“Yes,” the man said quietly, “East Tennessee is beautiful.” He offered nothing more.
“Is this your first Faith at Work Conference?” Mallie asked. Surely that would provoke a conversation so she would not have to sit there in silence.
The man turned to look at her and began to talk. “This is our third conference in two years. I’m here with my wife and a group of friends,” he said. “We lost our youngest child three years ago. She was on her tricycle and was hit by an Asplundh truck in front of our house. He never saw her.” The man spoke as if he were telling a story he had told a thousand times, each time convincing himself of the truth of it.
Mallie was stunned. She could not imagine anything in life more horrifying or painful than losing a child. And an Asplundh truck in front of his house. Dear God! She could see the huge orange behemoth with its black lettering on the side, lumbering down the street. Why hadn’t the child seen it? Or heard it? Why hadn’t the driver seen the child? The thought was unspeakable. Still, she felt that she had to say something. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, “so, so sorry.” It sounded hollow.
“She’s with the Lord,” the man said quietly. “That’s my comfort. She’s with him.”
Mallie reached over and touched his arm. “I admire your courage,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said. Then, as calmly as if he had changed channels on a television set, he said, “So, what workshop are you going to this afternoon?”
Before she even thought about the best way to respond to his question, she blurted out: “Well, unfortunately, I’m going to Dave Stoner’s workshop on ‘marriage and divorce’.”
The man didn’t flinch or change his expression. He asked simply, “Why’d you choose to go to that one?”
Mallie took a deep breath. This was going to be her second experience in two days of revealing herself to a total stranger. She might not have had the courage if he had not told her about losing his child. “Because I’m separated from my husband and I may end up divorced.” There. It was the truth and she had said it aloud. She tried to prepare herself for his critical judgment in case he was not as empathetic and kind as Alan Fremont had been the night before. He might even be one of those Christians who did not believe in divorce.
The man smiled at her—an understanding, not a mocking smile—and said, “Well, then, Mallie Vose, if that’s the case, I’d say fortunately you are going to Dave Stoner’s workshop on ‘marriage and divorce’.”
What a twist of thinking! A cool stream ran through the heated knots in her body, releasing the grip of negative thoughts. She sighed and looked at him in admiration. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re absolutely right. Thank you for that.”
They continued eating and chatting easily about Louise Mohr’s singing the night before and the books that had been written by different workshop leaders. Mallie admitted that she had never heard of any of the leaders before, certainly had never read any of their books.
“Keith Miller’s The Taste of New Wine is one of my favorites,” the man said. “And The Becomers. He’s really a good writer. Really honest about life and himself.”
Mallie recalled her thoughts about Keith Miller as he stood on the platform talking about The Becomers in the morning workshop. She was embarrassed that she had been analyzing his beautiful hair, his handsome face, and the way he spoke so intimately into the microphone, rather than listening to the message of his words. Maybe she would buy one of his books and read it after she got home.
“He’s recently separated from his wife. Did you know that?” the man asked.
Mallie shook her head. She couldn’t imagine that anyone who had written a Christian book and was a workshop leader at Faith at Work would be separated from his wife.
“And Dave Stoner’s been recently divorced,” he said. “They say it’s has been a horribly painful time for both of them.”
Mallie tried to keep her expression calm with a million thoughts raging through her head. Separation and divorce. Keith Miller and Dave Stoner. Painful times for both of them. Neither of them had perfect lives, as she had been taught to believe that Christians had perfect lives. Nor had the man sitting next to her who had lost a child. She thought of Tom and his wife and their three children. He told her his wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis years before, but that she was mostly in remission. Obviously he didn’t have a perfect life either. It seemed that being a Christian was no protection against human difficulties.
Chapter Twenty
For Mallie, Dave Stoner’s workshop on marriage and divorce that afternoon was full of helpful information, some aspects resonant with what she had been learning in her counseling sessions, some completely new. Initially, Dave spoke of the “death of a marriage.” Ever since she first heard that concept from Tom, she had taken it to heart. It had become a mantra against the assault of guilt that she felt for breaking her commitment “until death do us part.” But underneath the idea, she still had her doubts. Dave Stoner’s lecture was another step toward liberation.
“When a marriage is dead,” he said, “when the love is dead—the commitment is dead. Love, after all, is the core of commitment.”
“What is love?” he asked the assembled group. Then, without waiting for an answer, he wrote his definition in big block letters on a blackboard.
A DEFINITION OF LOVE:
I WISH FOR YOU GOOD AND NOT BAD.
I WILL BE THERE FOR YOU.
I WILL NOT RUN AWAY.
I WILL BE WHAT YOU NEED ME TO BE—WITHIN THE LIMITS OF MY VALUE SYSTEM.
Mallie studied the words. Right away, the ideas appealed to her, although the last two lines were puzzling. What did he mean by “I will be what you need me to be—within the limits of my value system’?”
“Everyone’s value system is not the same,” Dave Stoner explained. “Suppose someone wants you to physically or psychologically abuse him or her in some way. If you see that as harmful, then it is not within your value system. You must trust yourself in that case. Your value system is between you and God. You need to honor that trust.”
Mallie wondered if she had gone against her own value system through the years of denying Larry’s affairs with other women. Perhaps she had been lying to herself that she was being loving to him by protecting him—and her family. Maybe she had not really been what he needed her to be—maybe, however misguided, she had been protecting herself and her marriage. And what about the idea of running away? She knew she had run away—if not physically, certainly emotionally. She knew also that there had been times when she had wished for Larry bad and not good. She was angry with him. According to Dave Stoner’s definition, she had obviously not been loving to Larry. But neither had he been loving toward her. Larry had unquestionably run away from her, from their marriage. She thought about Tom Matthews. Could she follow those criteria for loving him? Yes, she believed that she could easily do all of those things for him. She smiled, remembering that Tom had said that he “would always be there” for her.
“Love exists in relationship,” Dave Stoner went on to say. “If there’s no relationship, there can be no love. Love starts with your relationship to yourself. To use the First Commandment as a guide—to love God with all your heart and with all your mind—it begins with the belief that God exists in the deepest part of you. That means that your first relationship responsibility is to yourself. You must love yourself if you are ever to love anyone else.”
He went on to explain that in his own life—and therefore, in his marriage—he had not really understood that loving God meant loving himself. He and his wife went through many years together—raising a family and going to church every Sunday—without being honest and loving within each of their own hearts. When trouble came, that habit, that outward expression of love, did not sustain them. He did not specify the trouble, but he spoke to his rapt audience with passion and conviction. “We must have an honest, loving, personal relationship to whatever it is that we think of as God
within us, and we need to apply those same values in our relationship with each other—in both marriage and in divorce.”
In the question and answer period of Dave Stoner’s lecture, someone asked about a parent’s responsibility to children in a divorce. He began by suggesting that both parents needed to support their children in learning to live with only one parent at home, no matter what the relationship was to the other parent.
“Answer all their questions as honestly as you can,” he said. “Don’t offer any information they’re not ready to hear. It won’t help them, and it’ll only end up hurting you in the long run.” That was similar to what Tom had told Mallie when she and Larry separated.
He ended his lecture by saying: “Love is not only the core of a good marriage, it is also the core of a good divorce.”
Mallie left the room with much to think about.
At the farewell dinner that night, Bruce Larson addressed the theme of the conference, the core idea of “Creative Living.” It seemed a perfect echo of Dave Stoner’s workshop message—and exactly what Mallie knew she needed to hear.
“The essence of God is the Creative Spirit,” he said, “always present, constantly renewable, an underground spring that is eternal. It exists in the deepest part of our being—as well as in the core of everything that lives and breathes. In order to know that spring, we must break the chains of our childhood fears, the negative barriers that are lodged in our minds. That is our most difficult task as Christians—as spiritual human beings. All of our poets and painters instinctively know that spring, that connection to the Creative Spirit, whether or not they call it God. They hold and nurture that relationship to the eternal. And so must we.”
By the end of the weekend, Mallie’s mind was exploding with ideas. She could almost laugh at the dubious, skittish person who had arrived at the front desk and met Louise Mohr on Friday afternoon. With a new enthusiasm, she sang the songs of praise along with the group at their final dinner. She didn’t go so far as to walk up to the stage when there was a call for new Christians to come forward and give themselves to Jesus. There was something about the drama of all that staged business that still bothered her.
At the end she hugged all her new friends goodbye—Alan and Paige, some of the people in her workshops, even a brief hug with Keith Miller. Besides carrying a signed copy of his book A Taste of New Wine, she left with a stack of “relational religion” paperback books to read. She was determined to go home with a new understanding of the Creative Spirit in her heart. She could hardly wait to share her new beliefs with Tom Matthews.
Chapter Twenty-one
For the first ten minutes of her weekly appointment with Tom, Mallie spilled out her stories of her Faith at Work experience—the opening night with Alan Fremont, the lecture by Keith Miller and the workshop with Dave Stoner, the idea of God as Creative Spirit, the prospect of believing in herself because that Creative Spirit was the deepest part of herself. She even told him about the man that she met at lunch, whose name she had forgotten, who had lost a child and turned her thinking around about attending the workshop on divorce.
Tom listened patiently, then said, “What you had, Mallie, was a mountaintop experience. It’s a great place to reach, but it’s a hard place to maintain.”
“Are you saying it won’t last?” It was discouraging to imagine losing all the positive things she had gathered from the weekend, deflating the buoyancy that had so lifted her spirits.
“No, not that you will lose it,” he said. “I’m saying it will change over time. It’s like stretching a knitted sweater out of shape. It never goes back to its original size. What you heard there—what you learned—was all good information and much of it has lasting value. But getting all that spiritual insight at once is so powerful—you can’t hold onto it in exactly that way.”
Mallie sat back in her chair. She knew he was right. She had already betrayed her own private Faith at Work vow to give up her fear of the unknown and be patient and honest with everyone in her life. All the way home in the car her mind went back and forth between happy positive thoughts and anguish over her financial situation. Before she had been home an hour, she had lost her temper at Larry. He had brought the boys home after seven thirty on Sunday when he had assured her he would be there by five. She hardly let him explain that the game on television ran overtime and the boys asked to stay until the end. She had also lied to her mother in her Monday morning long distance conversation.
“I guess I’ve already come down,” she said with a shrug. “I blew up at Larry and I lied to my mother this morning. I told her I’d gone to Nashville to stay with an old friend from camp. She would never have understood about Faith at Work.”
“Sometimes you have to fudge the truth a little to protect your-self—or someone else,” Tom said. “That’s not really lying, not in any sinful sense. Sin, after all, is not something you do—or don’t do. It’s a state of separation from God.”
It didn’t occur to Mallie at the time that Tom might “fudge the truth a little” to protect himself. Nor did she want to pursue the definition of sin as separation from God. She didn’t want to talk about sin or God. All she was interested in at that moment was getting through the talk stage of her appointment. With a part of her still floating in the euphoria of her experience at Faith at Work, she felt even more passionate toward Tom.
Within seconds, she reached for him and the two of them fell onto the couch. When he kissed her, she wanted to burrow inside of him. Too soon—at least in her mind—he lifted her away from him, reminding her that their time was up. It always came too soon for her. He kissed her one last time and assured her he loved her and he would be thinking of her all week between their appointments.
Mallie drove away from St. Michael’s on a high note. She felt nothing but the positive things in her life. Faith at Work had given her a new perspective on religion as a Creative Spirit and on surviving her future without Larry. Tom had given her reassurance that he loved her.
Quite suddenly, as if a foreign body had invaded her consciousness, she began to experience clear images of some of her most cherished memories with Larry. The timing seemed absurd. Her whole being had been filled with Tom and suddenly she was face to face with Larry—the Larry that she had once loved—along with an entire scrapbook of their life together. As if her experience with Tom had opened the door to the place in her brain where she stored happiness, she was blinded by pictures of the past, joyful times with Larry that had been all but crushed under the weight of suspicion and anger and fear.
For the first time she saw the possibility that all the places and people she had loved and shared with Larry for eighteen years would change dramatically if they were divorced. Christmas mornings with the boys, the joy of standing beside her husband and watching their sons’ eyes widen when Larry lowered the sheets covering the entrance to the living room, their rush toward the lit Christmas tree and all their presents stacked in piles. Family hikes with Bingo on Sunday afternoons in Shelby Forest. Boating trips on Pickwick Lake—Larry teaching each of the boys to waterski. Their summers in Watch Hill. Until that moment it had not occurred to Mallie that she would lose Watch Hill. Of course, she would. The place belonged to Larry’s family. It had been Vose territory for generations. And she would lose Edie, her dear mother-in-law. In her mind’s eye, she could see the tiny, trim woman with her cap of curly, silver-streaked hair that framed a face dominated by enormous light brown eyes. Mallie always thought Edie resembled a small, lovable, furry animal, bubbling with chatter and infectious laughter. On the day that she met Edie, her future mother-in-law had asked her to call her by her first name. “I always knew Larry would marry someone I would love,” she said. Hearing the echo of her mother-in-law’s voice, Mallie felt a searing pain in her chest. And what about her father-in-law? She thought of the tall, taciturn, professorial lawyer, an overseer at Harvard whom she had once called Mr. Vose. How she loved both of her in-laws! After the boys were born, she had le
arned to call her father-in-law Poppy. Through the years, she had watched him patiently teaching his grandsons to fly-fish. She listened to him give brilliant toasts at family events and speak quietly to her about politics and world affairs. Certain pronouncements he made were etched in her mind. “Civilization is a race between ignorance and education,” he once said.
In all Mallie’s years of knowing her in-laws, neither one of them had ever criticized her and often praised her for being a good mother. She even felt that, on occasion, they would take her side over Larry’s. The thought that she would never be with either of her in-laws, close to them again, saddened her. Her summers in Watch Hill had opened a new world of family experiences that she could not bear to think of losing.
As if God himself had spoken to her, she felt the full force of Tom’s pronouncement of “sin as separation.” She had never thought of herself as a sinful person. But if sin were separation and sin caused pain, she was surely sinful. She was separated from Larry, separated from her marriage—separated from everything that she had valued and tried to protect. She was alone in the world. She pulled over on the side of the road and buried her face in her hands.
Chapter Twenty-two
“Mallie, where’ve you been? I’ve been calling you all day with no answer.” Jenny’s usual soft, comforting voice was sharp with breathless urgency.
“Today was my April board meeting at the Art Academy. Why? What’s the matter?”
“Hold on, my friend—you’ve got a shock coming,” Jenny said.
Mallie’s back stiffened, her jaw tightened. “What is it?” She knew whatever was coming must have something to do with Larry. Jenny had promised her that she would not keep any information about Larry a secret from her ever again.
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