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.
