Marriage is Work

I'm not sure what got this thought going—perhaps those old bits of writing I referred to. This evening I was pondering the slogan I heard thousands of times from various church leaders: "Marriage is Work."

Over the years, there has always been a church retreat or Sunday school series or something that was designed to repair the damaged marriages of Christians. Apparently Christian (heterosexual) marriages are always trembling on the edge of melt-down, and a major task of Christian leaders is to shore them up before they collapse. Thus the "Marriage is Work" theme—you can't simply assume your spouse is a loving friend who enjoys your company and wants to preserve the friendship. The results are fascinating:

• Somehow a Christian spouse isn't a friend or lover, but a coworker. Maybe a team member. When I worked at the book warehouse, I had a lot of fellow team members, and we had to figure out ways to cooperate. But we didn't necessarily like each other that much.


• There's really nothing intrinsic about the coworker relationship that makes a person want to spend time there. It's just functional. Therefore, the standard advice given by church leaders (especially to men) is that they have to ditch all their friends and find all their fellowship with that spouse/worker. If there's nobody else on the horizon, then you have to be with her.


• There's just not a lot of joy, spontenaity, or love in the coworker model of marriage. It's all about getting something done—preserving the partnership so the kids can have a stable home.

Several people have asked me why I stayed married so long. I think this is the answer. If I had expected to actually enjoy the relationship—to find love, comfort, romance and even a bit of sex there—I might not have stuck around. But I didn't. I bought the plan. I expected to find work.

Footnote: I wonder if this is one reason the straight church is so terrified of gay marriage. By definition, gay marriage is something two people enter into freely (and in the face of opposition) because they want to be together and expect to love and care for each other. It isn't work. It's gay. And if two people who love each other can freely associate, choosing each other even though other options are available and stick with it just for the sake of commitment and love, that's pretty threatening to the drudges who labor so hard to keep their fragile Christian marriages running.

End of an Era

Today I said goodbye to an old friend: my Windows computer that has been with me for more than five years. In fact, I am now totally Apple.

It was surprisingly difficult. A friend gave me $70 for the thing, and a few weeks ago I would have considered that sort of overpriced. But last night, I reformatted the hard drive, and discovered that a lot of the ills of the machine were simply the accumulation of trash. It's still true that the machine can't run Word for Windows in any modern version and that Norton doesn't make an anti-virus for it any more. But if the thing had been running this well in April, I don't think i would have bought the iMac. Lots of nostalgia there—I spent hundreds of hours doing desktop publishing on it (a main money-maker for quite some time). Lots of AIM time with several friends (a couple of them deeply depressed guys I tried to encourage). I'll actually miss the Windows chime when I turn the machine off.

I always second-guess any major financial event, so I guess this isn't much different. The new machine does look pretty good, though, and has almost no spaghetti cables under the desk. I'll get used to pretty, efficient, and elegant. Just give me time.

Into my Past

I guess I'm a writer at heart. Whenever something really grieves me, I tend to write about it, then save the copy somewhere, often on a Zip disk which gets forgotten. Anyhow, I'm in the process of getting rid of my Windows computer, and I was looking at all those old disks. I won't have WordPerfect of Microsoft Works any more, so I have been translating (and reading) all the old material to RTF files. Some funny stuff there. Some sad stuff.

One thing has really struck me. Several letters dated 1999 really focus on my sense of disenchantment and ill-ease with the church I've been attending since 1977. Since DaviD is out of town at the Pride festival in Columbus, there's no question of him coming to Ashland Presbyterian with me tomorrow, and I was asking myself this morning whether I would go without him. Maybe one point of all this archive-reading is that I have an answer. Yes.

A bit of my writing

OK—maybe this is the ultimate ego trip (perhaps an ego voyage). Here's an unfinished draft of a play I was working on a few years ago: Wedding Play. It never quite arrived, but the last couple of lines still bring tears to my eyes. One of the wedding planners (the guy in the loud suit) is actually patterned after the funeral director who did such a crass job with my grandmother's funeral. The other one (the biker) began as one of my friends from Columbus.

Old Blogs Return

I used to have a blog on the old Blogger system (before Google bought the thing), and I've managed to find and insert some of the better posts on this reincarnation. They will be at the bottom, according to their original date—enjoy.

Mac's Back

DaviD and I retrieved my machine yesterday, and life's (sort of) good again. The good side of things is that I did think to back up all of the really important stuff before making my experiment. The bad side is that it takes forever to put a computer back together after one of these crashes. I hadn't realized just how many little programs I'd downloaded—weather widgets, helpers for QuickTime and all.

It was almost worth it, though, to spend a day wandering around a really large shopping mall with a friend. We looked at kitchen gadgets (a passion for both of us), yearned over a new desk for me (no money for that yet), and ate at California Pizza Kitchen (always good). All in all, a fine day. And even though I knew I should have gone to the gym, I really did just spend the evening reloading stuff for the computer. After all, I would be less than human to simply let it sit there, right?

Bereft

Ouch! My friendly new iMac is in the shop for a few days. I tried to install Boot Camp, a program that allows it to boot up from either the Apple or the Windows operating system. The result was that it can't boot up from either. Fortunately, the whole thing was under warranty, so I'm only inconvenienced (a lot). Kind of sad and lonely too. Something must be wrong when I depend on a plastic machine that much.

Life Priorities

Today found me biking on the Kokosing Gap Trail. It's totally beautiful, and well worth a trip for the day. I guess I've gotten into bad habits though.

The trip from my place to Mount Vernon, Ohio, the starting point, is supposed to be a straight shot right down Route 13. Being who I am, I simply set the cruise control for the speed limit and roll. That worked just fine until Fredericktown, where we had to make a detour. Off I went to Centerville, 20 miles out of the way, down a beautful rolling road, behind a truck. He couldn't keep the speed limit. After all, we were supposed to be going 55 and he often dropped to 45!

Finally I arrived at the trailhead, pulled myself together, and took off. I often treat a trail like this a a sort of race. The trail is 13.5 miles long, and I wanted to do it all as an exercise in speed. (Kind of funny, considering the hybrid bike and my non-speedy physique. I see young muscular guys all the time who could double my speed for the whole trip.) Beautiful, fairly uneventful trip to Danville, the end of the trail. I stopped for a couple of minutes before returning. This was when a fellow trail user gave me a cheery "hello" and made a comment about the beautiful weather. He was right—it was a totally wonderful day. I thought maybe I'd found a companion for the trip back, so I stopped to chat. Then I got a look at him. The bike was a fat-tire 5-speed. He was clad in a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and loafers. He had quite a gut. Obviously, speed wasn't our agenda. He kept chatting and I kept wondering how to get away from him gracefully. But that wasn't happening. We biked along at about 4 miles per hour, so slowly that I had trouble keeping my balance in places.

Then he pulled his trump card. He's a birdwatcher, and his specialty is finding eagles' nests. And he had found one just past the halfway point of the trail. Well, I had to see that! Just as we arrived at the watching-point, a bluebird pulled the old injured-bird trick to lure us away from her nest. We played along until we were a safe distance from the nest, then the bird took off. Then we stood, looking through his binoculars, trying to find the eagle's nest among the foliage. We never did see it, but we saw a lot of redwing blackbirds, and I found out that my companion comes from the same tiny town where my uncle lives. After half an hour or so, it became obvious that we weren't going to see any eagles, and we finally headed home.

I guess I finally got the point. Sunday found me hiking through Mohican State Park with two teenage boys. Jared was a gas molecule, bouncing about and always urging us to zoom ahead, but Jake and I had the sense to ignore him and look very closely at a jack-in-the-pulpit.

Small Town Life

My aunt and uncle have lived their entire lives in a small Ohio town (population 1500), and I get over to visit them occasionally. The town boasts a well-known Amish-themed restaurant, and we always end up eating there.

Last Wednesday I dropped in for a visit, and as usual we went to the Amish restaurant. My uncle (who was never a farmer) keeps farmer's hours, so 5:30 seems a little late for dinner—that's when we got to the restaurant. Apparently the Masonic Lodge got there just before we did. Hattie, the cute waitress (she really is Amish) took our orders and three of us bustled off to the salad bar (my uncle ordered something much simpler).

We ate and talked for a long time. A very long time. Finally the main course came. Two orders of fried chicken (the menu said it was the best east of the Mississippi), one beef dinner (mine), and one thing that the menu claimed would be sort of a salad with a chicken breast (that was for my uncle).

My uncle's meal wasn't at all what he was expecting. The chicken was tough and under-cooked (perhaps all the Masonic business had put too much stress on the kitchen). My mother, aunt, and uncle complained all through the meal about the food (and remember that it had taken a very long time to arrive).

When Hattie came back to ask how everything was, they all just smiled and said, "Fine."

Later my uncle explained. They know all the people in the restaurant. He eats there several times a week. It's not worth making enemies for the sake of one complaint, he said.

More church stuff

I was thinking again about what I really want in a church.

Now I know that I should make a difference in my mind between what God thinks of me and what the church thinks of me. Even though it's supposed to be the body of Christ, a church is really a miscellaneous collection of sinners, saints, etc., run by humans with their own political agendas. My knowledge doesn't help much. I still confuse the two voices. So when the church says, "We don't mind if you show up and sit here passively—just don't expect any relationship," there is more damage than a problem with an organization.

I guess that's my real problem. Some folks flop from church to church looking for the best product, much the way I flop from restaurant to restaurant. (Is the staff at this one friendly? Does the food arrive promptly? Is the dining room pleasant?) I just want more. I'm seeking the voice of a divine friend who has been absent from my life for a very long time.

Back to the Presbyterians

Yesterday found David and me back at the Presbyterian church. Unfortunately, I feel like we still don't know that much about the place. As I commented afterward, "You know you're in trouble when the preacher shows up in full academic robes." It sounded a lot like a commencement address: generalized, positive, and not much about Jesus. Their new interim pastor will have her first shot at things next Sunday—too bad we'll both have to miss. I don't feel that we've gotten much of a feel for the way they would do worship yet. I hope that after a couple of months with the new interim they still aren't as sleepy on a Sunday. She seems to have some life in her.

We did get a chance at the coffee hour afterward. Met a couple of people and had pleasant conversations. I wonder what they thought. We had (quite by accident) showed up in almost-identical clothing (kinda gay looking too).

After church, I drove over to my aunt and uncle's house where my mom is staying for the week. Someone asked me what I was looking for in a church, and I'm sorry to say I sort of fluffed the answer. An honest answer might have been, "A church that treats someone like me as a part of the body and not a virus." An honest answer might be, "A church that doesn't give knee-jerk reactions to so many things." An honest answer might be, "A church that has a little more distance from James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and George Bush." But I fluffed and said, "I go along with David because he's looking for a good church."