On our first Marriage Encounter Weekend, I re-found my deep love for Karen. On our second, Deeper ME Weekend, I re-found my love for fellow Catholics and for the Roman Catholic Church.
Upon leaving that first ME Weekend, we were greeted by a room-full of people we knew and did not yet know, who offered us a fellowship I had never experienced – except for rare times with fraternity brothers decades ago. They gave us their love, because of who we were and not for what we did or did not do. In the following weeks, we met with a small circle of them to share meals and fellowship conversations. From such beginnings, we developed close relationships with couples that lasted for many years – until death or natural geography intervened.
Karen and I continued to write daily love letters to one another. I learned how to express feelings with words and at depths I had never truly realized before. Over the intervening years we had – as have many, if not most, couples – drifted apart. We were icebergs floating over cold waters, most of our existence hidden from sight from all who passed silently by us. Frigid mists encompassed our passages, parting only momentarily just before a collision might occur. It was during these new, halcyon days that we rediscovered our passion for one another and for life.
We journeyed to Kansas City, Kansas for our second, Deeper ME weekend. The love letters we wrote in Kansas City had topics not unlike those we had responded to at the Marriot Inn on I-45 in Houston, but somehow, the feelings, the illumination, I now experienced went beyond the two of us. At the Eucharistic celebration completing the weekend, I felt an intense oneness with those couples who had participated in our fellowship and had made commitments to bring this encounter to others.
The following months and years were not always easy. We met with other team-couples as we developed our own presentations for ME Weekends we would be giving. I learned I did not welcome criticism, especially “constructive” criticism, regarding my descriptions of a personal life over which my soul-searching had labored for many hours. But I did learn to rethink and to rewrite, so that what I said might prompt listeners to undergo their own metamorphoses. I learned that true metanoia comes neither cheaply nor immediately.
Our lifestyles changed. Karen gave up her job as a secretary with Petroleum Publishing, perhaps without much reluctance, and became the underpaid secretary for Fr. Drew Wood, the director of the Vocations Office for the Diocese of Galveston-Houston. This Chancery office was downtown, giving us an opportunity for a mutual commute and replacing our separate drives to the Galleria and the Texas Medical Center.
Meanwhile, we did act as a presenting team-couple for Marriage Encounter Weekends throughout Houston. We continued to meet routinely with our ME circle of friends.
We also became active within CGS. Our major joint-ministry was to be part of the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), which was the process used for bringing new members into the Catholic Church. The parish program, nicknamed Maranatha, was directed by Sister Alice Meeham, who was a model of what an “elderly” nun should be. At the time, she was well into her “late sixties” or “early seventies” and had once been a cloistered nun for the Maryknoll Sisters. Karen and I, as well as many of our friends at CGS, were amazed at how active a person of this age could be! She even taught yoga! Oh, how much we had to learn over our next forty years about the process of aging!
Sister Alice was not the only model for our new lives. Fr. Ed was, by far, the most exemplary one. I have never seen a priest so enraptured when celebrating Eucharist as I had when given the privilege to observe him consecrating mere bread and wine to become, indeed, the “body and blood of Christ.” And yes, I was later in a position to recognize that he, too, had human foibles, but ones which scarcely mattered in the long run. Fr. Ed presided at the twenty-fifth and fiftieth wedding-anniversary Masses offered in our honor. He had agreed to preside at our funeral services, as well, but predecease us several years ago.
His encouragement, along with that of several other clergy, was behind my own decision to become a Permanent Deacon. The “story” in our family is, however, that since Karen, who worked in the Vocations Office, could not get either of our sons to become priests, she donated me to become a deacon. The story is only partially true; Fr. Ed had his role, too.