WHEN WOMEN GET TOGETHER

This week I’ll be meeting up with women from across the country as well as Canada, Europe, and South America because my husband, like the husbands of these women, is active in the Maritime Law Association. The association has a meeting in New York City every year during the first week in May.  There are also meetings all over the country in the fall usually at port cities. We’ve met in Mobile, Alabama and a resort near Long Beach, California.  Over the years we’ve also been to Baltimore, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon and Maine), Boston, Hawaii and Charleston.

The meetings never disappoint, because of the women I’ve met. The real meat and fun of the conferences for me is getting together with the other wives and significant others, talking and sharing.  We probably run the gamut of political affiliations--and these days, politics is a topic filled with landmines, but that's not what we talk about or how we relate.  Our conversations are more about our lives and how we cope with what we have to do.  Some of us are grandmothers, some have weddings coming up and some have ailing parents, but in this group, maybe because none of us are in each other's lives otherwise, we can talk honestly about the difficulties each of these stages brings and the joys and the pains. No one is in competition and no one is judging.

What happens at these meetings reminds me of a conversation I had with a woman I met on vacation last year.  She was my age, in college during the time when boyfriends and male classmates were trying to figure out what to do about Viet Nam and their military obligation because of the draft. For those who weren’t around then or were too young to feel its impact, the draft, regardless of one’s politics, defined the young adulthoods of all the males who were eligible in the mid to late sixties.  The prospect of going to Viet Nam was just about certain unless one got a deferment. 

Regardless of how stressful that time was, it was an experience shared by the entire country. To this day, Viet Nam, and how one handled it, is a subject that those of us who were of age at that time slide into discussing. Talking about the divisiveness in the country now, this woman said, the problem in this country is that we don't know each other anymore.  If there was a draft, if we had to spend time with people from different backgrounds, we might get to know each other better, find common ground, and come up with solutions to our problems. Instead, we just see what divides us.

That may be what’s the best part of my experience with the women in the MLA. Although we come from a variety of religious affiliations and, in spite of our politics, we always manage to find common interests and beliefs and have genuine conversations.  If only that same experience could extend beyond groups such as mine into the national level.

Universal Atonement

Universal   Atonement

My husband and I were down in the Virgin Islands on vacation last week where we took a sunset cruise.  As we looked off into the horizon and watched the sunset a conversation started with ‘what do you do.’

One of the two women I was talking to explained that she was an ex-Catholic studying to be a Methodist minister.  This led to a discussion of Lent and how we were going to observe it.  To my surprise, as a nominal Catholic, the third woman in our group, a Jew, fully participated in the conversation.  The future minister mentioned Pope Francis and his recent comment about sacrifice and what was really important about Lent.  We three ultimately agreed that some form of giving was a better way to observe Lent than giving up something we love, even if the giving up was difficult.  I’m still struggling with how, based on that philosophy, what I should do, but that’s another story.

I wouldn’t think this conversation or my thoughts on it would be right for a blog, except that like politics these days, it’s a subject that seems to be on everyone’s minds.  In my art class here in New York City, we’re a group of nine, ranging in age from thirty-seven to seventy, who are Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants and agnostics, but Lent and how we observe it, or what we were going to “give up” was the conversation at my last class.  Everyone had an opinion, Pope Francis’s recent statement was mentioned, and it seemed that whether we intended to observe it or not, we all had thought about it.

I’m not sure what this seemingly universal recognition of this Christian season means.  It doesn’t happen at Christmas, where the holiday and all its trimmings are observed from afar by everyone but Christians, even if with nostalgia and pleasure.  True, there are Jews that have Christmas trees, but at least from my observation, those who do have trees are in the minority. Instead, there is an emphasis on Christmas being a Christian holiday, not a universal one. 

Could it be that in these tumultuous and stressful times that just as we find comfort in the existence of a holy man like Pope Francis who renews our hope that there is good in this world, we also find comfort in how we’re alike, not different.  No matter what our religion or belief system, I think we recognize that we all good-hearted and thoughtful people. When times are uncertain, I think we see a need to find universal truths and be prepared to sacrifice or atone with the hope that we’ll participate in making the world a better place. Or am I complicating it?  Is it simply that as a people we have far more in common with each other than we realize?