I have a social media post I need to write, and I don't know how to write it. So I'll blog all the thoughts flitting around that post and maybe that will help it take shape.
It's a post intended to publish the fact that James and I won't be getting married in the Church. It is something James has asked me to write, and which I think I'm still only partially on board about, although I think his reasoning makes sense.
I'm partially not on board because I dislike kowtowing to the narrative that this is a big deal. As previously noted on this blog -- true off my chest, what matters to me is the commitment, not the religious flavor, since (in terms of a broad average of feelings) I have no particular taste or distaste for Catholicism at the moment, nor a fear that God would punish me for lacking it. But I'm also partially on board, in that my marriage is not something I particularly want to a) hide or b) have blow up in my face socially when revealed as a fait accompli.
Not marrying in the Church makes sense for us as a couple, because neither of us are set to accept the rights and obligations of a Catholic marriage. James is an atheist and, at the moment, I actually have no clue what will come out of my mouth when my kids ask me about God, so -- this has been a change -- I now think it would be likely dishonest to swear it will definitely be what the Church teaches. Meanwhile, seeing as we are both mentally healthy and have liked each other a whole lot for a very long time, marrying does check out.
But I've already experimented with one dear Catholic friend in trying to explain how it could make sense to choose to marry a good person I love very much, while acknowledging that it might not make sense to marry in the Church, and found it didn't really work. So I need to try to anticipate this reaction on a broader scale.
What are the reactions I need to anticipate in my audience of firmly-ensconced Catholics? Let me try to imagine myself reacting as if I were one of them, as indeed I was a relatively short while ago.
...It would feel as if something had possessed her, some primal need to be with her lover had robbed her of her better reason. She had been seduced or taken advantage of and, in her shame, turned away from the vision of Catholic teaching as the energy pulsing through and binding together the great mandala of interior and exterior harmony, the great sacramental, the equilibrium of love and obedience. I would be making guesses at what had broken her deep inside, or if she had always been broken. I would immediately be sniffing out the story that she had built to make this action excusable to her mind so as to call her out on it, to show her the worst dissonance between this story, this jagged outgrowth, and that lovely (but essentially centripetal) mandala.
My response to this has to be something like: a) my lack of inner conformity to Catholicism is demonstrably traceable to Carmel, not James, b) I'm not playing along with the story expectation because I'm not interested in stories ahead of making life decisions that make sense and c) if I were to play along: when forced to choose, should we really see that mandala of God's will for our lives as essentially centripetal and constrictive ("don't do things that step out of bounds"), or centrifugal and expansive ("do things that increase happiness and peace")?
Considering c), James would probably prefer I preach a bold epic of purity and freedom from stories. I do agree this is more like truth, but I still see value in tracing those old lines, for the sake of communicating the good things I've perceived in a language my friends can understand. Without bridging that gap, many would not be able to hear a bold epic at all, only something scary and cold, possibly evil.
But..it's not really just for them. I want to tell myself this story and allow myself to believe it on some level. It's part desire to feel the joy and peace of it, and part fear of the alienation and despair I feel when it's missing. I could call it my subconscious, or some other name, but it's the part of me that craves stories that justify my actions as pursuing a higher degree of communal life. When not fed, that part of me, thug-like, holds my inner peace hostage. And especially in Covid isolation, that part isn't going anywhere soon.
By speaking in a Catholic voice about our marriage, I would enjoy the heck out of myself. But what sort of game am I really playing? It feels good because, as a Catholic, I'd become a goddamn black belt at canonizing my emotions and justifying my actions. It's hard to resist picking up that familiar old sword when facing the great yawning mass of potential-judgment that is my whole Catholic network. I'm just so good at it. The urge to flourish it just a little feels slightly crave-y.
Where is this really coming from?
I want to downplay the implicit cult switch cemented by my marriage because I don't want this event to present to the world as a rupture between the old Kathleen and a new one. I don't like this idea that James changed me. Somehow, women should change men, but men shouldn't change women.
This isn't entirely nonsensical. Women are the ones with an inherited instinct to keep a centered stance, all samurai-like, on the role they have ascertained would provide them the most sheltered possible position within their community because -- you know, child-bearing and all that. If I were to substantially budge from this stance due to a man, that means the flighty, male seed-spreading instinct has trumped the stable, female child-nurturing instinct, and we all figured out a few thousand years ago that the latter should generally win in order for society to develop in a positive way. But taking our breeding instincts as a guide for how almost everything should work (as we seem to do a lot) is a pernicious fallacy indeed.
The truth is James did cause change in me, and still is. Carmel drained me of affection for Catholicism. But if James hadn't persistently hacked away at some doublethinks in my underlying beliefs, they would have moldered in a deep corner of my mind, too load-bearing of my Catholic way of life to ever be touched again.
This process of changing me wasn't as clean as I'd have liked. I haven't always felt happy about it. I often wished James could just lay off being so opposed to the Church, my main source of security, particularly at those moments when marriage wasn't on the table. Assailing my relationship to the Church at that time felt, honestly, rather ridiculously futile on my end.
But as marriage began to emerge as a possibility, this unleashed the potential for change in me as well as a fair bit of chaos. I felt angry and scared as my instincts grew schizophrenic in their assessment of who was the better source of security, and whether I needed to suppress thoughts that contravened one, or the other, in order to be safer. My integrity proved rather sucky: I learned at least to check myself along the way as to whether I wouldn't really go back to acting and thinking a certain way if James dropped dead. (I've also lately started wondering how I'd start acting and thinking if the Catholic Church were to go extinct.)
In general, this does mean one of the nastiest-sounding versions of my story checks out: a good Catholic girl lost her grip on her faith because she fell in love with an atheist. Blugh, I hate typing that. At the risk of splitting hairs though, I feel this doesn't quite convey the right image. My love for James has not been a great wall sealing off a spiritual center I no longer enter, but the window through which grenades continuously drop into it, right on my now rather uncomfortable head. James has made me at turns furiously defensive of a right to hope God exists, and terrified of my desire to speak to Him.
Meanwhile, I had a chance to observe something new in myself, not without disgust though. It was how my sense of what was true acted exactly like a river whose shape, location and speed depended quite simply on the path of least resistance to the lowest topographical point; in this case, the point of maximum personal safety. I began to be able to flip back and forth between my two centers of gravity and feel two different rivers, each covering their own stretch of land: their own allotment of allowed thoughts.
I like that I can now see this about myself.
I dislike that my sense of self is now the weakest it's ever been. Although I grant this is not objectively bad, I do remain concerned about its prognosis. I always seem to be making another guess at what my points of reference ought to be, only to watch them slip out of focus shortly after. I don't feel entirely sure that my changing is actually evidence that James has helped me see the truth more, or simply that James has stronger convictions than I, and that I'll keep slowly sliding toward his worldview while he stays more or less the same. A part of this concern is that I'm not perfectly certain of James' potential to be legitimately updated by me in turn. Perhaps, as the party more lenient toward emotional semantics (sc. one of those touchy-feely types), I will always rate as a second-class source of information that a true rationalist would never really countenance. I don't know.
That's about the shape of it. There's no sense in pretending that I'm more sure of myself than I really am, though old habits are hard to break. So I'm finding it wholesome to try to embrace more fully my mother's assessment that I've gone off the rails.
In one sense, I really have gone off the rails. In another sense, I've chosen to assume the risk of using a different method to discern the existence and direction of the rails. This doesn't really work in the physical world, or in the world of fundamentalism, so I'd rather not get overly defensive about my rails being the real ones. There's no real rails: rails, too, are a story. Reality, the experience of my life, is far better than any story I could tell.
That seems a good place to end: the part where I tell you that what I'm really talking about and really invested in is something words weren't built to communicate.
