The nuns tell me they want me to present on the Nuns and Nones idea at their September community meeting in a few weeks. There isn’t much for me to do but wait.
Well. Wait, and finally introduce Josh to the nuns.
Sister Suzanne sent out an invitation to the spiritual formation group months ago, and I put it on our shared Google calendar. During the last week of August, the nuns host a picnic in a park for the Visitation Companions. When Josh and I talk through our end-of-summer plans, about whether we can squeeze in a camping trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior, I remind him of the picnic.
“We have to go,” I say, pointing to the purple-shaded item on the calendar on my computer screen. “I committed months ago. And, you haven’t really met the nuns yet.”
Months later, when I ask Josh what he remembers about the picnic, he said he had a good time.
“You did?” I said. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Of course, I did,” he said. “The sisters are so warm. They make you feel welcome right away.”
It was true. The sisters seem to exude joy whenever I see them. Sister Katherine gives me a hug and a humongous smile, sometimes clapping her hands together in delight. Sister Karen leans in to ask me how the writing is going, how the children are doing in school. Sister Mary Frances’s rich alto voice declares “Stina!” when she makes eye-contact, as though I were the prodigal daughter returning home. They are hard not to love.
The nuns’ picnic is like this: wooden picnic benches in a park by the Mississippi River, a grove of towering cottonwood trees casting dappled shade on end-of-summer grass, kids running about the lawn, spinning, cartwheeling, leaping like little goats. The normal constraints of the city, the “watch out for the broken glass” and “hold my hand when you cross the street” are blissfully unnecessary. We are picnicking by the river and it is glorious.
I carry a bowl of salad for the potluck, two silver serving spoons poking out like bunny ears, and add it to a crowded table. Sister Suzanne bustles about, opening coolers and setting out plastic cutlery. The nuns gush and shake hands with Josh. (“So wonderful to finally meet you, Josh!”) He makes small talk with the others. Someone hands us each a bottled water that sweats with water droplets.
Josh is with me, meeting the sisters and other Visitation Companions, and it’s a good thing. We pile our plates with burgers, hot dogs, potato chips, salad, watermelon. My daughter sprawls across my lap, red juice dripping down her hands, listening to the adults chatter around her.
Someone has brought blue camp chairs, the kind that fold up like umbrellas, and my son sits with his paper plate on his lap. Sister Karen offers him a small can of A&W root beer, and he takes tiny sips before carefully placing it back into the cupholder. We wear name tags and I meet new people, but mostly I watch Josh talking to the sisters, smiling. He laughs and they laugh, and later Sister Karen tells me, “You didn’t tell us your husband was so handsome!”
At the end of the picnic, the sisters invite us to join them in evening prayer. They pass around booklets so worn and soft that I worry the stapled bindings will break, shedding whole pages across the lawn. We sing hymns and recite prayers and occasionally I shoot glances over to Josh, who is sitting at a picnic table on the edge of our circle, looking at his phone. The kids grumble, “This is boring,” and I hand them potato chips, one by one.
We are a small circle, a cluster of Catholic sisters and laypeople, joining our words to an ancient prayer form. Josh sits on the outside edge, not participating. He is only here because of me, because of duty, because he knows our marriage only works when we try to love what the other loves. It’s part of the commitment we have both made. When Josh was in the Mycology Club in graduate school, I would join his friends for forays to hunt for chanterelles and chicken-of-the-woods in forest preserves, not because I am crazy about mushrooms but because he was. Loving each other doesn’t mean giving up our distinct beliefs or practices. Loving each other means we each seek to understand and honor what the other holds sacred.
In another way, it’s how I practice the vows we made to mutually obey one another. Kathleen Norris writes that, at its root, “The word obey means ‘hear.’ And listening in that sense, as mutual obedience, is fundamental to marriage. . . . Such intimacy is a great gift, but it also contains the challenge of doing what is necessary, every single day, to maintain the relationship.”
In all my thoughts on marriage growing up, I never expected that mine would lead to a nuns’ picnic. I never expected to be here, praying thousand-year-old prayers while my husband scrolls Twitter at a respectful distance. But there is no denying the sweetness, the grins and laughter, the subtle flirting with these Catholic octogenarians who have taught me so much this year about faithfulness and joy. As I watched them, I remembered Kathleen Norris’s statement to me the year before, when I had asked her about her own lapsed-Catholic husband: “Oh, he made friends with the monks while he was here.” Maybe this is what she meant—that this overlap in worlds could feel like joy. That it reflected her husband’s willingness to understand the things she found sacred.
When evening prayer finally ends, we gather up the kids who are now climbing trees. I place plastic wrap over the Pyrex bowl of half-eaten salad to take home. Sister Mary Frances offers the kids ice cream sandwiches that are melting into their paper wrappers, and their eyes light up like fireflies.
We say our goodbyes and carry our children across the grassy lawn to the parking lot. All the while, the Mississippi River is several hundred feet away, lazing its way down to Saint Anthony Falls where it will rush and pound and foam. I wonder how long it will take that water to travel the entire length of these United States, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, where the fresh water releases into an ocean of salt.
In a month, Josh will run across this river on the Franklin Avenue Bridge a few miles downstream. He will be at mile nineteen of the Twin Cities Marathon, and the kids will make signs and stand with me along Summit Avenue to cheer for him. I don’t understand why he runs marathons, why he wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to get his miles in before work, but I show up for his races anyway.
Wendell Berry writes that marriage, like any form, “serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. . . . The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
Some days I am not sure where our stream is headed, whether there is a waterfall coming our way. Today, at least, we are listening closely to each other, circumventing rocks and meeting each other on the other side. Today, it sounds like laughter.