Fate and Destiny Pt. 02

Dean took me to Maine. I took refuge by the ocean at our cottage. I walked the beach for hours each day regardless of the weather: thinking, meditating, praying, and finding a new God. I cried often. I read voraciously, seeking guidance and answers to my prayers. I'd seen other people change themselves in times of crisis. I talked to some of them about how they did it. They served as my role models and a few as my mentors.

I raged at myself – the anger palpable as I screamed my fury at the ocean. I talked to the gulls and the sandpipers. Try as I might, I couldn't always be constructive, particularly when I looked at the twisted path of destruction I'd left behind me in Dillon – in my life and in the lives of those around me.

I took ownership and responsibility for my actions in the debacle. I couldn't be any type of victim in all of this. Gradually, I detached from the old, ego-based life style and from the grief Laura and I had caused each other. Detaching from possessions and life style turned out to be easier than I thought. It was hardest to detach from the intangible, like love of my family, my reputation, and the addictive behavior success bred – all the things my ego thrived on.

Dean stepped in and negotiated a truce between Margaret and me. She gave me a year to reform – again Dean's word: reform. He knew the hubris, the ego, and the invincibility I'd developed over the decades. He saw I'd lost my God. He mentored me past these debacles.

At the end of the year, I visited Margaret for the first time, hat in hand, apology at the ready. What made the difference to her was that I was a changed man at the end of that first year. I was the man she'd met in college: beat up, much older, a little wiser, and repentant. I'd become serene and more introspective. I didn't need the validation from outsiders the way I had before the Rubicon.

Margaret had changed too, or at least I woke up to many of the changes she'd gone through over the years before the crisis. She was stronger and more an equal than I'd seen her before. She'd done much better than me at weathering the cataclysm in our lives. She'd closed up the parsonage and turned it over to the Church, found a new home in another town, and fielded thousands of questions and expressions of sympathy from friends and parishioners. She'd also held the family together, and later bridged my return with the children – having them accept me back into their lives.

Margaret and I picked up the shattered pieces of our marriage and started to mend things. It was strained for a while. We set new boundaries. I was too subservient for a while, until she told me to get some spine and get on with life. We built a new marriage on the ashes of the old one.

I built a new life on the ashes of my previous life too, at least that described some of the thoughts I had about what had happened. I created a lot of karma on this journey. Now I'm left with those tinges of sorrow and regret that plague all men – in my case caused by action rather than inaction. Fate had put a lot of things in my path – some good and some not so good. I had choices all along the road. Destiny is what I did with them – some good things and some not so good. I think I used a line something like that in my last sermon at the Dillon Church: 'Fate is what life deals you; destiny is what you do with it.'