Chapter 51

Linda says she wishes for our ceremony, our wedding, to take place in religious house.

“I want to do it up proud,” she tells me. “Just like most girls, I’ve always dreamed about walking down the aisle in a flowing white gown to meet my man at the altar. I know you don’t think a lot of religion, but the only place I can do that is church, so could we?”

I say that it is not religion that troubles me. She has told me, and I have read, of the teachings of religion, and they seem to me very good. My concern is what men make of these teachings, how they twist them to their own desires. But I say this does not stop me from respecting the beliefs of others, and that I am happy to have ceremony in church if this is what she wants.

It seems that we must choose a church and speak to the proprietor, the leader, and we go to do this in a place that is nearby. He takes us to an office and we sit down and he asks us many things about ourselves. I think he asks more than is right, but Linda does not object and I accept.

To my great surprise, when he learns that we live together in the same house he says he cannot do the ceremony.

“You’ll need to separate, live apart, for at least six months before I could consider it,” he says.

I think he makes sport and laugh, but he is serious. He wishes for me to make my dwelling elsewhere for half of a year before we marry. Linda just shakes her head and thanks him for his time, and we leave.

“What is this foolishness?” I ask when we are back in the car. “He wants us to live apart until we are married and then we will live together again?”

She laughs. “I’ll tell you about it when we’re home, Hugo,” she says. “And we’ll find somebody who’s a little less of a stuffed shirt.”

At home she explains. A teaching of the religion that most believe here where we are is that men and women should not mate, not make love, unless they are married to each other. Otherwise they are to stay “celibate,” is the word she uses.

This makes sense to me if the mating may bring children. For a woman to have children alone with no man to provide is hard in any time. But I remember that she tells me about “birth control,” so that a woman will not have a child until she chooses to do so, and ask why this should be so now.

“It’s still part of the scripture,” she says. “You’re still supposed to wind up in hell after you die if you have sex outside marriage.”

Hell is some place of endless torment and pain where bad people will go after death. The whole idea seems very strange to me; if there does exist this benevolent spirit, this God, who looks after people, and if some other life does exist after death, then how could God send people to such a place for eternity for simply acting in the way of their nature?

“It doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?” Linda says. “But anyhow, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Some people take it more seriously than others; I think this one may even have thought he was doing us a favor, saving our souls from hell. We’ll find somebody who isn’t so rigid.”