I keep coming back to this blog because I want to talk to somebody, I guess.

I'm working through some spiritual issues, and find myself unsure of which set of clergy to trust; or which set I could talk to without betraying my wife, the liberal humanist.

Let me talk about her a bit, actually. She's great. I mean it. I am so in love with her. Have been for these seventeen years. She loves Justice, and Mercy, and Goodness; but she refuses to spell them with capital letters. She lives and speaks in a way that makes it clear she's aware of a real right and wrong out there, but she stops short of placing their source in a personal God.

This worked for me, sort of, when we started up. I was a sorta kinda liberal Protestant without much use for the organized church. I made efforts now and again over the years to seek out a church we could attend; it didn't really take, until four or five years ago when we tried a Unitarian Universalist fellowship.

The trouble is, I'm a Trinitarian. No, really. And while my soteriology might be a little more mamsy-pamsy than most evangelicals or Catholics could tolerate, I'm hardly a universalist. Yet every Sunday we were driving past the Presbyterian Church of the Savior and the Luthern Church of the Redeemer to get to the UU Chuch of the Dubious Historicity. My choice of church had become a witness against my beliefs. And that didn't work for me. It really stopped working when our first child was born.

I decided, to my wife's horror, that I was an Orthodox Presbyterian. I tried to take Sola Scriptura seriously. In my experience, most people who do this-- the people whose spiritual lead I was looking to follow-- walk around with some ideas and values that clash pretty seriously with humanism (as humanism is understood in the western world). My wife saw this as an about-face and a turning against what had hitherto been our shared values, our shared definitions of justice, mercy, goodness. I changed sides in the culture war, if you like.

This did not last. We couldn't sleep in the same bed. We couldn't relax in each others' company. I had joined the ranks of the Enemy. She wondered desperately what kind of small-minded judgmental superstition I would impress upon our little daughter.

And part of me agreed with her, the whole time. It's mean to exclude gay couples from the same protections heterosexual couples enjoy. It's mean to stand out in front of an abortion clinic and call a vulnerable, struggling young woman a murderer. I realize now, better than I ever did before, what people who do these things are trying to achieve-- the higher mercy that they're struggling to serve-- but I lacked whatever quality I needed to stand with them, even rhetorically in conversation. Fortitude? Faith? Whatever it is, I didn't have it. After a few months, I reconverted (or apostatized, depending on your point of view) and declared myself a "liberal", for lack (fear?) of a more descriptive term. I'd like to say it was about mercy. But I'm afraid it had at least as much to do with sleepless nights and loneliness and sexual frustration and watching my wife-- my wonderful, big-hearted, loving wife, for God's sake!-- crying, again and again, night after night, because the friend and companion of her life had chosen to trash what we used to hold sacred.

What can I say? She's the Saint Monica of secular humanism. It was impossible that the husband of so many tears should "perish".

I tried going to a mainline Protestant church, settling for a while on an Episcopal church. She won't go with me. She won't let me baptize my daughters (did I mention we're expecting a second one?) and raise them in the faith. (Why should she? If I'm her example, a love for Jesus doesn't do much to improve a person.) It's gotten harder and harder for me to go. Not my wife's fault, this: she's happy to watch our daughter while I go to church. She sees it as the moral and spiritual equivalent of a round of golf; Daddy has to take care of himself, too, you see; so I'm to feel free to go to whatever church I like on Sunday morning. But then I'd go and hear a sermon about how the church was not just about what happened on Sunday morning, the importance of being in a community of believers, blah blah blah. So now I'm looking at fellowship dinners or choir practice, and it's as if I'm trying to get to the golf course two or three times a week. Responsible fathers/husbands don't do that.

And even the Sunday morning service itself, with its Youth Sundays and anniversary commemorations and greetings between old friends, usually rings hollow to me.

Frankly, I've reached a place in my life where I need my wife's buy-in on this whole Christianity thing. Yes, I've read Luke 14; honestly, if those are the conditions, I've already failed. My wife, and our mutual love, is the most holy thing God has ever placed in my hands. I can't, and won't, let go of it. If necessary, and God forgive me for saying so, I fully intend to clutch it all the way down into the pit of hell if it comes to that.

But I don't believe that's what God wants. I think He wants us both, husband and wife, to love Him, and serve Him. So why doesn't that seem to be happening? Why can't I be loving enough, tolerant enough, holy enough to show her Christ convincingly? Or if it's as the Calvinists say, that God and nothing but God opens people's eyes, why won't He open hers (and mine, if they're closed)? I ask Him to, all the time. I ask as sincerely as I know how. I ask him now, here: God, purify my prayers, show me how to ask. Are You trying to teach me patience? Humility? Go ahead. Teach me. But open my wife's eyes, please, sweet Jesus. I don't understand what you want from me and I have no one I can ask. I need my wife here with me, God, I need her, please help!