It’s almost dinner when I arrive at the monastery for a weekend retreat, and as I leave the shade of the ancient sequoia near the entrance, I’m unexpectedly grateful for the timing — morning sickness doesn’t usually kick in until week seven for me, and tonight’s menu features cod, a smell that will soon, but not yet, send me lurching for the bathroom.
I am the only retreatant this weekend, the sister tells me as she hands me a key. Her voice is soft and kind, but her energy is propulsive: She’s on her way to tend to hospice patients — would I mind letting myself in? Just to the left, the first floor of the bungalow behind the stone monastery. There’s a mini-split going so I should find it nice and cool, she offers.
It’s late August, 90 degrees, and the feast day of Saint Monica, though I don’t know that yet. In retrospect, it’s auspicious: Among other things, Saint Monica is the patron saint of patience. I’m here to rest and pray, to try and discern a call to Catholic conversion, a call grown too loud to ignore. I’m also beginning my final year of graduate school, with three young children at home. The timing is off — completely off — for all of these things, in addition to the arrival of a new family member. Yet here we are.
Well, me and this baby, anyway.
My husband is home with the kids. He checked our Honda’s tires and oil — the car we bought before we knew we’d have three kids, let alone four. He gave me the easy smile I’m so familiar with, and told me to enjoy myself. In other words, in his own way, he’s given me his blessing.
Neither of us were religious when we met. Later, I’d returned to the Christian faith of my baptism, eventually landing in the Episcopal Church. We’d used the marriage liturgy from the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer at our wedding, which was held in a circle of friends and family in a mountain meadow.
The New Zealand liturgy is poetic, infused with imagery from nature. Circled beneath the trees, we joined in a call and response, which a friend — ordained online to officiate at weddings — read aloud.
Priest: Help them to be wise and loving parents and to grow together in faithfulness and honesty, in mutual support and patience.
All: Spirit, bless this marriage.
The actual liturgy reads “Spirit of God, bless this marriage.” At a sun-warmed picnic bench in our neighborhood park, we’d looked through the book together, finding a compromise for two people who’d loved each other since we were 21, whose beliefs had grown and changed as we had. Could we keep a space open between us for God, however differently we each approached him?
After a lot of searching, I’d renewed my belief in God as the Christian tradition conceives of him: the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Lyle, my husband, believed in a creative spirit, a mysterious animating force that dwelled in everything. Among many other things I loved about him was his deep connection to the natural world. When we’d first met, he’d taught me the names of wild mushrooms I never knew existed, and showed me how to find them, turkey tails fanned out along fallen logs, chanterelles scattered over hillsides. How could there not be a God — a creative spirit — with evidence like this?
I’d read to him from my favorite poets; he knew language mattered to me. Names mattered, including the names of God. Yet my renewed faith was just that: new, and vulnerable, a seedling barely emerging after rain. In conversations about spiritual things, when we approached the borders of potential conflict, we sometimes shied away, out of respect for the other but probably out of fear, too. What if we uncovered something that would drive us apart?
On a picnic bench 12 years ago, we had agreed to call God Spirit, trusting his presence would be there with us in the meadow, and in all that came after.
Now, I drop my bags in my retreat room and enter the cool of the chapel, joining the sisters for vespers, though I don’t know the prayers. I fumble along, letting the sisters’ voices carry me as we sit and stand, sing and return to silence. Afterward, I stop at the blank book for prayer requests, just outside the chapel door.
Please pray for my husband, I write, tears in my eyes, and for this new baby.
For Me, the Patience of Saint Monica
The woman who would become Saint Monica lived in present-day Algeria in the fourth century and married a Roman officer who didn’t share her Christian faith. Accounts conflict about this husband of hers: He had a violent temper, and he was abusive and unfaithful, some say. Some claim her religious habits annoyed him; others, he respected her faith. One thing is clear: He was not religious, and she prayed for his conversion for almost the entirety of their married life; he was baptized just one year before he died.
Monica is often invoked for intercession in matters of domestic abuse, difficult marriages, and child loss. She lost many children during childbirth. Of the three who survived, the child who would become Saint Augustine was her oldest, and she worried and prayed over him for years before his ultimate conversion.
In the fall, when I begin the rite for entrance into the Church, I choose Saint Monica as my patron, or maybe she chooses me. I ask her to pray for me, for my husband, and for the tiny person soon to join our family. Having miscarried in the past, I know nothing is certain, and though my nausea and fatigue never really subside, I’m relieved when we make it through the first, then the second, trimester.
Chasing after our children and working double time to complete my degree before the birth, I have no time to worry about what’s ahead, about what could be when all of these swirling possibilities finally settle. If all goes as planned, I’ll graduate, enter the church, and give birth, all within a matter of weeks. Friends shake their heads and ask me how I’m managing it all, but the truth is it doesn’t feel like something I’m doing. It feels inevitable, necessary — as if a great current is carrying me forward, making any uncertainties on my part irrelevant. Which is not to say I don’t feel them deeply, sometimes painfully.
As my belly grows and I celebrate Mass, I feel more and more affirmed in my desire to enter into full communion with this beautiful, ancient church, despite the horrors and pain in her flawed, human history. At first I’m alone in the pew, then seated with friends. Sometimes, when I see families there, I wonder what it would be like if I had been raised Catholic, or if Lyle had. What if we had been married in the church? What if we shared the same faith? But I resist the temptation to compare.
Just because a couple has the same faith, friends are quick to point out, doesn’t mean they approach it in the same way.
God comes to us, often, through our human family, and part of how I feel God’s presence is through my husband and our marriage. We’ve always carried one another through challenges. As we near the baby’s birth, Lyle keeps us afloat, helping me navigate the course I feel certain has been set for me, and by extension, for us. He fills in gaps in childcare so I can make it to class during the week; he takes on solo parenting without complaint on weekends when I’m away for school or church. He’s there when I dissolve in tears over concepts I’m just not grasping in school; he helps me sift through massive piles of schoolwork and laundry. He brings me tea and takes over meal preparation when the nausea returns in full force in my third trimester.
Day in and day out, he is solid and dependable, kind and understanding. Maybe he can’t believe as I do, but he believes in me. And I want to respect his own beliefs, by not pushing mine on him.
In the first days of our relationship, we’d sit up for hours while the stars came out, talking about poetry and the universe. Each time I take another step on this journey of faith, and share another question or wonder with him, it gets a little less scary. We no longer have hours — or energy — to stay up talking, but when we do, I find that my faith and our marriage can handle it. I find the vows we made in the meadow — to grow together in faithfulness and honesty — are strengthened, not diminished, by the differences we discover.
In This Together (and Apart)
It’s summer, nearly a full year from the feast day of Saint Monica, and beads of sweat roll down the backs of my knees. We stand to say the creed, and I lift our baby girl, adjusting the yards of white fabric around her chubby thighs, pulling on the back of my own dress where it sticks to my skin.
We are at the Catholic parish where I’d been received in April, just a few weeks before Beatrice’s birth, and where we’ve begun celebrating Mass as a family. Lyle squeezes my hand beside me. Many babies are being baptized today, and the church is packed. Our pew is filled with our own kids and those of my friends — Beatrice’s godparents.
For the moment, I’m preoccupied, bribing our two-year-old with snacks, keeping the baby calm, not passing out. Between the lack of air-conditioning and the layers of clothing around Beatrice, I’m dizzy with the heat, and the weight of it all.
As a new convert, I’m constantly fighting off anxious thoughts. I long to focus on God, but with young children, at least half of my consciousness is always keeping tabs on their behavior, and mine. Though my kids have their godparents and the larger parish community to help shape their faith, I often feel as if I’m the one holding the baton for the family. The kids look to me for direction, but there are still parts of the Mass I don’t know by heart, still times I forget when to kneel and when to rise.
In some ways, Lyle and I are in this together; in others, we’re not.
When we had filled out paperwork for baptism, I had been briefly elated to see he’d checked the box for “Christian” under Father’s religion. I’d assumed he would simply mark “none.” When I told him I didn’t know that was how he identified, he said he thought he should mark that box, since it was paperwork for baptism and since he accompanies us to church each week. Deflated again, I laughed inwardly at my stubborn hope.
Why shouldn’t I be hopeful, though? With God, anything is possible. But then again, why should I expect such a change, if it comes, to be anything other than unpredictable, much like my own conversion? And if conversion never comes — what then? Can we still share in the love and wonder of raising our children in faith, continuing to hold a space open for God, even if we never agree on what that means?
Like Monica, all I can do is be faithful in prayer, and honest with Lyle about what I believe. I take comfort in her intercession, knowing she felt the same pain and sense of urgency I do, beneath all of these surface desires for companionship in faith, for my whole family to come to know and love God. I take comfort knowing it isn’t up to me at all.
Standing at the front with her godparents, we profess our willingness to bring Beatrice up in the practice of the faith, and as I imagine what that will mean in our home, I remember: Ultimately, her faith is not in my control. My responsibility is not to make her believe as I do — it’s to love her, to commit to her growth. Our promises here are an echo of what we promised to each other, standing under the trees years ago.
She is quiet and wide-eyed when the priest gently pours the baptismal waters on her downy little head, the way you might water a sequoia, curled up inside a tiny seed.