78/365 Less and Less Like Me All the Time

"Got it all sent away," my sister-in-law says with a nod. We're standing in her kitchen after my niece's birthday party. She's talking about her annulment papers.

I mention that our former bishop, now in Rome, is planning to crack down on American annulments. "He thinks there are too many. When I read that, I thought about you and hoped you'd gotten things in."

One of Mike's uncles shakes his head. "It would be just like him to stick his nose in there. Did he run out of Polish parishes to abuse?"

I know, many people these days who enter into a marriage don't do it for the long haul. And there was a time when Mike and I hit a rocky patch and things started avalanching downhill. We saved it--and other people give up and walk away. I don't think either of these things are true in the case of my sister-in-law, and I suspect she'll get (earn?) her annulment.

But once again, where was the church in these marriages? If it is so difficult to divorce in the church, why is it so easy to marry? Because an Engaged Encounter weekend or pre-cana with a celibate priest really doesn't give you any inkling what you're headed for. Warm fuzzy stories of wedding days long ago and first babies and family planning do not prepare you for lead poisoning, lost jobs, miscarriages, anger, and financial straits. Sharing life with another person is so hard, it's a wonder really that it works as often as it does.

And there, there my church goes again, getting less and less pastoral with every step. Fitting into the church outside my parish boundaries gets more difficult with every new pronouncement from Rome. As Lyle Lovett puts it, But what's riches to you/ Just ain't riches to me.

And yet I'm clinging to my Catholicism like a lichen to a rock. There's no other place for me to go. I've found the best I can and here I stay until they pry it from my cold dead fingers.

Or until my demographic group matches something Burke has decided to go after and I'm not allowed through the doors anymore.

187/365 That reading from Corinthians

You know the one. The one at all the weddings (but not mine--we had a reading from the letter of James). The one with the list of what love is. Love is patient, kind, enduring, and so forth. The greatest of these is love.

I used to hear it and think how sweet it was. How it belonged on a 1970s era poster with children with big eyes and round bellies holding daisies in front of them, surrounded by puffy little kittens.

I didn't get it.

It wasn't until after I was teaching that I read about this passage, and then learned about it in an overview class I took in order to teach religion in the Catholic schools--you'd think a minor plus some in theology would have been enough, but I needed to take two more classes to be legit. One of them was about the grueling topic of presenting human sexuality to middle schoolers. In the end that turned out to be a pretty amusing thing to teach, but learning about it was akin to kneeling on gravel.

The other class went through the virtues and the sins against said virtues. Faith, hope, love, temperance, etc. And he brought up this reading in regards to the virtues. The greatest of these is love, he said, because it is the one that does not fail, does not pass away. The whole point about seeing indistinctly, but there we will see face to face? That has to do with faith. Once we are one with God, faith passes away. We don't need it anymore. It has been fulfilled. And hope, not the mundane idea of hope, like "I hope Maeve has a good time today," but the hope of eternal life, the hope of one day being with God forever, well, it is fulfilled too. It passes away.

Love remains. And therefore, of these three virtues, it is the greatest.

Once it was explained to me that way, once the words had real meaning, it made so much more sense and got to me for the first time. Now, anytime I hear it read at weddings I just find myself taking a deep breath and really letting the words sink in.

And I don't care if it's a wedding reading. That second part? I want that at my funeral.