Wangerin - As For Me and My House

AS FOR ME
& MY HOUSE

Other Books by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Novels
The Book of God
The Book of the Dun Cow
The Book of Sorrows
The Crying for a Vision
Paul: A Novel

Children's Books
The Bedtime Rhyme
In the Beginning There Was No Sky
Mary's First Christmas
Peter's First Easter
Potter
Probity Jones and the Fear Not Angel
Thistle
Water, Come Down!

Collections of Short Stories and Essays
In the Days of the Angels
Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?
The Manger Is Empty
Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace
Ragman and Other Cries of Faith

Theology
Mourning into Dancing
The Orphean Passages: The Drama of Faith
Whole Prayer

Devotional
A Prayerbook for Husbands and Wives
Preparing for Jesus
Reliving the Passion

Poetry
A Miniature Cathedral and Other Poems

AS FOR ME
& MY HOUSE

WALTER WANGERIN, JR .

CRAFTING YOUR MARRIAGE TO LAST

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wangerin, Walter.
As for me and my house / Walter Wangerin. Expanded ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7852-6671-2
1. MarriageReligious aspectsChristianity. I. Title.
BV835.W36 1990
248.8 '44dc20

90-30602
CIP

Expanded Edition Copyright 1990 by Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Copyright1987 by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and used by permission.

13 14 15 RRD 08

ISBN-10: 0-7852-6671-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7852-6671-6

Whenever I write, dear Thanne, whatever I write,
I write for you.

CONTENTS

1. When Does Marriage Begin?
Introducing Marriage, Thanne, and Mortal Fears

2. Who Did I Marry After All?
Idealization/Realization

3. How Shall We Live Together?
Mutualization and Gender Differences

4. What Kind of Relationship Is Marriage Meant to Be?
The Divine Ideal

5. How Does Sin Destroy the Marital Ideal?
The Reality

6. What Is Forgiveness?
The Divine Absurdity

7. How Do We Practice Forgiveness?
Steps to Accomplish the Necessary Miracle

8. How Do We Preserve the Goodness Gained in Forgiving?
The Covenant

10. The First Task:
Truthfulness and Dependability

11. The Second Task:
Sharing the Work of Survival

12. The Third Task:
Talking and Listening

13. The Fourth Task:
Making Love

15. The Fifth Task:
Healing

17. The Sixth Task:
Gifting and Volunteering

ONE
WHEN DOES
MARRIAGE BEGIN?
Introducing Marriage,
Thanne, and Mortal Fears

B y Christmas, 1967,1 not only did, but I also knew that I did, love Thanne. On New Year's Eve, then, 1967, such knowledge and such loving pitched me headlong into a crisis wherein I suffered a blindness, from which I arosemarried.

Do you suppose the experience is a common one?

I had been courting Thanne Bohlmann in the old-fashionedest way for a full year, myself in perfect control of the progress of our relationship, congratulating myself for cool control. On May 2, 1967, I had written in my diary: I have found the woman I intend to marry. Nothing has been said to her, nor shall anything be said until the time is right. She'll know before I speak, however, because I intend consciously to court the woman. No. As yet I don't love her with a marrying lovebut I will. I'll be courting both Thanne and my love...

Thus wrote a young man of supernal self-confidence, absolutely ignorant of the crisis he was preparing for himself and the anguish to come at New Year's Eve, the end of that same year. So I wrote my perfectly emotionless strategem in perfectly chiseled sentences in my diaryand so I began.

I sent a stream of letters from my university in Oxford, Ohio, to Thanne's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, seeking to dazzle her with sunlight on my liquid language. This was my tool, that I could write. I philosophized, poeticized, postured, theologized, and generally drew a favorable portrait of myself in my own words. I spent the summer at my parents' house in Chicago, writing my master's thesis and junketing northward to Milwaukee in a beaten VW bug, there to visit Thanne, to talk with her, to watch her slantwise when she didn't know that I was watching, to assess our progress and to be, for her, a significant person. Oh, I withheld myself from her those days in a holy decorumfor three reasons. First, Thanne still suffered from an earlier rejection and was acutely suspicious of the motives of men. I could handle that. Second, I was myself waiting to feel a marrying (as I said) love for herand I could handle the wait until I did. And third, I was in control of the situation. I was handling everything. Therefore, by the end of the summer I had done this: I had taken her hand as we walked on the shores of Lake Michigan; and I had drawn her portrait with soft pencils on expensive paper; and I had kissed heronce.

I wrote in my diary, I will love her. I will. And I wrote, God help me in my courting and her in her understanding. Amen.

My VW was a yellow convertible which I called Hadrian for the vast, triumphal traveling that it did. In October Hadrian and I drove to the farm in Illinois where Thanne grew upagain, there to meet her for a weekend.

The farmer's daughter. It was a wonder how easily Thanne fit to a country landscape, how familiar she and the black earth were, one with the other. Her spirit was the autumn air, and her forehead as smooth as the sky.

She had a younger sister named Dorothy who would live forever with their parents, who chose not to talk, and who got away with that because she had Down's syndrome. Whether or not anyone else in the family knew that I was courting Thanne, Dorothy knewand she was not sure she approved. Dorothy, soft as dough; Dorothy, broad in the buttocks, no taller than she was wide; Dorothy, whose face was as unreadable as an empty plate; Dorothy, whose eyes slanted at the corners, made her doubts known, nonetheless, by her actions.

After supper Saturday night Thanne and I retired to the back porch, to the evening breezes and a chill October snap, to a fine old creaking hanging swing from which to watch the sunset together a perfect place for courting. Do you know how close two people can feel when the round horizon seems so distant and burns so beautiful? They imagine they are an outpost, and they want to protect each other in the universe. So Thanne and I sat side by side, preparing to gaze across the fields now harvested, stiff and stubbled like animal fur. I had just begun to consider some nonsense we might murmur