Shine (24 page)

I care. And I anoint him my priest, my prophet, and my king. He’s my advocate. I really and truly am
his
advocate. And by the time I was ready to marry him, that’s what I wanted: a partner in marriage but a man strong enough to take the lead.

Not everything’s all his call. I set the tone for this family—how we’re perceived; in many ways, I’m the hedge of protection for us. And listen—sometimes he makes me angry. He can be a big old baby. He can be selfish. He can
sulk, and I’m not used to that. But I always go back to “He’s the man of my dreams, the man I want in my life long term, and I would rather fight with him than make love to anyone else.”

And like me or not for it, that’s the transparent me.

Celebration

This one’s simple. Be excited about yourselves. You’re not allowed to be arrogant, but you can definitely feel self-assured—you’ve done it, you’ve found each other, and that’s worthy of celebration! So, we honor each other, celebrate our love every waking moment. When I’m all dressed up and ready to walk out the door, Al will say to me in the quietest, sexiest voice, “Let ’em have it, Ms. Jones.” You know what that does for me?

“Baby, you are the Man,” I’ll answer.

“Thank you, baby,” he says.

Later on that evening, when we meet again at home, I’ll say, “Babe, did you make any money today?”

And he’ll say, “Yeah, I think I might have made a little bit of money.”

And I say, “Did you go buy your wife something? Because your wife likes pretty things.”

And he’ll say, “I know my wife likes pretty things. Didn’t I give you that big old diamond ring?”

And I’ll say, “Oooh, that was last year.”

So—we toast each other with humor and appreciation and, yes, with enormous respect. That’s my kind of morality.

What’s
Not Morality?

Funny thing: once I asked a guy who was very interested in dating one of my friends, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No, that ain’t me right now,” he answered.

It was a little too hemming and hawing of an answer, so I became the prose
cutor and asked what I like to think is the ultimate follow-up question in this situation: “Well, is there anybody out there in the world who
thinks
she’s your girlfriend?”

And the guy said after a little more hemming and hawing, “Well, there be a couple of them.”

“Well, I’ll be doggoned,” I answered.

It was my first clue that this guy was not for my friend. He was never going to have a moral relationship, neither with her, nor with anyone probably. Nor will the guy who takes you to church on Sunday and tries to hit it on Monday.

We want to be free to do everything we want anytime we want to do it, and nobody seems to want to pass judgment or even say, “But you know what? That’s wrong. It doesn’t make me comfortable. It’s wrong to sleep around even if it feels good. And if everyone else does it and you use contraceptives so no one will get hurt, it’s still just wrong.”

Lots of things don’t make me comfortable. It doesn’t make me comfortable for someone to say that a woman who’s a teacher can have a sexual relationship with a child, and seven or eight years later, because the child is eighteen, let’s celebrate their marriage. That’s wrong. That’s immoral.

Do you also have serious issues with making jokes about Michael Jackson and the young boys who sleep at his house? Listen—Michael may have the purest heart in the world, and he may be telling the truth about the innocence of his relationships with boys, and he may mean it that only friendship is in his heart. But that’s not what’s in everyone else’s heart who invites young boys to a sleepover. So Michael has to ask himself if it is right to give a child a false sense of how the rest of the world acts. When you’re forty-eight years old and say to a child of nine who’s sharing your intimate space that “there are no boundaries between adults and kids,” that isn’t going to benefit the child in the long run—even if Michael never laid a hand on those boys. Children are not short adults. And the mother has to ask herself whether it was right for her to allow her boy to share the intimate space of an adult, even if she
knew
the adult had the purest intentions. What happened to no? What happened to, “It’s no because I’m the momma? I’m the momma and you’re not.”

What’s acceptable to us today probably starts with society’s saying, everything goes.

It follows that if you’re talking sex and dating, it’s not acceptable, it’s not moral for a date to refer to a woman—even in jest—as a
bitch
or a
ho.
It’s not acceptable for any woman to accept that treatment. Your morals…your decisions. I’m just asking.

Passion

Let me say a few words about passion, before I stop talking about sex and dating in a moral relationship. My man—he’s passionate. He was when we were dating, and he never stopped. But passion has to be something more than sex. You can have a passion for growing roses, for painting, for exuberance in life.

Al is passionate about some textures—he loves the feel of cashmere. First Christmas, my mother bought him a gray cashmere sweater out of the blue, she didn’t know about his passion. He loves that sweater more than any other article of clothing, and whenever he’s contemplating something or something’s just not right, Al puts on that sweater and his pajama bottoms, and it’s like a cocoon for him. So, passion, maybe, is finding the thing the other loves and being willing to give it to him. And passion is being each other’s cheerleader.

I’m so passionate about being in his presence that I have to work real hard at not smothering him. I’m passionate about humor—and Al gives it to me. At one point, last week, I was talk, talk, talking, duh duh duh duh, telling him everything that my head held, talkingtalkingtalking, and Al was lying on the bed, and after I talked for a solid fourteen minutes, he quietly said, “Oh my God—I married a woman who talks more than my mother.” I couldn’t stop laughing for ten minutes. That’s a kind of passion.

And once, when we were having a little argument about six weeks before the wedding, I gave him the opportunity to back out, and he said, “How am I going to back out of this wedding when half my family is carrying your veil?”

I mean—you gotta love a guy who makes you laugh.

So, all kinds of passion lie in our lives, and one of the reasons I think it’s so powerful is that we proved to each other before our marriage that we could wait for sex, that there was lots of other good stuff besides sex, that we excite each
other in a hundred different ways, and that we, together, can distinguish the difference between right and wrong.

Of all things, we find
huge
passion in getting dressed up for each other and going out to dinner. We like to make sure the other looks really good, and then we’ll wrap our arms around each other. And he’ll say, “Let ’em have it, Ms. Jones.”

And I’ll say, “Oooooh, baby, you’re lookin’ good.”

Yep, there is someone better than Prince Charming.

S
ometimes, I need a reminder that God uses other people to send me messages.

Sometimes, I need a reminder that God is there, watching.

Recently, I had a whole lot of stuff that was weighing heavy on my spirit. In the space of one week, I had to do an enormous amount of work, give a speech in Chicago, and fly down to Florida to host an event. My emotional state was very fragile and not least of all because my husband wasn’t falling all over me with sympathy. I called him from Florida, and I really lit into him.

“You’re not comforting me the way I need to be comforted,” I said to him.

“Because I won’t crawl into bed with you and allow you to wallow?” he asked. “Because I think you need to take responsibility for the decisions you make
about your life and career?” he asked. “That’s not providing comfort. That’s babysitting. I’m not that husband. You don’t need that from me.”

He was right. He’d given me a reality check instead of the babying I was pleading for. But frankly, at the moment I couldn’t see that reality check. I was mightily pissed.

So, there I am in Florida, chewing the ear off my girlfriend Jaci, who’d flown down to keep me company. I’ve done the hosting, and we’ve done the spa, and we’ve done the pool, and we’re doing the beach—and I’m still feeling pretty mad at Al. Jaci’s reading
O: The Oprah Magazine,
which features a little take-away booklet that month. All of a sudden, Jaci says, “I need to share something with you, Star.”

Jaci never says “You better listen to this,” or “Here’s a lesson for you;” right now, she just says she wants to share something that moved her in Oprah’s booklet.

And Jaci starts to read me something Oprah’s written, describing how she was crying one day because people were being so mean and nasty to her. The people had made up terrible lies and were accusing her of awful stuff, and Oprah was telling all this to Dr. Maya Angelou, the wonderful poet. All of a sudden, in the middle of Oprah’s whining and moaning, Dr. Angelou turned to her and firmly said, “Stop—and say thank you, Oprah.”

And Oprah looked at Dr. Angelou, amazed, and said, “What do you mean, stop and say thank you? This is horrible for me.”

And Maya Angelou spoke hard into Oprah’s spirit and said, “If you don’t stop and say thank you, I’m not talking to you anymore.”

I took a deep breath, stopped, and in my heart, thanked Dr. Angelou. I got it. Then, I turned to Jaci and thanked her. Then, I thanked God. I literally felt God smile right then. It was as if my whole funk about Al had lifted. This is why:

I strongly believe that there are some people who are God-used in life and some people who are God-sent. Al is God-sent to me, okay? Jaci, right then, was God-used just as Maya Angelou was God-used for Oprah. God sometimes uses somebody to convey a message and the message was, Star—I want you to think really long and hard about what has happened in your life.

I thought about how incredibly lucky I was that I could afford to help my family out financially. I thought about how deeply beautiful my life is—the travel I
can do, the people who love me, the fun I have in my career, the fascinating friends I have, the good health of those in my closest circles. I thought about how blessed I was to find Al Reynolds, that sweet man. Fact is, I’ve been able to have a life that most little girls born low-income and black could only dream of.

My dreams, they got me in a whole heap of trouble when planning the “Wedding of My Dreams.” And the really interesting thing is…I wouldn’t change one thing. As I thought about Dr. Angelou’s advice, I remember the pain I felt from the media attacks over my completely over-the-top wedding. Al used to say, you don’t want a wedding, baby, you want a parade…and he was right. But not for the reasons that most people thought.

You know that I come from people who are the salt of the earth. They have earned every dollar they have and still struggle for each and every one. We were not poor, because we knew where every meal was coming from, but
privileged
was not a word in any of our vocabularies. As I planned that over-the-top, parade of a wedding, I thought about what it would mean, not just to me but to my family and my friends. My grandfather is eighty-nine years old. That means as a black man he has lived through Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings, water hoses, separate water fountains, unwelcoming lunch counters, and young white boys calling him “Clyde” when he deserved the respect of being called “Mr. Bennett.” He has lived to see his children all attend college and was in the room when his eldest granddaughter, Star, graduated from law school. And on November 13, 2004, he also lived long enough to watch that same granddaughter close a section of Park Avenue as she got married in one of the most beautiful sanctuaries in the world, and—also for her wedding day—close the entire lobby of the greatest hotel in the world, the Waldorf-Astoria. Because of the blessings I have been given, I got to take my grandfather and my eighty-six-year-old grandmother shopping in Saks Fifth Avenue and buy for her her first designer evening gown. I look back on the photos of my grandfather being escorted from his very own suite in that hotel to the front of St. Bartholomew’s Church to sit next to Hillary Clinton, a U.S. senator, the former first lady of the United States of America (and possibly the first woman to be the president) and I cry tears of joy. Whatever they have to throw at me can’t begin to erase the blessings of what I’ve been able to do for my family because of this public life.

So, I stopped and said thank you.

And it also came to me how lucky I was to have this man who cared so much about me he wouldn’t feed me platitudes. I realized that it’s okay to be annoyed with someone and share that when you’re dating and certainly after you’re married because then you’re really communicating. It’s not all hearts and flowers and running toward each other in slow motion. I stopped and said thank you.

So, Sunday, I walk into the house after my trip. Now, Al doesn’t know I’ve had this epiphany. He doesn’t know that Jaci, the God-used one, had brought me a spiritual knowing. So, I walk into my house, and on the table was a candle, my favorite oatmeal raisin cookie, a little bowl of my favorite barbecue potato chips, and a book called
The Purpose-Driven Life
opened to a highlighted passage that talks about how families grow through stages, and some of them are difficult, and how at any moment, God has you at a stage for a reason.

There was also a hand-created note. Al had cut a ring of flowers from a magazine and laid it down on a piece of construction paper. Inside the ring was written,

I love you. And this is just one stage. Okay?

Al

And next to the note is a little happy face.

Yeah—Jaci was God-used. Yes, I had the epiphany. But the God-sent one came through in a pinch.

Much Is Required

The Bible tells us that to whom much is given, much is required. Now, you can interpret that any way you wish, but now, when I embrace the fact that God has given me so much, I know that means I am
required,
I have a responsibility not only to give back to those who have less but to stop and say thank you to God. And for me, that’s spirituality.

I’ve been brought up in an atmosphere of religion and godliness, but when I was readying myself to meet my soul mate, I knew I had to delve even deeper into spiritual matters. I had the feeling that much more than I was giving was
required of me, and it was deeply important that the man for whom I was searching would feel the same way.

Let’s talk for a second about that word—religion. Lately, it seems that religion has taken on the mantra of being exclusive rather than inclusive. Being Christian for me means walking in Christ’s steps—not being judgmental of others who don’t buy into my religion. Being spiritually fulfilled is the same as being religiously fulfilled—and anyone, no matter her faith, can find this comforting spirituality. It’s just as available to someone who has very little in her life, as well as to someone who’s got the whole world at her fingertips. And if you want to change your life by finding someone to share it with you, it’s my feeling that a spiritual balance, along with physical and emotional health, must also be yours.

It’s fascinating to note that according to a 2005
Newsweek
poll and cover story, the vast majority of Americans (88 percent) describe themselves as either spiritual or religious when only a generation ago, a 1966 cover story in
Time
magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” Today, everywhere, says
Newsweek,
is a “flowering of spirituality: in the hollering, swooning, foot-stomping services of the new wave of Pentecostals; in Catholic churches where worshippers contemplate the Eucharist; among Jews who are seeking God in the mystical thickets of Kabbalah…”; in Buddhism, in Islam—everywhere. Americans are seeking to experience God in their lives, are seeking to be, as one person put it, grounded in “transformative experience.”

Doesn’t surprise me. If you are spiritually weak, nothing else matters—I feel that as surely as I know my own name. The thought of approaching life as if there are no ramifications to actions, in my opinion, is what has taken culture down a wayward path and why we’re having such trouble in this world right now. There needs to be an unjudgmental but moral standard in politics, and in relationships, as well—in the way parents and children relate to one another, in the way countries relate to one another, men relate to women, employers relate to employees, and definitely how lovers relate to each other. It seems to be that, along with giving personal comfort to us, spiritual strength also helps provide the foundation for that kind of moral standard.

My covenant with God is unshakable: There is nothing else I know in this world that is one hundred percent reliable, dependable, and consistent, now
and until the end of time. If the same is true for you, if spirituality is important to you, you must seek a mate who also makes it important in his life—that’s what will make you equally yoked. If you’re a sports fan, you generally seek out somebody who’s a sports fan. If you like art movies, you tend to seek out people who like art movies. If you’re a NASCAR fan, and you want to put on those jumpsuits with all that stuff on them, then you’ll probably look for a man or woman in an orange jumpsuit just like you. Now, if you spend that kind of effort for your extracurricular activities, why wouldn’t you seek out a man who has a gentle, spiritual heart? The thing that holds everything together is my spirituality. It’s what’s inside me.

Stop for a moment and assess your own sense of spirituality. What’s inside
you
?