I have an engagement ring on my finger. This has never happened before, even though I, consciously or unconsciously, have spent the last 33 years or so hoping to see one there (I think three years old is a good start time estimate). I want to try to describe to you what this is like now, for me in particular.
I'll start with the part I know: girls.
Little girls in stable traditional family structures know for sure they will get married. They know this as soon as they are informed that being "married" means they will be a "bride" and a bride wears a "wedding dress" and that last phrase is quickly understood to refer to the ultimate clothing, the Supreme Bling. Girls grasp by pure instinct that Supreme Bling is the expression of worthiness in an absolute sense. And of course they are worthy. Therefore, they will of course get married. [Edit: I don't really know how often this is the case. Maybe a lot of girls in these families feel differently. But there's got to be at least a significant subset that feel this way.]
The Supreme Bling concept is the diamond perfectly, lovingly crafted by eternal generations of women to fit the emotional prongs that have simultaneously evolved specifically to make space for it and hold it in a little girl's brain.
For a long time I had a relatively strong desire for marriage. At one point I started putting some distance between my self-identification and these urges, seeing them as something cultivated by forces outside my control. But that was before I flung my deeply romantic twenty-something self into Carmel with the vigor and glee of the proverbial moth into a flame (except imagine it screaming a tiny, 'wheeeeeee<3<3<3').
I got married in Carmel. What I mean by that is, I believed with all my heart that my profession was that true Supreme Bling. From the inside view, being a nun taking three-year vows as written and one taking them with firm intention to preserve them until death, as we were instructed to do, feel universes apart. I of course considered myself to be the latter nun. I had spent the previous years as a novice in daily awe that our beloved habit was my wedding dress, our rope sandals my wedding shoes. Even today, tears can come to my eyes when I remember them. But the Profession crucifix was the wedding ring, and that was received on the day of simple vows. It wasn't just in my head by a long shot -- that day, Pentecost, was accepted by all observers as my wedding day. I was referred to by my sisters quite simply as "the bride."
When I was unceremoniously ejected a few months later, as witnesses will confirm, I had only one item on my agenda, a fully automatic response to prop up my suddenly highly compromised psyche. I came out, hugged my parents and, smiling cheerfully, asked them to please drive me from the convent straight to the nearest department store. I picked a $50 bill out of the dowry box that had come out with me to buy a sterling silver ring I immediately jammed onto my finger. It felt like abruptly disarming a nuclear bomb that had been hidden and ticking away at the center of New York City.
On top of that, some weeks after I left, the nun responsible for my removal sent our Profession crucifix to me in the mail, saying she discerned in prayer that it belonged to me. I have many things to say about that sister and her own desperate, repressed need to leave the convent. But anyway, it took a few years, and the direct intervention of the current ring's owner, for ring and crucifix to get dumped.
So I hope this illustrates to what extent my marriage piety, just like my religious piety, got heckin bamboozled. Today, I of course still sense marriage as a major commitment and a joyful event. But it no longer casts the spell of grave, from-above momentousness. I think I prefer it this way.
But I get the sense that many of the people I know, particularly those with a religious background, have not experienced this diminishment of the sway of meaning. And now this discrepancy is beginning to hurt.
On the one hand, I've learned that it can mean something to marry a Catholic, over and above the implications for Catholic marriage validity. As for that, I'm open to children and to exposing them to the teachings of the Church, whether the wedding is Catholic or not. But to have the ceremony be Catholic seems to contaminate the affair with submission, or of ownership revoked; there's a certain religious juju. I can understand how it would feel this way.
Meanwhile, most of my Catholic family and friends still hold both Catholic meaning and marriage meaning dear. Therefore, if I were to marry outside the Church, that means I'm committing a mortal sin, which means I'm rejecting God, which means I'm rejecting Love and Goodness itself, which implies I have on some key level stopped the beating heart our friendship, perhaps leaving either niceties or fervent prayer for my soul in its stead. I've been there, so I know it's possible some friends simply cannot think otherwise. It isn't a question of amount of love for me. I can understand how it would feel this way too.
I can say with all my heart that the meaning of my marriage is my own. I don't feel a need for something extra bestowed by Catholicness, or any other -ness except genuineness. If God exists, even the Catholic God, I find it impossible this would displease him, or that he would actually withhold his benevolence in such a case. Controversial, I know, but it seems impossible to me that God would be constrained by the form of a Sacrament if he didn't want to be. And He'd know how things balance out in me now: He'd know that any genuine filial impetus for conforming my marriage to the Church was bamboozled out of me, because He himself did it.
Meanwhile, my chosen meaning for it is not that it become a watershed moment that destroys a fruitful relationship with anyone, much less half my family and a large swath of my friends. Why the heck would it?
I feel I've overdosed on capital-m-Meaning and that I'm quite done with it. But it feels like it lives on in everyone around me: its demands yanking me to fulfill and satisfy here and there and everywhere, except for in me.
I'm not sure what to do about this. But at the moment, admittedly, it feels less than awesome.
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