Eight Years On

I've known you, really known you, for eight years now: for you never really know your husband until you've married him, until you've ironed the five thousandth shirt, or you know exactly which animal he looks like at any given moment (this morning it was a horse looking at you right before you put his saddle on, ears pinned back and pulling the eyes sideways). You only know him when you know that eventually, he'll figure out what really moves you.

I only think marriage begins, really, really, at the seventh or eighth year. Just when a lot of people really feel like getting out of it: the irony is that it is just really beginning to root in and grow. Perhaps if one wants to get out at that time, it means that you were never really in it for the right reasons. The great secret is that you can decide to now have the right reasons. Real love is that tough.

You were tough when I first met you, a modern knight on a creaky used bike at St. John's. You were so fun to watch, streaming like a flag past everybody on the football field, like the flagman in the calvary; and best yet, your flag had the cross on it, a real cross, a crucifix, not like the stupid sterile "resurrection cross".

Who cares if your zeal was part of a wounding? I saw you, as real love allows a true vision that others cannot see. God gave me that vision, which has carried me through. Who cares if you totally pissed off my whole Protestant family with very tactless Catholic proclamations? I knew it was done out of love, real love, and that they'd just never experienced that in our tactful world.

You were always honest with me. You came along, like a cold shower, like a fresh antiseptic on my wounds, and whipped me into shape.

How I have loved you, but I never felt so clearly until eight years on. Perhaps it takes that long, perhaps it takes 4,204,800 minutes of hoping and going up and down. My mother says it takes forty years, that the golden years are really about the marriage at that time of its day when the sunlight is slanted, making a beautiful, soft glow enter into every part of it.

I suppose then, you and I are still in the morning. But you've been my friend, my enemy(when I was bad), my cross (when I was good) and my fellow traveler towards heaven. Your weaknesses and wounds have been put up against my strengths, using them up to help you heal: and my weaknesses have challenged your strengths.

So marriage, eight years on, is like when you wake up after the first couple days of a strenuous hike, and your muscles are finally clueing in, and have given up screaming. It is when the sun hits you and you smile, and you know that without Our Lord, without the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lord present to us in the Eucharist, without Confession, without fellow Catholics and fellow lovers of Christ, without our families, our parents, our children, without all those gifts-the most important is Our Lord Himself- without Him, we wouldn't have made it home in the same plane from the honeymoon. You know that you are generally a jerk, and so is he, but that God has big plans for you both, and the happiest thing is to see us getting there.

You know that when you're sitting on the couch at night, and three little heads are bopping up and down, you know that in that cacophony of child-noises, you can catch an eye, a blue eye, full of new wisdom, the wisdom of a young and brave father, and you can share a silent laugh at our attempt to say the Rosary.

Blessed be God, in His angels, saints, and us.

The Spouse of Love is Truth

"The right path is not, and never will be, an easy one. And as I mentioned, it is so easy to be taken morally hostage by family members. But we cannot allow ourselves the contemporary canard of divorcing love from the moral law. Rather, we must follow Christ: "If you love me, do as I command." How can we help others if our love, and their lives, are separated from moral truth? The spiritual and pastoral art is communicating this to others (particularly hard as it is in the case of loved ones) in a gentle and yet effective manner."


"It isn't easy, Father. You know, now, I have a hole in my heart that moral truth does not fill."

"Daughter, Our Lord will fill it."

"How?"

"In His own way. Remember that He said, 'He who gives up home, family...for My sake will receive a hundredfold'."

"Yes, but like Job's new family, how does it make up for the lost ones? They are irreplacable."

"Daughter, what you have done is to show him the narrow path- whether he sees it now, or later- this is up to him. You know the Lord never takes our free will from us. You have done a small thing, small in the Lord's eyes, to show him that his way is not good. And your very suffering will be further evidence to him. He knows you say this, and do it, at great cost. And never forget that He loves him, much more than you ever could. Remember the lost sheep?"

"Oh yes. To see him upon the Lord's shoulders would be -"

"-wonderful. Take courage, Daughter. We live most of our lives in faith, in the dark-"

"-like the cloud of unknowing?"

"Yes, yes. We find the Lord in this life within the seeking. We find Him in obedience, even when we don't fully understand His commands, and even when, perhaps, it is very costly. I am thinking of him and of you when I say this."

"That is why, isn't it, Father, that we can only truly live righteous lives with joy when we have our heart set on knowing the Lord in heaven-as we are known. Otherwise, it becomes pharisaic judgement."

"Love changes everything- but as Edith Stein said, 'Accept nothing as love which denies truth, and accept nothing as truth which has not love.'"

"My heart is not so empty- or perhaps the wound makes sense."

"It is the sense of true sacrifice- only when offered in love, like Our Lord's crucifixion does sacrifice find its meaning."

"Still, Father, I am afraid. Afraid of him staying on the wrong way-"

"Perfect love casts out fear. It is a gift you must ask of the Lord. Like the courage you need, the sense of love tied to truth, the highest standard of love, that we are all called to, now in the face of loss: even those who we love the most. Leave him with God."

The Fragrance of Fullness

It was a spring day today; sweet and gentle air seemed in control, vanquishing delightfully the normal smells of fertilizer and car fumes. The light was slightly slanted, and warm, so that each leaf on each tree was lit in the splendor of new green, and the Poor Clares Convent nestled in the little valley below the coastal hills like a hen settling into her covey for the evening.

We parked, and ten percolating little girls bubbled out of the cars, spilling merrily along the sidewalk toward the convent entrance. A bell rang, far off in the silence, and a little hunched-over nun opened the door. She looked an era old, but was resplendent in the habit of St. Clare. There was a busy-peacefulness about her, as she settled us in the visitor’s area in front of the grille, the lofty patchwork of wood that was the boundaryline between our world- a choppy, rushed, windswept and kalediscope place- and theirs- a mystery. I had never been to a convent. Being there is different than seeing it on a movie or reading about it, for there is a thousand immediacies which cannot be caught on film or page: the kitchy-seventies chairs from the little kitchen, a kitchen with only the essentials; as one little girl put it, the ‘nun-spiders’; the quiet, serious statues and paintings; and that grille, a strange conjunction between jail-visiting and a chosen desert.

The door in the room on the other side of that grille opened and Mother Trinitas of the Indwelling wheeled herself in. The ten girls all stood up, and she came to the grille and stood up, her small, old face peeking at them. She had a way of looking carefully and at close proximity, but not from infirmity, rather from interest. And she looked at each child in a slow and quiet rhythm, a rhythm it seems born from a different life. She would talk, in soft tones, and it seems no word was wasted; each sentence pregnant, each movement a harmony of silence. Yes, I remember her words. But I remember most her rhythm and the powerful exhortation she made to us: “Do not be afraid of silence. It envelopes you; in it is music, and you listen to God in that silence. When you are helping your mother, when you are at church, stop for a minute and let the silence take over: and listen.” That exhortation was a jewel set in a heavy gold ring, the ring that was her manner; a manner cultivated over many years of silence, purity and prayer.

Another Sister came in, and as they related to each other and to the little girls, our Little Flowers Club, I watched their eyes. There was happiness- to see us, yes, but a happiness that cannot be but an old happiness. Have you ever been to a flower show, to see some very rare and carefully raised breed of rose or peony? Or perhaps an Italian villa, built carefully over centuries by the same family, where every plant, every stone, every field and stone wall has been tended? You can recognize the fruit of many years when you see it. The happiness in their eyes, seemed to me to be the fruit of many years.

We drove away, and I didn’t want to talk about what was in my soul, so I made some jokes with the girls. The rest of the day, I was so happy, as if some grace from their crystalline fountain had been poured into me.

I wonder: can we cultivate something of that grace, that fullness -of -silence rhythm in our lives? Or is that the gift of the Bridegroom for His brides alone? It seems to me that it is a gift, that it is a certain loveliness reserved for the Brides of Christ. Yet this does not make me unhappy, rather it makes me see that like the peonies, we all have different fragrances; that at the end of St. Paul’s race, at the fullness of our life with Christ, whether we are, like Ven. Anne, eleven- or like Mother Trinitas, eighty: that at this fullness, we give glory to God in the way He assigned to us. The way He made us. Perhaps it will be the fragrance of suffering, perhaps the fragrance of the missionary, or my fellow mothers, the fragrance is coming from the reddened and workworn hands, hands and breasts and faces worn in childcare; a life sacrificed and not selfishly held. So perhaps we do not know what fragrance we give off as we reach our fullness. Perhaps the Poor Clare nuns we met do not know how sweetly their souls smell.

Pray for vocations.