Read Online Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley - Free Book Online Page B

all day in one of the snowiest seasons on record in Aspen. Some twenty-one feet had already fallen by late February of that year. I was due to fly home the next day. I am guessing that the pastor of St. Mary Catholic Church on Main Street thought he had a free hour on his hands when he trudged through the drifts to the church to keep his appointment for five o’clock confession, but there were three of us waiting for him that day. I was the last in line.
    Having been married in the Catholic Church, taken instruction in the faith, and been confirmed some years later, I had been a practicing Catholic for eighteen years when my marriage ended. During that time I had served in various positions as chairman of the parish council, youth group director, CCD teacher, and a third-degree member of the Knights of Columbus. I felt a strong kinship to the Catholic faith, and after my divorce I wanted the reassurance of my church that I might one day remarry and still have a home there.
    I made my confession to the priest about the affair that had ended my marriage. It was no accident that I had waited to do this in Aspen, Colorado. I was too ashamed to face anyone in my hometown. The sordid details would be made public not long thereafter in my divorce trial, but at the time I still felt like a man with a dark secret. My infidelity had its origins in the church.
    The woman involved was the lay administrator of our parish. In a twist of irony that was not lost on anyone, her affair with me ended the affair she had been having with our parish priest, who then renounced his vows and left the priesthood, only later to renew those same vows and return to serve a different parish. The woman resigned her job at our church, began attending a different parish, and stayed married to her husband. My marriage fell apart. It was a scandal and the greatest failure of my life.
    The young pastor at St. Mary’s in Aspen was very kind, almost apologetic, but firm. He made it clear to me that I had two options to remain in communion with the church. One was to stay single and celibate for the rest of my life and let my solitude be a testament to my piety. That certainly wasn’t ringing any bells with me. I knew who I was, and I also knew that fifty years of solitude and celibacy would make my life a testament to nothing so much as the prolonged effects of clinical depression.
    The other option, the priest explained, was for me to seek an annulment by proving to a tribunal in the church, through the testimony of family and friends, that my marriage of twenty-five years had never occurred in a heavenly sense, despite the two angels it had produced here on Earth.
    Catholic guilt is a powerful thing, and I would later go so far as to meet with a diocesan counselor—a nun who was wonderfully kind and forgiving—to learn more about the grounds for annulment. After hearing the story of the fever of immaturity in which my marriage had begun at the age of twenty-two, this good nun appeared certain that an annulment would sail through, and I have no doubt she was right. But the more certain she appeared, the less interested I became.
    There grew in me a sense of something self-righteous, sanctimonious, and even bullying about the whole idea of putting two impulsive kids—who were all wrong for each other but who couldn’t see that twenty-five years ago—on trial. Great goodness came of their decision to marry, but so did great sorrow. Isn’t that just a part of life? Isn’t every marriage and every life a mixed bag? Can we really funnel everything in that bag into a decision by a tribunal of strangers that what occurred more than two decades ago was holy or unholy?
    Some marriages work and some do not. Some marriages that once soared heavenward fall to Earth, because the people in them fail, as humans are wont to do. Some marriages that are devoid of intimacy and would qualify for annulment by acclamation if they were ever put