How I Met and Married Bruce Part 1

Or how my spiritual father midwifed deep healing

Warning: I wrote this years ago and thought you might be interested in how I met and married Bruce, how my spiritual father, midwifed very deep healing and how God’s grace was present despite my riding Eros in the wrong direction.

Prelude

The story of how I met and married my husband began two men back from him. Actually it began a long time before when I was a girl praying that God would grant me the desire of my heart, a man to love, a man who would love me, wrap me up in his arms and hold me like I’d never been held before, a man who would wipe away my tears. It began somewhere deep in my past where my ability to trust was smashed, where someone somehow touched me, and I felt desire a baby shouldn’t feel.

1.

The smell of him echoed back at me throughout the day like shavings off a sharpened pencil, the man I’d met at the Rockton Inn, a big strapping man who looked brainy with horn rimmed glasses but was really farm help at a dairy outside town. I’d gotten too quickly into his bed, in a farmhouse back a dirt road under stars that burned the darkness like the sun under a magnifying glass.

For three days an air mass had shifted down from the North, bringing clarity to the skies like a lens. The stars roared around my ears and I kept thinking about the Sunday sermon, Enter the joy of the kingdom.

When the man called at midnight, the second night of the stars, I told him I had a story for him to read. He invited me to bring it on over. “I’ll only stay a few minutes,” I said starting the dance lonely people begin to shuffle.

“You’re in control. I respect people,” he replied. He was starting the dance too. We were talking about lovemaking without saying it. Looking back now, I see he was saying I could have a choice not to, if I drove over there. Neither one of us wanted to admit that I might want it. I wanted badly to belong to someone.

I asked if he would hurt a woman. He said no. He said he was tired of divorcees who played with him or wanted marriage right away. He was tired of partying. He was looking too.

When I got to his house no one answered the door. I saw the Plieades through the branches of the dooryard trees. I let myself in. I saw one lamp and the TV pooled light. Jim, Bill, Jack--I forgot his name, was already in bed. “Didn’t you hear me knocking?” I asked.

“You can’t hear the outside door from in here.” He turned his head. “Sit down. Take your coat off.”

He took the story and read the first page. “You’re pretty handy with the pencil. You should write a book.” (By the way that story was the root of the sequel draft of The River Caught Sunlight.)

He put the pages on the floor, wrapped me in his arms, said, “You didn’t want to be alone either.”

I told him I didn’t want to make love, I only wanted to be held. He said, “I won’t make love if a woman doesn’t enjoy it. I used to, but not anymore.”

He tried but I said no, I wasn’t protected. He admitted he didn’t want to become involved with anyone, he had too much going with unsettled business deals. We held onto each other into a shallow sleep where I dreamed about a green sky streaked with gray patches of light. One burned out tree with two branches rose over the moor which rolled into the horizon. A monk in a brown cowl glided up to the woman kneeling there. He put his hand on her head, a gnarled human hand with long, cold fingers. His face was sucked into high cheekbones. I opened my eyes and watched the clock tick off fifteen minutes. I stirred.

“You can stay,” he touched my shoulder.

“No, I’d better get back to town.”

“Come back when you can stay longer,” he kissed me goodbye. I nodded but knew I would not be back.

When I left I looked at the stars. I used to pray toward those stars, that God would send me a man, someone to share my life with. This man wasn’t him. I was ashamed and frightened I’d been so easy to lie down next to him, but still show him my fear. He’d asked why I was so afraid. They all asked that. I couldn’t shake my fundamentalist training that told us not to sleep around. I was afraid of the man wrapped in a rainbow, whose foot will split a mountain in two. I belong to Him by faith. He’s the one I’m afraid of. And looking back there may have been other, darker things, human, that shadowed behind my bright fears of God, things I’d barely begun to guess at.

I wrote in my journal: I wish I could have God and man both, and I can in marriage, but I’m caught by the men I chose or meet who are more in love with their travel, their mothers, the sea, the ground, or for whom the timing is completely wrong because of pain in their lives. Some like guns too much. It goes back to being afraid to love a mortal because a mortal will die, or leave. It goes back to the reserve that keeps me from fully giving myself in lovemaking. I don’t become involved. I fall in love, yes, but that can keep him at arm’s length, that protects me from shattering.

The last time I was hurt by a man was when Caleb stayed out in the fields and stood me up and I sobbed for a day with my mother saying I was better off without him. She was right.

Up until now I’ve been able to turn to God away from men. I’ve chosen men over God in a variety of one night stands and now I’ve had this affair that won’t go anywhere.

There’s so much in this that parodies Christ--my wanting to risk a great deal--my job, pregnancy, for a man who doesn’t want to get involved, a man who’s in a kind of pain I know well.

Years earlier John Clellon Holmes had written me a note after reading a poem about this struggle. Here’s the poem:

God-become a cave

Where I can hide from the man

Whose fingers creep

Like salamanders of light

Slithering to penetrate the darkness

I sleep in.

But Lord—be the door

To the barn where I kneel.

Swing open with the fulness of weight

And oak beans to the man who carries

The stillness between bleats of his sheep

And lays it softly on my head.

Holmes said, “ ‘Prayer’ seems to go in two directions--perhaps it’s proper to the poem, God & man. Still, it’s a problem that has to be worked out. I feel a fear of man, and a consequent reliance on the idea of God which is perhaps uninspected. As you know, spiritual and erotic love, in Christianity, are not seen as similar, but opposed, though actually in Christian tradition the emotions are often employed together. St. Theresa, for instance, whose visions & seizures can be read either way. Don’t be afraid to realize that the normal emotions of a young woman like yourself can seek BOTH expressions at the same time. The body & soul have, I think, both an intimate connection with one another and probably an equal dignity in the eyes of God.”

He was right. The pattern had started with the best man I knew, next to my husband, who walked with me along sheer rock walls looking at cliffs and waterfalls for a summer, who loved me enough to want to hold my hand, kiss me and I pushed him away because I believed the preachers who said holding hands and kissing would lead to sex out of wedlock, the worse sin imaginable. I remember the preacher’s shouts like the judgement of God or a parent, a terror to listen to. I knew when H stopped calling that I’d lost a good man. I’d given him my heart. Sometimes I think nobody can hurt you like a good man can. It was a hurt so deep, I avoided good men for years, my loss rewarded only by insights from God about finding rest in Him.

Holmes was right, but at the time it was easier to hide in my idea of God, and chastity, even toy with becoming a nun than to walk down the road that would lead to marriage. That road for me meant discovering things about my past my poems only hinted at, my behavior shouted at but I was too afraid to see. My parents were still alive. But I still wanted to be married. I still walked out the road when I went home to the farm in New York and begged God to send me a man, not an angel, a man. I invoked the promise that he would give the righteous the desire of their heart.

After the man in the farmhouse, I drove to Glen Ellyn for my appointment with my spiritual director. Father MacFarlane of St. Barnabus Episcopal Church was the closest I came at that time to a therapist because I’d seen therapists pull friends into deeper depression than before. I didn’t want to be told who I was before I was ready to know. Father MacFarlane was a quiet man, balding with a white beard that dropped around his chin and nose. He spoke carefully, slowly as if from great depth or extreme tiredness.

We sat together in his office. He listened quietly while I told him my shame, my inability to say no to myself, my wanting to be held and loved, even when it was inappropriate, even dangerous. He heard the fear in my voice, the compulsion. He’d heard it before. He’d sat with me. He’d told me to sit with God and breathe, feel my body and wait.

This time he said, “Why don’t you give it God? Turn it over to Him?”

Why not? All my life I’d tried to give it to God. The preachers always warned us not to take it back once we’d given it. I’d told God over and over, I wanted His will, if He didn’t want me to meet anyone, that His will be done. There had been times when I’d been neutral. Whatever God wanted was fine. There were others when I wanted to be with someone.

Somehow this was different. I sat and prayed. I don’t remember if Father MacFarlane said anything, or if I said anything, or if it was just a powerful silence.

But I saw a white horse, the gray Kharadi, a sixteen hand steel gray Arab I worked with while I was in Arkansas, who matured into a pure white stallion. I took him down the road behind the barn, crossed the culvert and lead him up to the pasture so huge it would take days of riding to come to its end. It was full of green grass, only it wasn’t green now because it was night. The horse arched his neck, threw a buck and galloped over the rise into a hollow where there was a pool of water. He drank deeply, ears twitching to the suck in his mouth and gulp in this throat, his lips black and wet and flat against his teeth. Then he was gone.

I opened my eyes, thanked Father MacFarlane and drove home.

“All right, God you can have it all,” I said as I walked along the tracks behind my apartment, the boxcar loading at the Sunoco paper factory docked at the end of the tracks. This section was used for nothing more than switching boxcars. I saw five cat paws tracks balanced on a snow covered rail and a track like a chain from one rail to the next, in the snow, that looked like a snake’s track, but no snake could crawl in snow. Cane Dog, my Rottweiller, sniffed in the weeds, going where he wanted to go whether I called him back or not.

I’d been told as a kid when you give it to God, He’ll give it back to you pressed down and spilling over, the blessing from the answered prayer is so abundant. I thought about the white horse I’d released into the pasture. The picture in my mind showed a knoll, the grasses cracking in the wind.

I’d known about this horse for years. In college, I thought I was daring when I wrote: There’s a stallion in me, foaming to white slime wormed with grass and bared teeth. His diamond head snakes passion behind juniper logs latched tight, a roofless log cabin. Though his freedom is muffled behind shredded bark, his squeals are not. They slice with descending sonic talons.

There’s a stallion in me whose urgent blood is eager to mount mares, sweaty with heat behind another fence.

Boxed in a canyon this morning, the horse was noosed by hidden desire and presented as a gift.

I tear the grass, my body lying grazed by sharp green stains, eyes level with tips silvered by cutting. My eyes close on a dream:

A white horse (every curve round to masculine) gallops to blood red against a sun blackened horizon. Bay mares pin garnet heads to emerald fields. Light pirouettes before a storm. Chesnut colts and fillies whisk bob tails, flicking caprioles in a new game as water shoots from broken black snakes along the ground. Artesian flanks flicker rainbows steadied by the sun as the stallion shadows them.

Before I die, and wake up, Easter bends supple around my leg in a relaxed two beat cadence. Her hooves carve a perfect volte, an embryo in dust.

Considering my college was Wheaton College, where Billy Graham went to school, I’m surprised I got away with the poem. People asked why the image was a stallion. I don’t know. Maybe I was writing to the masculine part of my nature, psychologists say all women have. My passion seemed so strong, as if it were with me forever. It was not a little pesty, as stallions can be, always snapping and biting. But the horse I rode was a mare, named after the day Christ rose from the dead, a mare circling, tracking a line with no beginning and no end. The mare something to do with resurrection, hope, new life, a new creation. I must have known then, how I would feel in the face of death, the resurrection. But that’s another story.

In the winter of 2009, a young fjord mare stepped off a trailer. She’d come in from Wisconsin as companion to my other Fjord, Tessie. Her name: DF Paske Morgen. Easter Morning. My resurrection horse had arrived.