Organized religion has been a significant part of my life since my earliest days with Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, my home parish in Niles, Ohio. Although I did withdraw my allegiance during my college days at Kent State, there was a modest return, under Karen’s influence, with the Newman Center at Cornell. In the following years, with each new move, we became affiliated with another parish. The closeness I felt to the parish usually depended upon the nature of the pastor. Although each parish and each pastor had an influence on me, the greatest impact came with Christ the Good Shepherd and its pastor, Fr. Ed Abell.
Father Ed appeared in our life, shortly after our settlement in Spring, Texas. We had been attending a parish associated with our particular neighborhood, Ponderosa Forest. One Sunday, Fr. Ed was a visiting priest who spoke about a new community he was establishing in the area. We listened but thought we should remain with our current parish, St. Edward’s, until our sons had completed their preparation for Confirmation. After that, we could make a decision about a change for our Sunday worship. Following their Confirmation, we began to attend services at the newly established CGS.
The transfer made geographic sense. Although both parishes were about the same distance from where we lived, we would no longer need to encounter Interstate 45, even on a Sunday morning, in order to get to Mass. The change did mean we would be returning to services in a public-school building for several years, but relinquishing those traffic hassles made this change of venue worthwhile. At the time, we had no idea how amazing life would become when it was centered, for the first months, at Benfer Elementary School and then at Strack Intermediate School. In a very short time, these sites became endeared to us and our new friends as “Saint Benfer’s” and “Our Lady of Strack.” While Sunday services were celebrated at these locations, the social-religious life of the parish was focused on a storefront building at a strip shopping-center on FM 1960. Our parish life became more than getting to Mass on Sunday mornings.
Fr. Ed and several members of the parish were active in a group called Marriage Encounter, a new program that encouraged a married couple to grow more closely together in their faith and love for one another. Karen and I, over the years, had participated in other programs we thought were probably similar to “ME.” In New Hampshire, we had joined the Christian Family Movement, (CFM) an outgrowth of recent changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council of the late sixties. We thought that ME, like the CFM, might expand the number of people we knew. Little did we realize how earthshaking this “encounter” would prove to be.
The weekend retreat, held in a local motel, was led by a priest and three married couples who gave brief talks about their lives, with a particular focus on “feelings.” After each presentation, the couples in attendance wrote a “love letter” to their spouse. Assigned topics for each letter were variations of the question: “How do I feel when you ….”
Karen and I had written letters to one another for many years, mainly while she remained for her senior year at Kent State and I was in graduate school. In fact, it was an early letter that prompted the beginning of our dating in college. Although we had continued to write to one another, when we were separated by individual vacations at our parents’ homes or by my work-related travel, the content of these new exchanges was radically different. We quickly learned that the “feelings,” the sentiments, expressed in our letters over the years were actually superficial. Of course, we had meant them at the time we wrote, but the intensity had not been equal to what erupted when we wrote letters to one another on our original Marriage Encounter Weekend. We, indeed, learned how to “encounter” one another at levels we had rarely experienced, except (perhaps) in our earliest years of marriage.
At the completion of the weekend, we were invited to consider becoming a presenting team. This would require us to continue to write daily “love letters” to one another on “How do I feel when you … ?” We were also required to attend a so-called Deeper weekend in Kansas City, where we would learn more about what it would be like to be a “presenting team.” We agreed to both conditions, little appreciating, at the time, how greatly our lives would change by saying “yes” to a simple invitation.