▸ Column · Modern X-Men era — a letter delivered to the Headmaster's desk at the Xavier school for the gifted.
PROFESSOR X replies.
Replied to by Professor X, with a rebuttal from Juggernaut.
The letter
A letter that found its way to the Headmaster's desk:
My husband and I were married in the long, holding silence of a Quaker Meeting — every Sunday began the same way, his hand in mine, waiting together for the light. Two years ago I was received into the Catholic Church, and now my mornings are all incense and kneeling and the beads of the rosary, while he sits in his old stillness waiting for me to come home so his quiet can begin again. Neither of us mocks the other. It's that the thing that once knit us is gone, and Sunday has become the loneliest day we have. Last week he asked, so gently, whether I might skip Mass just once and sit in Meeting beside him — and I heard myself say no before I had even thought, and the hurt on his face has followed me ever since. We love each other. But I am terrified that two sincere faiths are quietly laying a wall down the center of our bed. How do we worship as the people we have each become without losing the marriage we built as who we were?
Professor X replies
You write as though the peril is the two faiths. It is not. I have spent my life beside a man I love like a brother — Erik — and we took the very same wound, the world's terror of our kind, and forged from it two opposed and wholly sincere convictions. We have stood on opposite sides of nearly everything that matters. And I have never once stopped loving him, nor he me. Conviction has never been what ends a bond. Silence about it is.
So listen to your own "no." It arrived before thought because it was not truly about one Sunday — it was fear. Fear that a single yielding is the first brick pulled from the wall that keeps you yourself. Name that to him, plainly. He is not asking you to convert back. He is asking to be let near the woman you have become.
Then let him near. Sit in Meeting beside him — not as surrender, but as witness, the way you would attend the becoming of anyone you love. Invite him to kneel while your silence fills with incense, and let him watch. You need not share one practice. You must only refuse to worship as strangers. Hold that door open from both sides.
— Professor X
Juggernaut weighs in
"Hold the door open and WAIT" — yeah, that's my stepbrother all over. Waiting IS the wall, lady. I sat in Charles's shadow my whole life waitin' for somethin' to change, and you know what changed? NOTHING — until I started movin'. Your problem ain't two religions. It's two people frozen in separate rooms too scared to cross one hallway. So cross it. This Sunday, go sit in his Meeting. Next Sunday, drag him to yours. Quit negotiatin' with the wall and walk THROUGH it. You can't lose a marriage you're both still movin' toward. Quit thinkin'. Start movin'.
— Juggernaut
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