Engage!

A few weeks into my stay at Maryhouse, a rumor began circulating that Ted and I were engaged.  Though untrue, this was not an unfounded rumor.  During a meeting of the community Ted made sure to let folks know that he would be in and out for the summer, saying, “Amy has two siblings getting married this summer—and, maybe possibly, we would get married this summer.”  The ladies of the house let out a cheer, “he said it out loud!” they cried.  I was not in the room.  Ensuing congratulations took me by surprise.  After a few days, I had an explanation ready on my tongue before someone could get out their full, “I hear you have news…”  Even Ted’s sister asked me if it was true that we were getting married this summer (I will admit, I had begun a half-joking/half-serious campaign over e-mail for a triple wedding of Nee siblings, combining Adam and Grace’s already planned nuptials with my potential).  One afternoon a woman who occasionally volunteers, whom I’d met only once called the house phone,

 “Amy, I hear that you are engaged.”

“[laughing] I am not, actually.”

“Really? Someone told me you are.”

“It’s been going around.”

“[Disappointed] Well, I won these theater tickets and I wanted to give them to you and Ted as an engagement present.”

“Oh, how kind!”

“[Resigned] I guess you can have them anyway.”

“Thanks!”

Gradually, after much laughter, blushing and explanation, people were getting used to the idea that Ted and I were actually not engaged.  But it was in the air now, on our minds, if everybody else was talking about it, shouldn’t we?  Were these blithe mentions of slipping a wedding into the midst of those already set by sibling jokes or plans?  On the last day of March Ted mustered his courage and called Momma Nee, intending to ask whether she and Pop would like more time with him before he considered asking for their blessing on our marriage.  He stood cute and sheepish in the middle of his room, sharing this plan with me, his hair grown out mad-professor style, wearing a faded red War Resisters League t-shirt and blue jeans my mom had originally bought for my dad but found were too small.  I leaned on the door frame silently taking it all in – his plan, him, our life together in this house – until he shooed me out of his room and I went to mine.  At first diverting myself with a novel, I couldn’t shake the nagging thought that this was a significant moment; life altering conversations were underway, epic commitments being considered!  So I took out an old journal and revisited the notes I’d made about Ted and the ever gradually dawning desire for the mingling of our lives including this reflection I’d jotted down during a silent retreat I had just before moving to NY:

... I feel that I do want to live a religious life, but not as “a religious” in the Catholic sense of the word.  I want to live a religious life – angled always toward loving relationship (attentive, appreciative, accepting, affectionate, allowing; with reverence and devotion, curiosity and mystery) with God and recognition of God in all things – as a Catholic Worker and (dare I write it?) married to Ted (who teaches me to see and to feel and to respond)…
…Dear God, what has come over me?  It is the end of the day, 10:52 pm.  I am in bed – ready to pray and sleep.  But I am suddenly burning with an (almost) irresistible urge to call Teddy and tell him that I do know now that yes, I want to marry him.  I don’t want to have to wait until I see him or even until the retreat is over… 

But I did wait, and in fact, had not told him yet, still wrestling with myself, trying to discern what is best and playing my cards close to the vest in the meantime.  I laid down in my room, just adjacent to his, wondering what words were being exchanged next door, and wrote: “ Most of the time I wish we were married already, but every once in a while I begin to think the notion of such a commitment, such a life, is outrageous.”

 An hour later I heard his door open.

“How did it go?”

“It was really nice.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Ehm, the Hunger Games, Georgia—I didn’t say anything about taking a trip there or about us.”

“Seriously?”

“The timing didn’t seem right.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Are you disappointed in me?”

“No, just wondering what’s going to happen with all this.  Can we go?”

We were going to stay the night at his parents, who were out of town, taking advantage of the opportunity to have some time alone and cook a meal for two instead of fifty.  It was a beautiful night, preparing food and sharing a meal together.  Building a fire to cuddle and sip wine beside.  Maybe it was the atmosphere, or the wine, or maybe I was just ready to open the conversation; in any case, I ever so innocently asked,

“Did I ever tell you I almost called and proposed to you?”

“What?!”

“While I was on silent retreat, the night I started sending you text messages.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.  I hinted about it in a letter, but that’s the letter that got lost on Devon Ave. before it made it to a mailbox.”

“Unbelievable.”

The next morning was Palm Sunday.  As we were preparing for mass, Ted started getting messages from our friend Joanne (who knew we would be using the theater tickets that had been given earlier due to the misinformation that was were engaged) some of which he read aloud to me:

“Doesn’t using an engagement present make you contractually obligated to actually become engaged beforehand?”

“I’m working on it!”

“I call BS! Screw your courage to the sticking post!”

Walking home from mass, I asked Ted what he wanted with regards to all this engagement talk. 

“I hear what other people think, and I know what I think, but what are you thinking?  Do you want to have it be something dramatic, to surprise me?  Do you want it to be collaborative?  Do you want me to surprise you?”

“Well, I think something collaborative would be more in keeping with the relationship we have and want to have.”

“True.”

“So what does the engagement mean then, if it’s something we talk about in advance?  And what is the purpose really of being engaged.  Is it just a time to plan the wedding? An open door to start really asking seriously if we do want to be married?  A time to learn what that even means and prepare ourselves?”

We decided that if, hypothetically, we were engaged, we would want to spend the time between engagement and marriage talking to couples and to each other, and learning what this means, and who we are, and how we want to be in relationship.  By this time we are once again in his parents’ kitchen, between the island and the wide clear windows that face the backyard.

“So,” Ted says, “can I just ask you now?”

“Um—ask me what? What do you mean?  Do you see that black squirrel?”  Suddenly feeling shy, I couldn’t bear to look at his face.

“Amy, you’re going to have to look at me.”

“I can’t.” Is he being serious? Is this really what’s happening?  I felt capacity only for questions.

“Amy, I need eye contact for this,” gently taking my face in his hands, “Amy Elizabeth Martha Nee, will you marry me.”

“Mhm.” I intoned, leaning into him, hiding my face in his shoulder.

“Mhm? Mhm! What does that mean? Is that a maybe? A yes?!”

“Ha, yes, yes!”

“Okay now you ask me with my full name, if you know it.”

“Of course I know it! But is it Vern or Vernon?”

“Vern.”

“Vern Edward Walker, will you marry me?”

“Yes! Enthusiastically! Ecstatically! Clearly!”

And so it was, and so it is.  We are getting married this summer.

The Beginning

Here I Am

“Here I am, sitting in the Maryhouse office – making use of the desk for writing, the CD player for listening – making myself ‘at home.’” This is how I begin a journal entry, March 29, pausing to consider what I’d written reflexively, and the implications of this phrase fill me with wonder and gratitude; “It’s true, I do feel at home.” That was nearly a month ago. Much has happened since both to affirm and challenge this feeling of finding myself at home here amongst this strange cast of characters, in this crumbling old music school, in the East Village of Manhattan.

 These happenings have served to distract me from my ambition of giving an account each week of the events that transpire and my responses to them. Now, as I try to recall these things to the present, I find everything is a jumble. I am sitting at Ted’s desk that I often commandeer since my room is too small for a desk. Ted is stretched out on a mattress on the floor beneath the window copying out a Rilke poem for our wedding. Outside, the sound of one man’s rich melodic Islamic chant competes with the street-cleaner’s truck that rumbles down the south side of our street every Monday and Thursday. Beside me is a notebook in which I sketched highlights from my journal March 24 to April 13 to give me a framework, but now it is April 26 and there is more and more and more.

 Present in my mind and asking for consideration is not the beginning of my burgeoning responsibility in the house – managing the clothing room, preparing and serving meals, answering the door and telephone, welcoming guests, making decisions without consultation – the sweetness and frustration of sharing shifts with Ted and finding how differently we make decisions, the strangeness and beauty of Holy Week, Martha’s fast from words and food, birthday celebrations, becoming engaged to be married (that will have it’s own separate story!) with all the joys and fears that rush in, weeks of prayer and lectures, and strangers and friends forever at the door or in the house, and the multitude of details that shout between the lines and make all of this riotously alive.

 Present in my mind is the memorial mass at St. Joe’s for a fourteen year old girl died by her own hand last week. Her father was a friend of the house. Their story is convoluted and I am confused by the little I know, but his anger and heartache rang clear as he read from his own writing at the end of the mass. And I am thinking too of the tiny woman who, just the night before had shifted from her usually mousey-meek demeanor to a bitter rage when she was asked to leave the house. She threatened that if the police or hospital were called she would kill herself and told Ted, who was trying to reason with her, that her blood would be on his hands. I am thinking too of a woman I call “Sister Job” because she would not tell me her name but kept reading to me from the book of Job, especially the end when Job’s fortune turned and he was blessed with an abundance beyond what had been taken from him. “That’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she would say, “I believe that’s God’s promise to me too. I’m kinda like Job.” And she would speak so beautifully of developing a heart of constant worship, showing how the words of the Magnificat are nearly smudged from her bible because of how frequently she reads and runs her fingers over them. Then she would shift suddenly to God’s judgment, especially how those who stare at her will get theirs in the end, coming back again and again to people who stare, “that’s rude and that’s wrong,” she repeated continually. She would say it and level on me a searching, hunted look with her dark, uneven eyes and all I could think to say is, “you’re right, it is wrong.” Then there is the ever present Angie; her new set of false teeth, her inability to keep a jacket or pair of shoes for more than a day at a time, her constant requests and sweet sociability that’s broken at times with surprising howls when something has gone wrong. I am thinking too of my seemingly bi-monthly descents into emotional tumult when all my attention becomes focused on refraining from tears until I am in a room alone, when I become critical and insecure, when I can barely stand to talk with anyone, question my ability and stability, and feel a desperate desire to flee either to the desert where I can be tried and refined in solitude, unseen, or to “home,” wherever and whatever that might be, where I can be comforted and disappear into familiarity. It was during one of those times that I read the following poem, by Rumi:

Do not ask questions about longing Look in my face. Soul-drunk, body-ruined, these two sit helpless in a wrecked wagon. Neither knows how to fix it. And my heart, I would say it is more like a donkey sunk in a mudhole, struggling and miring deeper. But listen to me. For one moment stop being sad. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you. God.

And I looked out the window of my sanctuary bedroom, and sure enough, a soft breathing breeze was freeing the white petals from the limbs of trees and filling the sky with them, and so it is with the blessings that breeze into and fill my sky. I share love and life and work with a brilliant, tender-hearted man who (though I often forget it) is a wonderful mystery that I’m being given the privilege to explore for the rest of my life. I live in a house where, to the best of our ability we provide a space for the hungry to be fed, the naked (or scantily clad) to be dressed, the lonely to have companions, the sick to be cared for. I live in a house where, though we also contend and have conflict with each other, we aim to contend with oppressive forces in ourselves and in our world so that we might better love each other, ourselves, our God. Two dear friends from the Chicago Catholic Worker drove to New York to celebrate life with me the weekend of my birthday adding to the feeling that all of my families, my human homes, were in some way present with me – the White Rose, the Nees, Maryhouse, St. Joe’s, the Walkers – and that I am filled with more love and blessing than one woman’s body can hold. Trying to store it up will only make me burst; may it flow out from me and become life-giving water for those who thirst.