work on their cars and
give each other vaginal exams. They moved beyond that to become a
support group extraordinaire. Every Thursday for 30 years or more.
Imagine that. Some of the group have moved away—Diane to Nevis, of
all places. And one of them died, sending them into a year or so of
dealing with death, especially since she had been kicked out before
she died....
Three of the
current five members have been in for 25 years or more. Two are
founding members. Bern is the other. They have been there for each
other for all these years, through family crises, personal meltdowns,
inconsequential upsets, the ordinariness of life. Just like that.
There for each other through thick and thin, good times and bad
times, in sickness and in health, for better or worse, like that.
Like a group marriage. It has been remarkable to me--”Group”,
which is all we call it—something I envy and wish for in my own
life, something I seek and search for, something precious and
invaluable.
And Bern is
considering leaving Group. It isn't satisfying her the way it has for
over two decades. It isn't what she needs or wants or longs for in
terms of support and listening and simply 'being there' with her. And
I am horrified. It is difficult for me to imagine life—my life and
Bern's—without Group. Thursday nights would never be the same. (Let
me be selfish—I enjoy a night alone. Often, since they go out to
eat from time to time, I get to eat things I love that Bern won't
take part in: lamb chops, for one, and Angel Hair with peas and
salty, Italian ham in a cream sauce. But, deep down, the worry I have
is that Bern's leaving group will cut her off from her last social
group.
We've always been
different that way. I have many friends and a gazillion
acquaintances. I am an extravert with lots of contacts. The truth is,
I have only a handful of truly deep friends, some of whom I only see
a couple of times a year. But I have so many folks to interact with,
to be with. Bern is an extreme introvert who, since she no longer
goes to a church, has only our immediate family and Group in her
life. I'm sure she would be alright if she only had me and our family
and our three (count 'em) friends, because our dog hates everyone but
John and Sherry and Jack and our kids and consorts and our
grandchildren. But it scares me.
It might send us
into a new marriage—and we've already leaned into and embraces five
or six marriages. I like this iteration of 'who we be' as a couple
and don't want to recreate our relationship again. Though I would,
God knows, just to be with her.
***
There is a question
I ask folks coming to me to be married that is the most important
question I could possibly ask such folks. “Tell me,” I say, “why
you want to be married. There is only one wrong answer.”
The wrong answer
that many of them give is this: “we're in love”.
If they say they
are in love and want to get married, I tell them we have some work to
do. I tell them, as painful and awful as it may be, 'that Love will
come and go. It simply will. And a marriage has to be built on
something larger, more expansive, more enduring than love.' It's a
terrible thing to tell people in love, but it needs to be said.
“Love” is an emotion. It comes and goes and is not in our
control. Not at all.
Many times, in
marriage homilies, I tell them about me and Bern. I tell them that
there are times when I can't wait to be home just to look at her,
just to bask in her presence, just to love her. And then I tell them
about waking up before she does and seeing the pillow creases on her
face and the drool coming out of her mouth and hearing her cat-like
snores. And then I ask myself, “where am I and who is this? What am
I doing here?”
Marriage isn't
about 'love', not really. Love is an emotion. You can't stay angry
for ever. And you can't sustain love all the time. What is needed is
something firmer, more solid, something like commitment, something
like 'saying so', something like your word, something that endures
and transcends the 'feeling', the 'emotion' we call love. Emotions
are ephemeral and passing. They come and go and we neither make them
come or make them go. In a real sense, we don't have emotions.
Emotions have us. Unbidden, uncontrollable, beyond our beck
and call, 'love', and all emotions are distinct, have an integrity
that is separate from our volition, have a life of there own.
“Don't be angry,”
is a nonsensical thing to say. “Don't be sad” or “don't be
anxious” are equally insane things to say. You would never do
it—never say to a person full of joy—but even saying “don't be
happy” would be astonishingly crazy to say to someone who was full
of happiness. If we could decide and control emotions, being a human
being would be something remarkably different than what it is.
What we can control
and be responsible for is something like commitment. We can choose
each day, each moment, each nano-second, to 'be committed' and be
present and responsible for being our word, our promise, our vow to
stand by this particular relationship, this marriage, no
matter what, whatever the circumstances are. We can choose a reality
that truly endures 'for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
sickness and in health'.
Why ever we chose
to do that, Bern and I have been married for almost 42 years. Jesus
Christ, four decades and two years with the same woman when there are
so many other women around! And men for her. But it's not always been
the same marriage. There have been a few, it just happens that
they've always included Bern and me.
She was 20 and I
was 23 the first time--children. That lasted as long as we could
ignor the reality that we didn't really know each other. We were
stubborn and committed, so it was when we moved from Cambridge to
Morgantown and lived in a trailer and I didn't have a job that we
were married in a mutual sharing of disappointment and doubt. Then,
with her in college and me actually making money as a social worker,
we forged a new marriage, living in a house, not a mobile home,
wondering what came next. Then she went to New York to act and I
stayed in Morgantown, waiting to go back to seminary. I'm not sure we
were “married” in any real way then, but when she came back to me
and our Puli dog in Alexandria, we forged a new commitment, riskier
and less clear than even the risky and unclear ones before. She left
me for a while then and came back and Bern got pregnant and that
began the longest marriage of our many marriages. Josh and then Mimi
came into our lives and though we moved from Charleston, WV to New
Haven, CT to Cheshire, CT, we had the 'marriage of children' for a
long time.
Even that's not
true. I had an affair when the kids were rather young—10 and 7—and
Bern and I separated for 6 months or so and I was disgraced and
shunned by the church and our friends. But somehow, out of commitment
to our children and out of a deep and abiding commitment to each
other, we not only survived, we thrived, in yet another marriage—the
post betrayal marriage.
Some people were
horrified that we had 'reconciled' and some were deleriously happy.
The truth was, and we told everyone who would listen, we weren't
'reconciled', we had 'transformed' our marriage. While we were apart,
Bern had (outside all her natural inclinations) had gone to an EST
weekend and then convinced me to go to one as well. She thought it
would give us a shared 'language' to end our marriage in a respectful
and responsible way. Instead, it gave us a vocabulary and language to
not only save our marriage, but transform it and re-create it in a
wondrous way.
That lasted until
both the children left home. Then we looked at each other and
wondered, 'what next?'
Since then—for a
decade or so, we've been in the latest marriage—and hopefully the
last. We are aging white people with a reasonable income and a
wondrous house and a dog and cat and bird and who knows how many
years to live together. And, so far as I can tell, we both accept and
adore all that.
At night, in our
bed, both of us reading books, I'll turn to her and say, “good-night,
Woman”. And she'll kiss my hand and I'll kiss hers and she'll say,
“good night, Man.” We are “Man” and “Woman” because we
are not mother and father or husband and wife anymore. We are Man and
Woman to our dog and our cat. And we are, I believe, Man and Woman to
each other. We have reached the point, over all these years, over all
the pain and all the joy, over all the boredom and all the
excitement, over all the dullness and all the wonder of being
together this long—42 years is over 500 months, over 2000 weeks,
more days and hours and minutes you can imagine. And still we're
here—Bern and me.
The Pastor's wife
and the Priest.
Just roles we've
played, like many other roles. Newlyweds, parents, grandparents,
seniors, people growing older. Together.
In the end, though
I'm still a priest, Bern isn't the Pastor's wife. And our kids aren't
PK's. And in this, hopefully last marriage, alone with our dog and
cat and bird, we are the Man and the Woman.
To each other, most
of all.
That is probably
what we were meant to be all along.
It fits.
It feels right.
I am 'the Man”.
Bern (love of all my life) is 'the Woman”.
And so it goes.
The last marriage
we will have. And, believe me, though all the other marriages to the
Pastor's wife have had their ups and down and their wonders and their
pains, this one—the last one—the one where we are not stock
caricatures it is the best, I'm not kidding, simply and truly and
without a doubt, the best marriage we've ever had.....
The MAN and the
WOMAN, and those animals we love. That simple, that basic, that
vital, that near the bone.
That's where we are
and where we will be. 'Til death do us part.
I'm not only OK
with that, I couldn't imagine anything better. Nothing.
No thing at all.
Being with her,
being with Bern....That's more than all I could hope for. Really.
No comments:
Post a Comment