Beyond Blue: February 2008 Archives

Because both Eric’s and my parents are divorced, we have had to find other role models in our lives to show us what a good marriage looks like. I have been lucky to know several happy couples in my life. Ben, my running partner who just died, had been married to the love of his life, Betty, for over 50 years. Except for the Valentine’s Day he gave her the old chocolate he found underneath the bed, Betty always said that “marrying Ben was the best thing I ever did.”

But the marriage I go to for counsel and instruction—especially when I don’t know how to handle a situation—is the partnership of Vickie and Mike. Their relationship reminds me of my favorite marriage quote, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, on how marriage is a dance, an ebb and flow, each person taking turns stepping forward and back.

I feel incredibly lucky to have a mentor in my life like Mike because he has 30 years more experience in EVERYTHING than I do, so he knows many more answers. I find him to be so very wise.

So I thought I’d interview the guy that I’m always talking about: the co-editor (with moi) of I Like Being Married (although not to each other), my writing mentor, my spiritual director, and my marriage counselor … Mike Leach!

1) Hi Mike. Thanks for agreeing to share some of your wisdom with my Beyond Blue readers. A book in my future will be “Mike’s Rules for Relationships,” because I think that your rules are much more practical than those stupid rules on how to get a guy to marry you. For example, I often remember Mike’s Rule #1, when Eric and I are squabbling over something silly: “You don’t always have to be right. But you do always have to be loving.” You have said to me several times, and I can never repeat it enough, that it really doesn’t matter who “wins” the argument. What matters is that it gets resolved in a loving way. Right?

Wow, you remember more of what I say than I do! Thanks, Therese. I remember a line from A Course in Miracles: “Would you rather be right, or happy?” Marriage is a great classroom for learning to choose happiness. And like the song says, “It’s easy… all you need is love!” Of course, it helps to have a valid definition of love. I remember this one from Dr. Thomas Hora, author of Beyond the Dream: “Love is non-conditional, non-personal benevolence.” That helps me a lot.

Below is Mike and Vickie's love story--the details about how they met (when, ahem, Mike was a priest). It's a beautiful and refreshing tale, and my favorite chapter of our book on marriage. Please don't judge him too harshly for his behavior in New York. When I see the way he looks at his wife, I know that he was certainly not meant for the priesthood.

Michael: It was 1968, the year Kennedy and King were killed, the year of burning cities and the Chicago convention. Anything was possible. Even love.

Vickie: I had just moved to New York from Mississippi. I was just out of college, and excited about my first job and life in the big city. On October 25th my roommate Holly and I moved into a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, our first home away from home. That night Holly suggested we go down the block to a sing-along place called Your Father’s Mustache. I was tired but decided to tag along.

Michael: I was 28, and a Catholic priest. Ever since I was a kid, I had always wanted to be a priest. I wanted to help other people and make them happy, especially children. As a seminarian I dreamt of burning myself out for Christ before I was 40, just like Don Bosco, my favorite saint. When I started to do that, I had second thoughts. I had gotten back to the rectory late at night when my friend Artie called from New York. He was on vacation, and asked me to hop a plane and join him.

“I can’t,” I said, “I’ve got work to do.”

“When’s the last time you had a vacation?” he asked. “Come on. You can see some plays. You love plays. It’ll be fun.”

He talked me into it. When I got to the hotel, the desk man gave me a note. It said, “Meet me at Your Father’s Mustache. In the Village. Seven o’clock.”

Vickie: At the time, believe it or not, two guys wanted to marry me. All my life all I ever wanted to be was married, have children, and live in a house with a white picket fence. But I couldn’t decide between them. One was my high school sweetheart: he was kind and gentle. The other was my boyfriend from college: he was strong and confident. I remember once asking my mother: “How will I know when I’m really in love?” She said, “You’ll know, and you won’t have to ask.”

A loving heart has a cataract and cannot see. -Louise Colet

Dear God,

In today’s reading, Paul describes hope to the Romans (5:1-2, 5-8). He says:

Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

It’s easy to have hope on the good days, God. You know that. But what do we do on the bad days? What do we do when there is no evidence of your goodness, but only suffering in those around us? What do we do when we feel like Beyond Blue reader, Lynn, who wrote on the combox of my post "Dear God: On the Beatitudes and Hope":

Hope is a wonderful thing, but when you lose it how is it regained? How do you find it when there is no evidence of it in your life? I see others who seem to have all this hope and very strong faith and wonder why I seem unable to attain hope and consistently feel hopeful.

I suppose we could start with the differentiation between the feeling of hope and the virtue of hope that Mrs. Angel Lady, Joan Wester Anderson, explains to Lynn:

I think you may be confusing the virtue of hope with the feeling of hope. Hope isn't a feeling; like a lot of things---faith, love in particular, it's a behavior. It's the old "act on the outside while your feelings are catching up" syndrome. 
If you put your trust in God, you do it in an intellectual way and you decide, you commit to doing life His way. Feelings of hope may follow, but they may not. Remember that we are not responsible for the results of what we try to do, only the trying itself.

For his birthday on Tuesday, I handed Beyond Blue reader Larry Parker all rights to take over the Self Esteem Forum that we have done during the months of January and February. He did a super job with the last one, so he is now the official moderator of Self-Esteem Forum #3. Below is the invitation he sent out to Group Beyond Blue members of Beliefnet's Community:

Group Beyond Blue will hold its third monthly "Self-Esteem Forum" at 10 a.m. EST on Saturday, March 1 (9 a.m. CST/Bnet time, 7 a.m. PST). People who sign up for the initial one-hour "draft" will be assigned a person for whom to write an affirmation letter. (That person will also RECEIVE a letter.) The first two months have had more than 20 people each participate. If you can't make it at that time, simply leave a message with me on my homepage (Doxieman122), or leave a message in the combox of the SEF#3 post on Group Beyond Blue, by March 4 -- saying that you couldn't make it for the March 1 "draft," but would like to be included in the chain of letters. I will gladly answer any questions regarding the process -- again, I can be e-mailed via my homepage, Doxieman122.