Conference quark::human_relations-v1

1173.0. "Promises to Keep" by QUARK::LIONEL (Free advice is worth every cent) Tue Jun 18 1991 18:23

When Leslie and I were planning our wedding ceremony, we wanted a "reading"
which was compatible with our views and values regarding marriage.  We are both
fans of the writing of Melinda Regnell, who is well-known to readers of this
notes conference, and we asked Mel if she would honor us by writing an essay
about marriage for our ceremony.  Mel accepted, wove the themes of our
wedding and our views with her own unique style and experiences, and called the
result "Promises to Keep".  Here, with Mel's permission, is the version which
served as the centerpiece of our ceremony.  I am sure you'll all enjoy it as
much as we and our guests did.

					Steve


		Promises to Keep
		by Melinda Regnell


I have been asked to write something for a wedding.  I am flattered,
honored, scared to death, and unsure of just what, if anything, (as a
self-proclaimed skeptic on some of the basic foundations of marriage
in the Christian world), I can offer.  Yes, I have a twenty-some-odd
year marriage cooking on the stove; and I have a child and a career.
But I also have a set of rather unorthodox beliefs and understandings
that have allowed all these things to work as well as they have.  And
that is not to say they work smoothly all the time.  We do have our
respites when life seems uncomplicated and blissful, but they are only
punctuation marks in the greater story which is more likely filled
with discussion, tensions, compromise, even argument.

In my more humorous moments I subscribe to the unattributed but
accurate observation that "If you are not panicking, you fail to fully
understand the situation!" And, of course, to Murphy's Law:  "Anything
that can go wrong, will."

I have one other observation that I subscribe to which I credit to my
little old Irish grandmother, but that I am sure every little old
(Irish or otherwise) grandmother has cautioned her grandchildren with:
"Don't speak of your good fortune or it will turn sour." It would be
with some trepidation that I would set out to share how and why my
marriage works in particular, since I would be sure to have it go
south as soon as the words were uttered.

I usually write essays that are based on my personal experiences ...
tapestries of interelated snapshots of my current and younger life ...
but as I hate to tempt fate, I don't really feel that I can write that
kind of piece for this occasion.

Now that I have eliminated both the format and content of what I might
say, I will endeavor to think of something of worth about marriage.

Well, no.  I am not going to talk about marriage, actually.  I am
going to talk about promises.

Promises are the stuff that broken marriages are made of.

And promises are based on two premises.  Truth and trust.

The first thing that we have to unlearn about truth is that it isn't a
constant.  What I think is 'truth' today is not what I may think is
'truth' tomorrow...and promises that I make today based on the 'truth'
of some matter are liable to be broken.  Truth is more aptly what I
'believe' is true...not what 'is' true.

What we believe is what defines who we are.  I am not talking about
who we pretend to be, or who everybody at work thinks we are, or what
our friends think we are, or even what we often think we are.  I am
talking about who we really are...and how that effects how we make
promises.

When I was little, I believed that when my cherished old red cocker
spaniel died, she would go to heaven.  Don't ask why I believed such a
thing, I just did...with great passion and enthusiasm.  I would sit
and stroke her old tired and arthritic body and I would promise her
that when she died she could go to heaven and would never feel pain
again.  And when she did die, my parish priest corrected my
misconception by telling me that only beings with souls could go to
heaven and Bessy had no soul.  She was only a dog.  The result of his
elucidation was that at the age of 5, I determined that I would never
again set foot in a Catholic church once I was a grown-up.  (I knew I
could never convince my mother or father to let me stop attending
before First Communion.)

This edict was de-railed by a slightly lunatic but much loved (by me,
anyway) priest who tempered the denial with quick wits and silver
tongue.

"So, Melinda, You want your dog to go to heaven?"

I sighed.  "Yes, Father." I thought even he would not understand.

"Do you know what heaven is?"

"No, Father."

"Well, I think that heaven is whatever the righteous deserve to make
them eternally happy."

This little tid-bit was rather over my head, but I thought a positive
response was called for.

"Yes, Father."

"Do you know what that means?"

"No, Father."

"Melinda," he took my hand, "it means that if you make it to heaven,
and you want your dog there to make you happy...she will be there.
You just keep believing.  Can you do that?"

"Yes, Father!"

He spent the years following that one, until he died quite young, in
an insane asylum for priests.  But it most likely was his tenuous
grasp on reality that allowed him the insight and grace to avert a
head-on collision of my beliefs and the church's.  He made it possible
for me to continue to believe.

And then there was the day when I decided that I wanted to be a
priest.  There was no Father Roche this time to temper the
pronouncements by several priests and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart,
not to mention the lay teachers that only men could be priests, what
was I thinking of...a mere girl?

The abruptness of their protestations caused me to again determine a
parting of the ways.  And this time it stuck.  Once free, I promised
myself never to return.

Of course, I could not keep that promise.  If no other event had
forced it on me, my Father's death certainly demanded that I set foot
back inside a Catholic church.  And, quite frankly, although I have
not returned to the ranks of the practicing Catholics, I view their
church's organization with a less jaundiced eye than I once did.

So, what does this have to do with marriage?  Everything, I think.  We
all are adept (some more, some less) at playing the parts that are
laid out for us.  We act most often as we are expected to act; we say
most often what we are expected to say.  And there is nothing wrong
with that.  The very capability of doing so allows us to live in
communities and be social animals.  It is a survival skill.  However,
when we live exclusively with one person; when we share continuous
time without much break with a single other human...our 'act' becomes
quite transparent.  The adjustments, the coverups, the compromises
that let us present ourselves to the world at large, even to our
smaller groups of friends; don't work.

And, more importantly, when we make promises that are based not on
what we really believe but on what we are expected to believe, we
often cannot keep them.  If our our partner is not ready to see us as
we really are, the shock of finding a somewhat different person can be
rather cataclysmic.

Nils doesn't like dogs.  Now, it never occurred to me to screen
potential husbands for an aptitude with dogs.  He was always polite to
my old dog at my parent's house.  He even allowed the same old dog to
come and live with us over a period of several months while my folks
were traveling.  And then he blew up.  It is obvious how I think about
dogs and here is my husband going over the edge about some poor old
collie.  I was non-plussed.  He was furious and feeling imposed upon
and misunderstood.  Then I moved over into ultimatum mode..."my dog
and me or no me!"

Luckily the absurdity of the topic reduced us to hysteria before we
got serious about it, but what would have happened if the unknown
'belief' had been more important to either of us?  And I am not
suggesting that a dog issue is of less importance per se...I am merely
suggesting that it was not of enough importance to either of us to
allow us to make fools of ourselves over it.  (Well, at least in
public...)

And I am suggesting that we tend to forget that the things that we
hold as 'truth' are more closely defined as 'our interpretation of
something I believe in'.  I am suggesting that the realization that
truth is a personal opinion is a necessity before we go making
promises.  Especially promises about things like love, honor and obey.

Can we promise to always love someone?  I don't think so.

I have always respected my husband's opinion; I have always liked him
because he is a decent and likable person...and my best friend.  But I
have also had the occasional span of minutes, hours, days, even weeks
when I did not love him.  If I had promised to always love him, and he
had had the bad timing to ask during one of those lapses, he would
have been devastated to find that I had broken that promise.  So I did
not promise to love him.  I promised to always treat him with respect
and care...even when I didn't love him.

Can we promise to always honor another person?  I don't think so.

Over the past twenty years or so, there has been the occasional moment
when I could have happily strangled the darling man for being such an
odious, mis-directed fool.  Not much honor there.  He is not a
paragon.  He is just a man.  A good one; a sensitive one; a caring
one.  But just a man nonetheless.  He will not only make wrong
decisions and choices, but he will make some that I adamantly disagree
with.  But if they are his (and not ours) to make, that is his
business.  I cannot honor them, though.  I promised instead to honor
his right to make decisions that bore only on him, and to only offer
my opinion when asked.

Can we promise to obey another human?  I certainly think not on this
one!

Who is Nils to tell me what to do?  Who is anyone to tell me what to
do?  Consider the number of lies and deceits created and manipulated
to get around that single ridiculous assumption of authority.  We
promised to negotiate those things that affected us both, to recognize
those that did not; and to leave the prerogative of action in those
cases to the partner that was affected by them.

I guess I would caution you when you make your promises to one
another, to make perhaps fewer of them than some do ...  and to make
sure they are the 'keepable' kind.  Don't promise the world when you
have an acre to give; don't promise absolute understanding if you only
have a good guess about what the answer is; don't promise forever if
you only can see tomorrow.

And then, once you have decided what the promises are that you can
make ...  and have made them ...  never ask for proof that the other
person has kept their side of the bargain.  Never listen to another
person who tries to give you rumor that the promise is broken ...
never accept doubt into your heart until the person who made the
promise indicates that is true.  Understanding how to accept a promise
is just as important, or perhaps even more important, than giving a
promise.

When Father Roche promised me that my dog could go to heaven if I
promised to believe, I accepted that promise on blind faith and trust.
I believe it, in my heart of hearts to this day.  Of course, my adult
mind has a few doubts about it ...  but my heart still believes.  And
when and if I get to 'heaven', if Bessy is not there, I am going to
look up Father Roche and give him a piece of my angelic mind!

A silly example.  But a serious lesson.  There is no point in
accepting a promise unless you have the strength of character to trust
that it will be fulfilled.

I seem to have old wives' tales up to my eyebrows today, but I am
reminded of the phrase "hung for a sheep, hung for a lamb".  If we
'expect' promises to fail ...  if we 'doubt' the word of the promiser
...  then I fear the promiser might feel that being excoriated for
'real' trangressions was preferable to being excoriated for imagined
ones.

So, have I said anything here?  Probably a great deal that could be
interpreted as a denial of all that society holds dear about marriage.
But that was not the intention.  I am not advocating a laissez faire
attitude with an easy out if the journey you are undertaking gets a
bit rough.  I am advocating that you not confuse the real issues at
hand that relate to the commitment to live a life together with the
surreal ones that are foisted upon us by historical political
maneuverings and misplaced albeit pervasive opinions of the 'id' of
society.

Somewhere along the line, somewhere between the child and the adult,
somehow ...  we learn, much to our disadvantage and sorrow, that
keeping promises is a quality that operates on a sliding scale.  As
children, we make promises that we believe with our whole hearts and
souls that we will keep or die; as adults we make them "all things
being equal" that we keep when and if we can.

I think if we could see which promises to make with the eye of the
adult, and then make them with the determination and blind faith of a
child...we just might have a chance.

    WOW!  The ultimate wedding gift...

In a vaguely similar way, a colleague of mine following the European Senior
Management Training programme asked me to write a couple of paras on marriage.
They were to be used for some obscure reason on the training programme, and had
to have marriage, trust and computers as themes!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trust - who can we trust? A marriage must be like a computer system. It must be
secure from hacking by outside parties, it must be managed and configured so
that all users have access to the resources they need, and when you need to
rely on it it must be up and on-line.

Trust - who can we trust? This environment we create, the marriage, must be a
long-term investment, short-term gains are no more than a grunt in the night, 
what we create must protect and be protected now and in the future. To ensure 
that protection, the marriage must be an open system, based on standards. De 
facto, de jure, de amor.

Trust - who can we trust? An open, bilateral partnership. In God we trust, in
ourselves we trust, in our partner we trust, else garbage in garbage out.

Phillip

Steve,

Thank you for sharing your wedding present. I found it deeply moving. It
expressed some things I have been trying to get my feelings around since my
divorce three years ago. I would like to ask a favor of you. Normally
I consider things placed in NOTES to be "public domain", but given what this is
I felt it appropriate that I ask your permission before taking a copy
(with your preamble intact). If you have no objections I would certainly
appreciate it.

Thank you,
Randy

    About copying it -- check with Mel; it's her property.
    
    					andrew

Correct - nothing in NOTES should be considered "public domain", especially
a work of creative writing such as this one.  I had Mel's permission to
post the essay in the manner in which I did - if you wish to make further
use of it, you must obtain her permission directly.  Mel owns the rights.
You can write her at SUPER::REGNELL.

				Steve

Thanks for the info. I will honor the lady's copyright. Sadly the opportunity
in which I wished to use it has passed in any case :-( There was someone I
wanted to explain something about promises to, but she didn't stick around
long enough to hear it. This said it quite a bit better than I can.

Thanks again,
Randy 

    
    Sorry...I am just getting back in here...
    
    Normally, I would hesitate in distributing  carte blanch access to
    something that I have written for exactly the reasons that Andrew
    alluded to. [Thanks, Andrew.]
    
    However, this is a special case. I _gave_ this as a gift. And, although
    I would be most appreciative if anyone using it credited the writing,
    I now consider it the property of the couple I wrote it for.
    
    I have a thing about gifts and giving...if it is not given without
    strings and stipulations, it is not a gift. The only stipulation that I
    put on this gift was that it be stated that it was written to reflect
    the couple's beliefs and not necesarrily mine. And that stipulation was
    only there because I did not want friends and acquaintances who have
    read my writings for several years now to think I had 'suddenly'
    changed my outlook on life! [grin] There are a couple of things 'not
    said' in here that would have been said if I had written only for
    myself.
    
    So....to make an unnecessarily long reply short...[too late]...
    
    Steve, feel free to grant whatever access _you_ would feel comfortable
    with...it is your present...and I reliquish whatever writer's copyright
    that I hold to you.
    
    [And, Andrew, thank you again. You were, of course, absolutely correct
    in how I would usually feel about it.]
    
    Melinda

Ok - I grant permission for the base note, as is, including prefatory text and
attribution, to be passed on individually to friends for non-commercial
purposes. Do not cause or allow the text to be "mass-distributed" in any form,
such as mail distribution lists, posting in another conference or printing
in a bulletin or flyer.

Do share it with friends for whom you believe it will mean as much as it does
to us.

					Steve

Some gifts must be shared. They are usually very special, and repeated giving
makes them more so. I've never met the author, but I knew when reading
the base note that she intended the text as a gift to the newlyweds. Some things
one just can't keep. :-)

Thank you for honoring my request. I'm sure there are others out here who, not
being as obnoxious as I, would never have asked, but will certainly appreciate
your gift.

Have a long and happy life together. May you make only promises you want to
keep.

Randy

Oh, I think everyone should have a chance to meet Mel!  She is truly a
delight to know.  Mel has written several other stories which she has
shared with H_R readers in the past.  See notes 961, 988, 1018, 1030,
1127 and 1159.

			Steve

    
    Steve,
    
    You skipped the part about me being a hard-nosed b**ch...[sigh]
    
    Don't mislead the public, dear.
    
    [hugs]
    
    Actually I am blushing but through the wonders of modern
    technology, noone will ever know...[giggle]
    
    M_
    

    Having delt with Mel before in the past... I will neither varify nor
    deny her statement about being a hard-nosed b**ch... I figure such
    things are in the eyes of the beholder.  So far, I havn't beheld it.
    
    Hugs Mel!... (I just had to put my 2 cents in).
    
    Skip