Heeding Repeated Warnings

You're in love, and in the sack with your man at every possible opportunity.

But, some part of your brain pulses warnings that distract you, sometimes WHILE in the throes of sexual pleasure. Warnings about differences in religion or class or education, or a combination. Sisters, pay attention.

Okay, okay, I will do the p.c. thing by adding a cavaet that indeed some marriages have survived a difference in religion, class and education level, but very very few. Very, very few.

Let me talk about how a difference in religion deeply affected my marriage. I was raised Catholic. In my teenage years, I rebelled. I refused to attend mass because I did not feel it was fair to the believers in the pews for them to suffer my hostility toward their beliefs. I also couldn't stand how suffocated I felt in church.

What kept me interested in the topic was a profound need to feel connected to this intense drama of life around me. And an intense desire to understand my parents, and for them to understand me. While I came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ was not my savior, I allowed that he could be the savior of others, even people as bright as each of my parents. I read about Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and about catholic saints in "The Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yogananda, one who bled from his palms every few days, and another who subsisted on nothing but air and love. I did not doubt that these people actually existed.

Reading on these venerable catholics was part of a broader effort to find my own beliefs. I became a vegetarian (now I am not), I practiced yoga intensively for years, I read "Women Who Run With the Wolves" by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, I fasted for three days, and chanted sanskrit mantras until 1am. I read books like "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" and "The Cloud of Unknowing" by an unknown christian monk. I completed half of the credits for a Masters degree in Humanities.

My efforts paid off. I was able to accept that my parents held their beliefs and I held mine. I want to emphasize EFFORT. All that fretting, reading, thinking and writing consumed much of my energy during my twenties. While I was not a catholic or christian, I was a believer, not agnostic, not atheist, but a believer. I believed that something ordered the universe, and I was part of that order.

My boyfriend who became my husband was not a believer. His beliefs, like mine earlier, were barely formed. When he learned about my battle with Catholicism, he was relieved, because he too rejected that religion. He deeply resented the culture of fear propagated by the fire and brimstone version of Catholicism that he was taught as a boy.

What I failed to convey to him was that my rejection of Catholicism was one thing, The fact that I was a believer was the more important fact. In all fairness, even if I had tried more rigorously to reveal this aspect of me, a fundamental one, I am not sure I would have succeeded.

Now, my young friends, in the next post I will explain how this major difference between us played out in my marriage.