It started before the wedding bells

When Ruby and I were dating (and we must have been engaged at this point), I wrote her a letter.  I don’t remember the exact thing I said, but it was something along the lines of Michelangelo’s famous quote.  While he’s working on a sculpture, someone tells him how great of an artist he is.  Legend has it that he turns to the guy and says “The statue was always there, in the rock, I just revealed it.”

So I wrote this to Ruby and I tell her that I will help shape into a beautiful person, that she’s in there, in the rock and I will help reveal her to the world.

There are two major things wrong with that.  a)  I didn’t really love her and b)  I only loved that which I though I could turn her into.  It was Pygmalion, only I set out with the intent of shaping her.

I didn’t even love her.

How fucked up is that?  And as the years went by, I stayed true to that mission statement – I tried to shape Ruby into something I could love.  And she learned to hate me for it.

Of all my sins: the anger, the rage, the manipulation, the lies.  This sin is the worst.  This is what I am most ashamed of.  Of trapping someone in a relationship where I was so desperate for love that I’d entangle her into my fucked up dysfunction.

 

 

 

*************

Oh.  Wanna know the kicker?

Before we were married, she showed that letter to the deacon in our parish.  He told her “You’ve found a keeper, there!”  The deacon was so clueless that he couldn’t see the obvious  dysfunction going on.

But, shit, he was a charismatic as well.  So I guess I can’t hold him to too high a standard.

Counseling

Counseling, once I gave in and went, wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Well, lemme clarify that.  It was horribly painful, but I could tell that it was doing some good. Looking back on it, I can see some of the things that the counselor was doing.  I had wrapped up my emotions and self behind so many layers of armor that I couldn’t express basic feelings (except, of course, anger.  I was good at that one).

She’d literally have to take a sheet of paper with a bunch of smily faces (well, faces showing different emotions) and have me point to what I was feeling.  Took me months to be able to simply point to a different emotion other than “mad” or “happy”.

This was an exercise that you’d do with an 8 year old, by the way. I was the definition of the “out of touch” man.

I had the emotional capacity of an 8 year old.

But I learned that, contrary to what I thought, the more out of touch we are from our emotions, the more they rule us.  To be truly free, a person needs to understand the emotional undercurrents that are driving their decisions.  Every decision is an emotional one, and unless  you have a grip on what you’re feeling, those feelings are going to drive your decision-making.

Took years for me to understand that.

One thing that was out of the norm was the length we saw the same counselor.  Debra and I were married for 13 and half years before we separated.  For about 10 of those years, we were seeing a counselor, off and on.  There was always something new popping up, and we go back.  I kept thinking “Maybe, if I fix this one more thing, she’ll be happy” or “If I fix this one thing, maybe I’ll be happy.”

Took me 13 years to figure out that it doesn’t work that way.

In the beginning was the fighting. And the fighting was the relationship.

I remember some of the first fights Rose and I had, and when I started to realized that I (and we) had a problem. Gods, looking back on it now, it was so obvious what I was doing, how manipulating I was behaving.

At the time I was working at a printing press and I had two main jobs – I ran a high-speed inkjet printer and I had to make sure that the bulk mail paperwork was correct for the USPS. I hated it. I hated my supervisor who always managed to get sick on Mondays. I hated some of the people I worked with (some were pretty cool). I hated running my machine – I felt like I was just there to feed the machine. As long as the machine was running, the bosses were happy. They didn’t care about the people, I thought.

So I wanted to quit and find a new job. Rose wasn’t real keen on the idea. She wanted the security that the printing press represented. I found the day in and day out drudgery to be suffocating. A “normal” conversation would go something like this:

“Man, I hate that job so much.”

“Well, we need the money.”

“You don’t understand, I may as well be a machine there”

(the tension increases) “It’s a secure job.”

(Getting angry) “There are guys there that have been running the same machine for 30 years. I’m not going to do that”

(She’s getting angry) “You can’t quit.”

(anger is ratcheting up) “Oh really? I tell you what, if I stay there I’ll be dead. I’ll kill myself in 10 years if I have to do this shit!”

(She begins to cry)

Yeah. It was bad.

And this was 3 months into our marriage. It only got worse.

I found a new job, one that was significantly worse. Less pay, less benefits. I thought there was opportunity, but there wasn’t. Eventually I wasn’t even getting paid for the work I was doing, but I was too stupid, proud, stubborn, and just generally too fucked up to leave. Some of those fights, during this period, was when I started to physically intimidate her. During an argument, I’d invade her personal space. I’d slam things. I’d hit things. There were holes in the drywall when we left that apartment.

Rose was/is a nurse, thankfully, and she was the only bread-winner. Eventually I did quit and was unemployed for about 3 months. She worked, I stayed home and tried to find some work (this was when I started in engineering). We actually didn’t fight that much, mainly b/c Rose was too tired and I think she was going through her own shit. But the strain was telling on her.

It was during this time that she started counseling and invited me to join. I said “Hell no.”

Of course.

 

Sex! And now that I have your attention.

Most people think that Catholicism has lots of hangs ups over sex. And it does, but not in the way that She’s criticized for it.

The Church has done lots to clean house in this regard, at least officially. I can’t say much at the level of the individual parish. Sure, they say that you shouldn’t have sex before marriage, but they have eased back on the language of “sex is dirty and bad!”

But. Where they are still hung up is this idea of the dual nature of sex as unitive and procreative, and in my own lived experience of this dilemma’s theological gymnastics can be truly destructive.

The basic premise that the Church starts with is that all sexual acts must be both unitive and procreative (able to create life). In practical matters this means that the man must orgasm in the wife’s vagina.

Has too.  No exceptions allowed.

No birth control methods may be used. Condoms, it is argued, create a barrier between the man and woman, both physically and spiritually. Same thing with diaphragms. The pill, it was explained to us, is both physically harmful to the woman and creates a psychological distance between the couple.

There is only one method of birth control available to Catholics – Natural Family Planning. Now, it has become much better than it used to be – the woman can track various symptoms – temperature, mucus, and a few other things to determine when she is fertile. It is then licit for the couple to abstain from sex during their fertile periods and only engage in sex when they are infertile.

So that is the theology.

The lived experience of this? When I married, I was a virgin. And I remained that way for three days after I got married.

Yeah, I’m still pissed off about that.

The 1st date

So. The Wife.

I’m going just use different names for her as I write entries to help protect the innocent.  We’ll see how it works.

We met and our first date was a hockey game. For a while, Baton Rouge had a minor league (very minor league) hockey team, The Kingfish. They were named after Huey Long, who was assassinated in the State Capitol building. The bullet holes are still there – I recommend a visit if you’re ever in town.

Carol (I hate that name, by the way) was getting a group of her friends together for a big outing to a game. She invited me while we talked after Mass for about two hours in the parking lot of the Picadilly (Gods, can you get any more Southern than that?  We talked, after church, in the Picadilly parking lot.  There doesn’t exist enough face palm to properly express the fail).

As the day drew near, her friends kept dropping out. I had invited my brother as well, but the event was looking more and more like a “date” and I told him “Dude, just stay away – this is turning into a date”.

So at the game it was just Carol and I. We had amazing seats, right behind the goal. It was a great time and afterward, I think we went to eat at a Ruby Tuesday or Chili’s or some other crappy place.

But we really hit it off.

And I remember deciding, right there, that “I’m gonna marry that girl”. On the first date.

I can hear y’all laughing at me, but you gotta understand – I had exactly zero dating experience in high school. I didn’t go to my junior prom (see my St. George post), and while I did go to my senior prom that was a one time thing.

After that, I was headed to seminary. Not much dating for me, while I was in seminary.

The consequence was that when I met Carol, I had no idea how to handle the emotions and chemical cocktail that dating produces. Hell, I still don’t.

I thought it was true love. I know the signs now, but then? I didn’t have a clue. Add to this mixture an industrial sized scoop of “God put us together for a reason!” and while the disaster would take years to play out, it was still a disaster.

I honestly married Carol not because I loved her, but because I think of myself as a fundamentally unlovable and defective person. I thought “Carol loves me, and there is no one else in this world that will love me, so I have to grab on and hold onto her, no matter what!”

Marriage Protip: marrying someone because you think you are unlovable is a bad idea. Of course, most people don’t realize that they are making this mistake.

I know I didn’t.

Musical Wars

So, this topic is a bit off topic, but it applies somewhat to seminary life.  What’s really going on is that I’m avoiding starting to write about some heavy stuff about my marriage.  I really don’t want to do that.  So here’s more seminary stuff!  

Ignore the man behind the curtain….

The vast majority of people out there, even most Catholics, have no idea of some of the wars that go on behind the scenes of a liturgy.  There are fights over decorations, flowers, children’s activities, etc.   But nothing will get some people going (and I’m biased because I’m a musician) is music.

Because of my background (charismatic Catholicism), I had no idea this war was being waged.  I had no clue it was even an issue.

The issue is:  is it appropriate to use guitars in the context of the Mass?  Case in point – in seminary, I learned to play one of those big stand up bass.  The abbot would not allow amplified instruments in the church, so if I wanted to play, that was it (they had enough guitarists).

One day, as I carried the bass to the church, one of the conservative seminarians from Lafayette (surprise, surprise, right?) asks

“Are there strings today?”

I was confused, “Yes.”

He sniffed, turned around and went back to his room.

I couldn’t believe it – in my eyes at the time, skipping Mass (even it was just a daily Mass) simply because of the musical instruments being used was pure scandal.

There were guys that would not sing “Amazing Grace” because it was a Protestant hymn. There were a couple others hymns they wouldn’t sing for the same reasons, but their names escape me at the moment. I’ll add them later if I can remember….

Back to the original question of “are guitars acceptable”. I thought that USCCB (United States Council of Catholic Bishops) answered that question pretty well. The last incarnation of the document states that “Many other instruments also enrich the celebration of the Liturgy, such as wind, stringed, or percussion instruments “according to longstanding local usage, provided they are truly apt for sacred use or can be rendered apt.”

Now, the conservatives will argue ‘til they’re blue in the face that guitars can never be made suitable.

But they’re wrong.

Act 1, In which we meet the ex-wife.

It was 1996 and I had just graduated (and left seminary) and I found a job in Baton Rouge teaching at a Catholic school. I approached the choir director in that parish and asked if they needed a guitar player. She said no.

About that same time, I tried to register in that same parish (St. Thomas More) and I got a rather snippy letter telling me that I actually lived within the boundaries of St. Patrick. The letter went on to say that most people tried to register in the parish because they were trying to get a better rate for tuition at the school. I thought it was snippy because I clearly stated that I was neither married nor had kids.

Oh well.

I started going to Mass at St. Patrick (which was actually farther from my house) and I talked to the choir director there. I remember that it was before Christmas and I talked to the director and asked if I could start practicing with them after the Christmas season (Christmas and Easter are insane times for a choir; unless you’ve been in a choir it really is incomprehensible how much practice a good choir puts in and different pieces of music are worked on during those seasons).

So, I started to practice with them and play with the choir. One of the older sopranos kept telling me “You need to meet my daughter”. Apparently we were the same age with the same background – Rose (not her real name) was on the NET Team – college kids that took a year off to travel around the country and give retreats. Servant Squad copied much of their playbook.

I avoided her for a while until one day, after Mass, her daughter showed up.

The rest is history.

Well, it’ll be history after I write about it, anyway.  Ha!

Why I left Seminary, Part II

A few other issues contributed to my leaving the seminary.

There was a strong strain of existentialism that in the seminary. The Catholic writer and existentialist Walker Percy lived in Covington and was very active in the life of the monastery and seminary. He even taught a class in the seminary before he died. One of the principle ideas of existentialism is the idea of living authentically, in accordance with your Being.

There are a few other things to consider – there was much talk in the seminary about some of the trials of the priesthood. One of the biggest issues facing the modern diocesan priest is loneliness. You see, most parishes these days are staffed by only one priest; there are very few assistant priests available in these days of shrinking vocations. A priest can have no friends in the parish – any person you may be friends with today will be telling you their deepest secrets in the confessional tomorrow. You may be giving them marriage counseling or planning the funeral of their parents. Friendship, we were told, was off the table.

But the problem was that there are just so few priests that you can be friends with. Thus, loneliness.

Another quiet problem in the priesthood is alcoholism.  And the alcohol abuse started in seminary – at one point alcohol became such a problem in the seminary we had to turn on any personal bottles to the deans. We were only allowed to access them while under observation. But that’s another story for another day….

One last consideration – as I looked at the priests and monks I knew and lived with, I saw that most off them were batshit crazy in one way or another. I realized that there was not a one of them that I wanted to be like. They were either egotistical, control freaks, legalistic, arrogant, or egotistical. I know I said egotistical twice. It fits.

As my understanding of authenticity grew, I became increasingly concerned that I would not be able to authentically live the celibate life. While I didn’t quite frame the issue in these terms, I had a dim understanding of the psychological maturity it takes to live the priestly celibate life in a healthy manner. I saw the alcohol abuse, the way the conservative seminarians and priest treated the laity, the lonely life they lived, and the fact that I didn’t want to be like any of them….

Yep. It was time to get out.

Why I left the seminary, Part 1

Why did you leave seminary?

This is one of the questions that’s easiest to answer, but it has a depth of complexity that is hard to relate in a few sentences.

The event that finally precipitated my final decision to leave was a lunch visit from my bishop. Once a semester, all the bishops who had seminarians at St. Ben’s would gather for a meeting with the administration and then have lunch with their seminarians. The menu, at least for the time I was there, always consisted of ham sandwiches (to this, day I still hate ham sandwiches). The refectory was filled with bishops, vocation directors, seminarians, and the seminary staff. We sat by diocese and pushed tables together to make room – some dioceses had many seminarians (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette).

My 4^th year there – I was pretty much done with the charismatic renewal, but very committed to Catholicism (obviously). Now, the bishop of Alexandria at the time was Sam Jacobs, who was very involved with the Charismatic Renewal. I think, at the time, he was one of few bishops that had anything to do with it, publicly or privately. So, we all sit down for lunch. He turns to me and another non-charismatic seminarian and says “Hello”. He then proceeds to spend the rest of the hour that he was there conversing with all the other seminarians, both in our diocese and from other dioceses who went to the local charismatic conference. He’d walk to this table and that table and give out hugs to all the dudes who were there.

But not us.

There were hearty “Hey there!” and “Praise God”, and “That was great!” and slaps on the back.

But not for us.

We fumed. As soon as it was polite, we got up and left. I said to the other guy, “Did that just happen?”

He says, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But it did just happen – he ignored us, right?”

He wasn’t having any of it “I said, I don’t want to talk about it”.

“I’m pretty pissed off”.

“Me too.”

 

If that was the way I could expect to be treated from my future boss, then I wanted out. So I got out.

 

More later.