In a new place

It has been so long since I last updated this blog that I hardly remember where I was the last time I posted. It seems so long ago. In March we were still planning our wedding and were immersed in the minutiae of rental furniture, dress making, and travel plans. I am happy to report that it all went amazingly well. We were married in a beautiful Orthodox ceremony on a perfect spring day supported by the amazing love of our friends and family.

For the past four months we have been dealing with transitions: me to a new house, Chris into less of his house, and both of us into successive periods of unemployment. Chris has been at his new job for a month and I am newly unemployed, which is probably how I'm finding the time to finally update this blog again. We are going to be ok financially, and being unemployed as a married person is certainly a different experience than the same unemployment as a single person. We'll make it.

We continue to attend both the Catholic mass and the Orthodox liturgy every Sunday morning, which is just as difficult as it always has been. I don't think we're much closer to figuring out how we will raise our eventual children as we were before the wedding, but we still have some time to figure it out. The good thing is that our bond of love grows and puts things into new perspectives, so I'm confident that the right decisions will be made at the right times. The day to day living of it all is still something we're working on figuring out.

Now that we are living this life we hoped for, I find myself much less able to think about the larger topics of church union or even individual conversion. It is enough to try to love my husband every day and to establish the kind of relationship that will carry us into our future together. This weekend we were at an Orthodox group's conference and were in the position of telling our story to new people for the first time since our wedding. Everyone we talked to was very supportive, and most mentioned the union of the churches as something they hoped for. One woman in particular, a priest's wife, said that she believes that this union will come not from popes, bishops, or patriarchs, but rather from people like us who are joining the churches together whether they like it or not. I'm still not confident that I can lead a movement, but if it is the kind of movement that get built on the small, daily gestures of love and life, maybe I can after all.

Two Lents

Tonight marked the beginning of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church, which means that tomorrow will be the first day this year that Chris and I have been observing Lent together. Meals have changed, of course, but it hasn't felt like Lent to me and I've felt disconnected from the fact that his Easter is right around the corner. Next Sunday I will attend a Palm Sunday service at 9am and then drive to my church at 10am, where it will be the first Sunday of Lent. That will be weird. Weirder still will be the ham feast when I'm just starting to get into the swing of things, and then Chris will feel disconnected from my Lent for the next 6 weeks.

I don't have any solutions for this Eastertime problem. I just hope we're able to love and support each other through the odd and probably difficult times this calendar difference will bring.

Planning a Wedding

Wedding planning is coming along nicely. We're both fortunate that our liturgical traditions free us from having to worry about the ceremony itself, leaving us more energy to plan the party aspects of the weekend. The wedding will be on a Sunday afternoon in May and so far all sorts of people have volunteered to help. I guess this is one result of having fairly public relationship struggles -- now that we have overcome them everyone wants to help us celebrate. It's also a huge relief for our budget. We're paying for this whole thing ourselves, so every bit of help frees up funds to apply elsewhere. It's going to be great.

We met with someone at the Catholic church last week about requirements for getting married. They want us to attend an all day workshop where we will take the FOCCUS survey. At first I was highly skeptical (now just mildly so), and not just because they charge $100+ for it. But after reading more about the tool itself and talking to people about it, it seems like the kind of thing that would probably be a good idea to do before getting married. People say that it brought up discussion topics that they never would have thought to talk about before. I only wish I knew at the time of the meeting that my priest is authorized to give the survey, because getting permission to do it with him would save us some cash. I'll have to ask them about that.