▸ Column · Modern Midgard — contemporary American suburbs
LOKI replies.
The letter
Wyatt and I have been married six years now, and honestly when we first got together we were both just "spiritual" — in that vague way where you don't really want to define it. (Which, fine. It worked for a while.) About two years ago Wyatt got baptized at this big evangelical church — full band, hands in the air every Sunday, small group on Wednesdays. I've drifted back to the little Episcopal parish I grew up in, with the candles and the liturgy and the incense. I don't mind that we believe things differently. I really don't. But we can't seem to sit in the same room and worship anymore, and last week he said he feels "spiritually alone" even when I'm right there next to him. So now I go to the 8 a.m. by myself and come home to find him already gone. We pass each other in the kitchen like roommates who happen to pray. Our daughter Lily is four, and she keeps asking which church is the "real" one. I don't know what to tell her. And I don't know how to tell Wyatt I miss him without it turning into a fight about whose God is louder.
— Passing Ships in Pasadena
Loki replies
"Whose God is louder."
There it is. That is your entire letter in four words, and I want you to look at them carefully — because you just told me this was never about incense versus a praise band. It is a contest. And the moment two people begin measuring decibels, they have both quietly agreed to lose each other while arguing over who won.
I know this game rather intimately. I spent the better part of an eternity standing next to a brother whose light was, by most objective accounts, significantly louder than mine. I tried every approach: matching the brightness, undercutting it, leaving the room entirely, burning the room down on my way out. None of it got me what I actually wanted, which was simply to be beside him without that meaning I had lost.
You are doing precisely what I always did. The early exit, the pre-emptive separation — you go at eight, he is already gone when you return. Rejection on your own terms doesn't feel like rejection. I want you to understand that it counts. You simply pay the bill privately, alone, later.
"I miss him." You buried that six sentences deep.
Unbury it. Not the theology. Him. That is the only fight worth starting, and the only one you seem unwilling to attempt.
I have won every argument I have ever entered. I live in my cleverness the way some people live in empty houses. Choose differently than I did.
— Loki
Thor weighs in
My brother speaks of the wound beneath the wound — and for once he is not wrong. But he will forgive me for naming the person in this letter he overlooked entirely. Lily. Four years old. Asking which church is real.
That is your answer. She is. Go to each other's services — not to debate them, not to score them, but so your daughter watches you honor each other with simple presence. I have sat in unfamiliar halls and felt strange and out of place. That is not a poor thing for the worthy to practice.
My brother counsels from a palace he inhabits largely by himself. He is right that you must lower the armor. He did not say: show up. Go with Wyatt once. Let him come with you. Quiet faithfulness to your marriage is not the same as surrendering your faith. Lily will know which church is real by watching whether her parents can honor each other inside it.
That is the work. Take it seriously.
— Thor
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