Doug
There are some pieces you don’t want to write, but eventually their time comes. They must be written. I told the first part of this story when my angel passed away. Like many, perhaps most, Christians I spent some time in the wilderness convinced that organized religion was for other people. For a decade I had faith in my intelligence and rational skills — maybe granted by God, but now I was on my own and that was fine, I remember scoffing to the heavens.
So God, sense of humor that He has, seems to have chuckled mildly at me and sent me a 5 week old Border Collie rescue with the challenge to see how well I do with just her.
Well, she stopped my arrogance in its tracks. In that story, which I’m told is my best, I tell how she saved my marriage and mention my faith and allude to some mentors.
One of those mentors retired today, which is not usually a big deal, but this mentor is a priest. So he won’t be in the pulpit anymore.
I was up at church the other day post some meeting or another and talking with another rector friend. Our discussion turned to my denial about the coming retirement. Really, I’m pretending it’s not happening, as if it simply won’t happen. His teaching and guidance has been so significant to me, I can’t get my head around this date barreling toward us.
Matt, my rector friend, laughed at me. (This does seem to be a theme, no? Authorities laughing at me?) He has read my dog story, and while he totally appreciates the cause-in-fact worth of the thing that stops you sends you looking for the right path, he told me, “You know, to the world, the dog gets all the credit when it sounds like Doug did most of the work.” Like my husband, Matt has this annoying habit of being right.
Ripley, the dog, did stop me in my tracks and made me ask the fateful question: maybe I don’t know everything. My husband was a stalwart, believing that I would work all of my questions out — even while I was prone to wild swings of opinion and attitude for almost two years while I did. Two wise elder women indulged me more than a few long hours of advice to keep me from going gimbal lock. But the Rev. Dr. Douglas Richnow did the work.
I had been raised in the Baptist Church. Saved in my early teens, I had been your typical faithful Texas girl until second semester of college. I went out on a third, maybe fourth, date with a guy I met at Campus Crusade. We were talking about our plans for the next year. I wasn’t going to be a CC leader because I felt I needed to focus on my grades. (I’d had a great first semester, a lazy second one.) He replied with obvious disapproval that sometimes we miss what God wants us to do.
I don’t recall if I had been questioning faith before that moment, and actually I never did question my faith in God, but I was done with organized religion of any kind from that moment on and for the next 10 years. Who in the blazes was this 19 year old kid to tell me what God’s plan was for me?! That was between God and me.
Fast-forward through my decade as a stubborn deist. It wasn’t awful, although I was more fearful and nervous than I would have admitted at the time. I was lonely and completely inept at curing that. I eventually went to law school to gain control of my life and ended up going into debt because I was naive. That sort of thing.
About seven years into this decade, I met my husband, but that wasn’t a love-at-first-sight and together-ever-since story. For one, soon after we met I took a job in the British Virgin Islands, and then when I got back and went to Austin for law school, he went to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Things were very unsure for a while, with us and other parts of my life. I was getting arrogant, in that way that people do to hide their waning confidence.
Then came Ripley. The stop.
Then came the proposal. So we needed to find a church. I had no interest in returning to the Baptist church and my fiancé was a cradle Episcopalian. My mom and I found a church to perform the service and Jim transferred his letter from the Cathedral in Dallas to St. John the Divine in Houston. We couldn’t make the marriage classes with Jim living overseas. No problem, as I didn’t think we needed them. I, the good-girl, anti-feminist marrying the upstanding family man with a promising professional future, had done this whole picking a husband right. We loved and respected each other and wanted the same things in life. This was going to be fine. (I mentioned the arrogance above? Yeah, peak.)
But Father Richnow disagreed. Everyone needed to go though the marriage classes and he set aside time in his schedule for Jim and I to have private, intense pre-marital counseling sessions when Jim was in the country. I’ll spare readers the details, but the sessions quickly became about helping me with assorted issues. I was kinda getting by on sheer force of will.
Those counseling sessions are the reason we are still married. They are the reason I have children. They are the reason I still have an extended family.
Doug married us in September of 2000. He’s an excellent officiant. I don’t remember much from that night but the time of Doug, Jim, and I at the altar. Most everything else is a blur, but that is crystal clear, like it was yesterday. Complete with the red carpet that used to be in the sanctuary.
At first Doug’s counsel was helping with my family issues, but oh man, our marriage. I’d done everything right, remember? So now that I was married, everything was supposed to go my way. But marriage doesn’t work that way. No partnership works that way. Again, Ripley jumped in, literally this time. (This is why she got such high billing. She was the big stops without which the thinking has no time to happen.) This time she stopped the fight that could have ended my life as I know it. Only this time, I didn’t just ask a question. This time, I had knowledge to answer that question, and I knew where to get more.
The next day, I uncurled myself from my fetal position on our bed — Jim had gone to the office or the grocery story, I don’t remember, and I had engaged in a pity session — and resolved to re-try God’s way. My way wasn’t working. In this context, it meant worrying more about the kind of wife I was than the kind of husband I had. It also meant I was now using Doug’s tool box all the time, not just with my family.
Within days, things were better. Within hours really, but it was within days that Jim and I started getting comments that we seemed relaxed, calmer, happier…better.
Since things had gone so well, I decided to enroll in Father Doug’s Discovery Class at church. Again, I thought I was too cool for it before, but now I knew it would mean a lot to my husband, and I was curious about the liturgy — now that it had stopped sounding like the Borg to my Baptist ears. My faith in Doug’s teaching was high so I would have taken this step with no one else.
Still, I went in defensive. He’s taught this class for decades, so I doubt I was his most pain in the butt student, but I wouldn’t fall over from shock if I make a top 25 list or something. Not that he has such a list. Theoretically speaking.
Turns out I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. By this point, I’d stopped being shocked by that.
And so it happened one Sunday morning a few months later that Jim and I stood for the passing of the Peace. The priest says “Peace be with you.” And for the first time ever, I realized I knew what it meant.
I don’t know if he knows. For one, I’ve never told him so directly. I write more directly than I speak. For another he’s a priest. This is the work God has given to him to do, so I am one among so very many he has helped this way. But it is all true.
Jim and I think alike these days. Seventeen years of partnership will do that. He wrote Doug a letter this morning — the paper kind; we think alike but we don’t act alike. He asked me to read it. Guess who was holding my husband up to have faith in me back in our first year of marriage. Yeah. Doug. I never knew. My husband closed his letter to Doug perfectly, “Thank you for everything — and I do mean everything”.
