The King of Starting Over: Notes on Singleness and Spiritual Wandering

One has to be careful with humor.

While riding in my car yesterday, the children announce they are already working on their Christmas lists.  My son asks me what I want.  I grin. “I think I’m ready for wife #6,” I say.

The quip does not land as intended. The joke is too soon, or my kids are too young, or both. I spend the next ten minutes apologizing. It was a stupid, insensitive thing to blurt out.  Their stepmother and I separated only five months ago.  I tell Heloise and David the truth, which is that I wanted framed pictures of each of them, and perhaps some artwork to tape to my fridge.

“I’m curious to see whose door you’ll darken next,” a cousin said over the summer. This isn’t a reference to some random woman whose apartment I’ll visit for the night. It’s a teasing reference to my spiritual peregrinations.  When I was twenty, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. Over the next two and a half decades, I moved to the Assemblies of God, the Mennonites, the Episcopalians, the Kabbalah Centre, and Chabad. Those are the ones that stuck for a while: I did campus ministry with the Assemblies of God, was on the leadership team with the Mennonites, led a youth group with the Anglicans, and was a lecturer for the Kabbalah people. 

I was raised to believe in the importance of volunteering. So, when one finds himself in a new church or synagogue, one introduces oneself and asks if there’s anything one can do to help.  And when one is a white man with a smooth tongue, good manners, a PhD and enthusiasm, one ends up time and again thrust prematurely into positions of leadership.  I did not understand Mennonite culture very well before I was on the church council.  I just kept saying “yes” and showing up. 

As you can guess, this also explains how one gets married five times.  When you have a rather inconstant and incomplete sense of self (something I now understand is at least in part a consequence of traumatic brain injury), you are eager to get into relationships or organizations that offer you not only a home, but a sense of who you are.  Hugo is a history professor.  Hugo is Sara’s husband.  Hugo is the head of the prayer commission. It’s not that I need those titles to make me feel important in the eyes of others, it’s that those institutional obligations, romantic entanglements and ecclesial commitments grounded me.  I have spent most of my life feeling like a hot air balloon, and I’ve looked for women or worship services to tether me to the ground.  That’s not a good deal for the women or the institutions… or for me.

My kids do not want their next stepmother. No one wants to go to my sixth wedding.  They do not not want these things merely because they are tired and hurt. My friends and family would very much like to see me break a cycle for my own sake. That doesn’t mean they want me to be celibate and chaste for the rest of my life, but it does mean they want to see me thrive in solitude.  It’s easy for an aging man to go a little batty on his own, and so we shake our heads and say, “Men on their own don’t do well.” There are a great many people rooting very hard for me to prove them all wrong.

Every once in a while, I’ll slip into morning prayers at Chabad.  I still have an old set of tefillin I can wrap, and I know just enough to be able to follow along in the Hebrew service. (Don’t ask me to read anything.) The men there regard me as a nice outsider, and they nod at me, and they do not ask questions. I like that.  Unlike most churches, Chabad is not the sort of organization where you can easily walk in and volunteer your way into leadership.  I’m safe there.  I’m also not nurtured there – God is there, and I feel Him, but at a distance. I like that remove, because it’s comfortable, but it’s a rather meager diet.  I am not starving, but I am not well-fed. Some mornings, I wake up very, very hungry.

I went to a weekday mass a few weeks ago, at Good Shepherd Beverly Hills. I sat in the back, knelt when one kneels and rose when one rises. They said the creed, and I remembered most of it, and was pleased, and then wondered if I could risk believing it again. I did not, of course, go up for the eucharist.  A gentleman does not take what is not his. I left in tears.

I am not crowdsourcing a new faith, my friends, any more than I am asking you to introduce me to age-appropriate single women. It is good for me to be celibate for a long stretch, and I need to find a spiritual home where I can be both useful and fed.  It needs to be a place where I cannot charm my way into leadership of any sort, but if a floor needs to be swept or chairs stacked or strong coffee made, I’m the guy.

I can live the rest of my life, I think, without holding a woman in my arms again.  I cannot go the rest of my life without a community in which and through which to grow closer to God.  The matter is pressing but not desperate, and I must push past the fear of what my loved ones will say when they hear that I have joined some new thing. “That’s our Hugo, always on to the next adventure!”  I must be willing to laugh at myself if it means finding a place to come home.