We met, once a month, for a year and a half, timidly sipping various coffees at a Borders Café, somewhere inconspicuous, common hairdos in a common strip mall. We were all moms, we never thought of anything more creative to call it than “Mom’s Group”; no one ever looked twice at us, except perhaps when we prayed or when more than one of us came in pregnant, easing into her seat like a ship at dock, heavy with child.
We were surrounded by students with laptops and morbid T-shirts; lonely and obnoxious teenagers and lost young adults. There was no beauty, but there I found solace, and each face around the table became more and more luminescent as the months passed. The beauty came from within, from the laughter, listening, and the occasional outburst and sympathetic tears. Each life, each common mom with common kids, became a mirror for the face of Christ for me; and the light spread around that coffee shop until the ceiling reflected a glow. We had topics, we searched for truth, we talked about the Cross-and the little crosses of each day; we told horror stories of days beyond repair and the eternal meaning encased in each day.
I remember one of us talking about being in heaven, and that we will somehow share a special place with those people we loved especially. We didn’t think of each other at the time, but now, after a year and a half of loving each other, we would now. I was on a search for solace, and the Lord gave me four friends, four common moms, with uncommon souls.
Now I am headed into the sunset, quite literally, to California. So what? Lots of people move. But I know that the Lord sees every life, every event in that life, as quite special. This I know for sure, now, and am glad to have lived long enough to really understand that existentially. And so I know He knows both the gratitude I have for each of those moms, for their husbands and children; for no person gives a gift from solitude- it is always with the foundation provided by others- most fundamentally, Our Lord. And He knows the tears I have on my face now because the daily minutiae matter in a friendship, and I will miss those now. I won’t be on a speakerphone on the Borders table: like a river, life will flow on. But sitting on a grave, as I did on a hot day in July in the middle of a Long Island suburb (my father-in-law’s new grave), will teach you quite forcefully that even in the silence and separation, love goes on. It goes on in a torrent, reaching ever back to its source in God, in eternity.
Am I overdoing it? This is friendship after all: friends come and go. No, I am not overdoing it, as C.S. Lewis bemoaned, friendship is heavily undervalued in modern life. Friends are the solace God gives us in this valley of tears, and the love of friendship, philia, is, like the other loves, meant to be baptized and thus super-naturalized into a higher level, an eternal level. The loves work together: the development of one kind of love is meant to help the growth of the others. In Christian friendship, friendship itself is baptized and begins to draw the other loves in a person’s life into the supernatural, the eternal.
So the common moms at the franchised Borders Café were aiding me in super-naturalizing my whole life. My God bless each person with at least one friend like that. I have been blessed quadrice.
