Daily Excerpt: Since Sinai (Gonyou) - Chapter 6, I Didn't Convert for Marriage

 


Excerpt from Chapter 6

I didn’t convert for marriage, but I think my husband’s soul was meant to convert with mine. The day that I met Travis, I was 16 years old and had just been elected all-school treasurer of our public high school. I was wearing khakis and a white short-sleeved blouse from Hollister to look “professional,” and my hair—which my Conair straightener pulverized every morning—laid totally flat against my head. He was a year older than I and had been elected school president. I never saw boys my age wearing suits and ties, so I was enamored with his sharp outfit. He had choppy, light brown hair and nerdy glasses. He reached out and shook my hand. I decided on the spot that I was in love with him.  

Alas, Travis had a girlfriend already, so I spent the rest of high school being hopelessly in love with him (as in, the “crying while listening to Taylor Swift” kind of love). Sometimes, I pretended that I needed a lift to various student government events even though my mom offered repeatedly to drive me. I liked when he was driving me around in his old Saab. I didn’t care that the car was older than we were; I was impressed that he could drive a stick shift. I told him that I had feelings for him on one of our drives, in the parking lot of a Taco Bell. Neither of us ordered food because both sets of our parents didn’t approve of processed foods. We sat in the parking lot under the harsh light of the street lamps, he gripping the wheel tensely and I looking down at my hands. He rejected me very politely. For better or worse, love would have to wait.

We both attended the University of Michigan but stayed in our own bubbles; he in politics and I in Greek Life and athletics. It wasn’t until after we’d both graduated from college and settled into our jobs that the stars would align. We were still in Ann Arbor long after our classmates had scattered around the country to find work in larger cities. Happy to remain in our cozy, liberal corner of Michigan for a while longer, we were able to hit our stride.   

Once he and I had our real first date at Aventura, we were inseparable. On what was technically our third date, tipsy on Chop House martinis, we booked flights to New Orleans for the New Year.

“Are you seriously flying to Louisiana with someone you’ve gone on three dates with?” my roommate Lizzie asked skeptically. “Is that safe?”

“We went to high school together,” I told her. “I promise he’s okay.”

“This is bold,” she said, “But you go, girl. Keep me posted.”

I promised I would.

The trip was amazing. On New Year’s Eve, we went to the city’s outdoor jazz concert and kissed under the fireworks while I shivered in the crisp December air. We ate at fancy seafood restaurants and shared our first beignet at Café Du Monde by moonlight. He had no idea that one day I would be committing us both to a shellfish-free life after we became Jewish and started keeping a kosher diet. Life is funny like that. When Travis dropped me off at my apartment after the trip, he teared up in the parking lot because he didn’t want to say goodbye.

“I think I want to date him,” I told Lizzie dreamily, laying on the floor in my new I Love New Orleans sweatshirt.

“Has it been enough time?” she asked.   

“I’m going to look for engagement rings soon,” I told her.

“You are out of control,” she replied.

But I wasn’t really kidding. My soul knew that I was supposed to marry Travis like my soul knew that it was supposed to become Jewish.

Travis and I didn’t spend another night apart that year. We took turns staying over at each other’s houses. He was terribly allergic to my roommate’s cat, and he hated the creaky old bed that had been in my family for generations. It shook and rattled trying to accommodate the weight of both of us. The cat hated his guts and spent the night scratching his feet and flinging his car keys around to prove it.  

 “Are we a couple?” Travis asked one day, lying on top of me on his carpet and planting a kiss on my lips.

“You haven’t asked,” I pointed out.

“That seems a little old-fashioned,” he said.

 “I’d say yes,” I promised him.

“Fine, will you be my girlfriend?” he asked, looking amused and adorably nervous. I said yes.

Travis loved to cook. He taught me how to make delectable seafood, flavorful stir fries, and vegetables that were actually edible. He liked taking me on dates to Ann Arbor’s historic theaters or the museums in Detroit. He bought me flowers at all of the right times and let me watch Dance Moms to my heart’s content even though he repeatedly reminded me that he didn’t get the appeal. Travis would do anything for me, including converting to Judaism. 

When we started dating, Travis wasn’t Catholic. He was turned off by the church’s refusal to perform same-sex marriages and told me that Catholic leadership meddled in politics too much. Travis grew up bouncing around churches of a few different denominations, but his parents were never sold on any particular religious doctrine. My in-laws are open-minded people, and my mother-in-law dismisses most churches as being “Kool-Aid places.” My in-laws are a riot to hang out with. I don’t blame them for being largely agnostic. I love them the way they are. Travis’s Christian friends took him to various churches during his time in college, but he described never feeling a sense of belonging. He settled on an Episcopal church with a female pastor he admired. He described the church as welcoming “with the right amount of pomp and mystery,” but he didn’t seem committed. He agreed to attend St. Mary’s with me until we found a more permanent spiritual home. I think his soul was waiting for Judaism, too.  

St. Mary’s was located in the building directly to the left of our studio apartment complex, so he chalked it up to convenience. I think he enjoyed attending St. Mary’s the same way that I had as an undergraduate. We both admired the thoughtfulness of the Jesuits who ran the church, and Mass was a nice break from watching Bones and ordering pizza. Travis was passionate about supporting immigrants and caring for those in poverty, which were strengths of Catholic doctrine and practice. We were both passionately opposed to the death penalty and in favor of protecting natural resources. On both of these issues, the Catholic Church tends to be a leader in pushing for reform. There was plenty to disagree on, but we had enough to keep us coming back.

We enjoyed attending Mass when we were traveling, not because we were the type of Catholics who thought that skipping a week was a mortal sin but because Catholic churches in large American and European cities tend to be gorgeous. When we took our first international trip together, we attended Mass at Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice. We were the youngest in attendance by a few decades, but the nice thing about Roman Catholicism is that you can attend a service in almost any area of the world and know generally what’s going on, whether you speak the local language or not. The same, of course, is true of Jewish services. It’s nice to feel at home when you’re not physically at home.

It wasn’t Travis who pulled me away from the Church. I was ultimately the cause of the split, though not all at once. Somehow, once again, community service ended up being to blame for my woes.

Given how hectic my college years were, the transition to law school felt eerily calm. Travis was fairly busy with his political job during the week, but I found law school to be somewhat slow. I breezed through my reading assignments and spent the rest of the day texting Travis about when he was coming home so that I’d have company.

“Maybe you can find something fun to do after class,” he urged politely. “You always said that you wanted to try fencing. Let’s get you signed up.” I took the hint and capitulated. I joined the University’s fencing team and also signed up to help with jail ministry on weekends. Fencing was a great deal of fun; jail ministry was not. It was the single worst volunteer experience of my adult life.

Jail ministry involved showing up at the county prison with communion wafers for either the men or women because we couldn’t perform a mixed-gender Mass; apparently there wasn’t time to do two short services. When the women weren’t up for Mass, my fellow volunteers and I would be sent into a spare room to sit around on hard plastic chairs and engage them in prayer. Usually, an older volunteer gave a talk about something that Jesus had helped him overcome while the women listened politely from their seats. I was painfully aware of the uncomfortable dynamic. Most of the women who attended services had been victims of abuse, addiction, or poverty. They didn’t want to hear a 60-year-old white Catholic male drone on about the one time that his wife threatened to leave him and how Jesus pulled him through. It was never a two-way discussion. The volunteer would talk at them, his volume going up or down at unpredictable intervals, the women listening and occasionally nodding. By the time the impromptu sermon was over, we would stand in a circle and say a few communal prayers before it was time to go.

The first time I volunteered, I sat on a plastic chair with the other women and listened to the lead volunteer talk about how a picture of Jesus once fell off of his refrigerator when he was feeling down and he took it to be a sign from God that he shouldn’t feel so sad. I gently kicked the metal leg of my chair with my heel in order to stay awake and took in the facial expressions of the other women. Each face was impassive, blank. This talk was boring and uninspiring. When it finally ended, a few women asked whether it would be possible for the priest to bring over the communion wafers after the Mass for the men was over.

“I don’t know if we have enough wafers,” the lead volunteer sighed, “If we have some left over, Catholic women can take communion first.” Only one woman was Catholic. The others looked a little downtrodden.

“How very loving and inclusive,” I whispered to a volunteer next to me.

“We’re here for the Catholic women,” she whispered back. How we were supposed to know which women were Catholic without interrogating them was unclear.

“They’re stale, anyway, and they taste like moth balls,” I whispered to a couple of the rejected women. They gave me small smiles back.

Only once did we get a block of free time in which we could engage one-on-one with the women. Spotting a woman who was sitting alone, I plopped down next to her.

“Are you doing okay?” I asked tentatively, “As okay as you can be under the circumstances?”

“No,” she mumbled to the floor. “I’m not a Christian or anything, but I’ve been coming to these church things whenever we’re allowed. I want to be a Christian. A lot of girls in here are. But I have to get my sexuality right with God. I had a boyfriend before this, and he was abusive. Since being here, I got a girlfriend. She treats me so much better. But I know that homosexuality isn’t right.” She folded her hands and continued to stare down at her lap.

“Whoever told you that was wrong,” I said quietly, so that the other volunteers couldn’t hear me. “What you have with your girlfriend sounds special. Don’t let it go because some fool with a Bible told you that homosexuality is a sin. No God that I believe in would send you to hell for being in love. In fact, having to turn away from that love sounds like its own version of hell.”  

“I do love her,” she said, looking more relaxed but still nervous.

“I’m not a priest, obviously,” I told her, “but I don’t think a homophobic interpretation of scripture is very credible coming from people who ignore the other 90% of Leviticus.”

“Almost done here?” another volunteer asked suddenly, placing her chair between me and the woman I was speaking to.

“Not really,” I answered.

“Well, we have to go,” she announced, “And by the way, you’re not supposed to talk to them about that kind of stuff.” She gave me a pointed stare and turned to leave.

With that, someone opened the door, and we filed out of the room. My face felt hot, and my jaw was clenched tightly. I headed straight for the parking lot without a word to any of my fellow volunteers. This ministry, which was allegedly supposed to bring inmates closer to heaven, was its own special sort of hell. Boring, homophobic hell. I hopped into my car to head home and never went back.

I was shaken up by my experience with jail ministry, but we had already signed up for Catholic wedding prep, so the train needed to stay on the tracks for a while longer. Since Catholic priests aren’t allowed to marry, we were assigned to do pre-marriage counseling with a deacon. (I was shocked when I learned that rabbis almost all had partners and children). Deacons are married, and ours had raised nine children, a combination of biological and adopted kids. Not every church assigns a married clergy member to counsel married couples, so we considered ourselves lucky. The deacon might have been old-fashioned, but he was a nice man. Our 5-hour-long sessions with him passed without incident. When the deacon balked at my plan to send our future kids to daycare, Travis jumped in with an air of finality and affirmed that we could manage our own careers, thank you very much. The deacon was sensible enough to let the issue go.

We also had to attend a weekend marriage seminar that mostly involved talking to already-married Catholic couples about topics of secular concern, like finances and in-laws. Travis seethed about the “natural family planning” session for a day or two, but I reminded him that no one was going to be spying on us in the bedroom. We tossed the “natural family planning” pamphlet in the recycling bin and replenished our condom supply. Having completed the steps necessary to be married in the Catholic Church, we were deemed hereby fit to become a nice Catholic family.

On the day of our wedding rehearsal, the priest went over the promises that we were to make to the Catholic Church on the day of our wedding. The sanctuary was empty other than my friends and family, standing lazily around and paying partial attention to the plans for the next day. Most of us had dressed up even though there was no one but the priest to see us. One of my friends wore sweatpants and Ugg boots in order to demonstrate her utter disdain for institutional religion. I ignored the gesture. The alter was dark and devoid of flowers but still smelled like Catholic churches often do: like a flower shop meeting incense. Travis and I held hands and gave our attention to the priest.

“Will you be faithful to one another?” the priest asked.

“We will,” we echoed.

“Will you accept children lovingly from the Lord?” the priest asked us.

“Yes,” we answered. Sure, we wanted them someday.

“Will you raise them in the ways of the Church?” he continued. We paused.

we had a beautiful promise to make about the distant possibility of having a child. I was two weeks out from law school graduation, and we hadn’t really set a timeline for bringing a baby into our world. I hadn’t, until that day, thought of the fact that Catholic parents generally raise their children to be Catholic. I paused for a moment, standing on the altar in my sparkling white rehearsal dinner dress, and contemplated the weight of that.

It seems reasonable enough on the surface, but what a steep price to ask of two people who want a priest to officiate their wedding! Would I baptize my children? I pictured dressing them in a white gown and watching a priest sprinkle water over their heads to mark them free of original sin, a theory that I thought was cruddy and untrue. Did I want to baptize my children before they had a chance to choose the Christian path for themselves? Would I expect them to attend Mass every Sunday? What about Sunday school? What if any of my children had questions about female leadership or wanted to marry someone of the same sex? I felt suddenly overwhelmed.

With everyone staring expectantly at us, Travis and I nodded and recited what we were supposed to. It wasn’t until I was outside in the cold December air that I felt like I could breathe again.

I woke up the next day to unbelievably good weather. It was sunny and over 40 degrees in early December. The sun was rising as my friends and I pulled up to Zingerman’s Cornman Farms, where we would be getting dressed before heading to the church. It was a really beautiful day. We got ready, fiddling with the ribbon on my dress and chatting until it was time to go to the church. In the basement of the church, my mom pinned my long, flowing veil on my head, and my dad took my arm, ready to walk me down the aisle.

We opted for the full hour-long wedding Mass, much to the chagrin of our friends and family. If you’re going to do the thing, do it right, I suppose. During our wedding Mass, the priest gave a homily that didn’t mention either of us; in fact, it was a metaphor about wine that involved telling our gathered loved ones to find hope in the Lord even when we feel like squashed grapes. “Squashed grapes” became quite the joke among our friends in the following weeks. Nonetheless, the music was lovely, and when Travis kissed me at the end of the service, everyone clapped. We smiled and smiled, all the way back down the aisle and out into the crisp winter air.

We eventually did a full Jewish wedding under a chuppah [a Jewish wedding canopy], but without all of the guests or the tiered wedding cake. Rabbi Rubenstein’s sermon at our wedding was significantly more touching. I don’t, however, feel upset about the fact that our first wedding wasn’t Jewish. Things tend to happen at the right time even if the wait is painful.


 For more posts about Shannon and her book, click HERE.

For more posts about Judaism, click HERE.

For more posts about conversion, click HERE.

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