Germanium anniversary

[Written in September and left languishing in my drafts folder] 

Math Man and I have been married for 32 years (100,000₂ for the CS crowd). As we drove to dinner last night, we wondered what the traditional gift was for your 32nd. The 30th was pearls and the kids got us these beautiful oyster shells with bits of the nautical chart of the area we sailed on our honeymoon. The 31st? Last fall was a haze — between the college and Math Man's health issues. (Turns out the gift was "travel" — but the most travel we did was to UPenn's hospital.) 

The 32nd turns out to be bronze (at least on the couple of lists that include it). Most lists start to only give the “gifts” for the years divisible by 5 after the 25th, perhaps because 5 years goes by in such a flash at our ages? Though if you make it all those years, it seems to me it’s time to start counting each and every one, if not each day. That would be almost 12,000 days for us.

Frankly bronze seems a bit blah for any anniversary. 32 is 100 000 base 2, which seems to demand something more valuable. We batted various gemstones and metals around. I suggested germanium (Ge), which is atomic number 32. It’s lustrous and silver-white, like our hair these days. It’s a bit pricier than silver, not as precious as gold. Math Man suggested he get me a new laptop (germanium has applications in electronics) as a gift. No need, I said. The one on my desk is fine. 

What did I get him? A new water bottle! Not made of germanium, though roughly the dusty green of geranium leaves. Maybe he should have gotten me a potted geranium.

Renewing vows: 9131 days

It's the nine thousand one hundred and thirty first day since Math Man and I walked through the doors of the parish church, processed down the aisle and vowed to stand by each other and cherish each other in weal and in woe.

It's our 25th anniversary, if you don't want to do the math (yes, Math Man included the leap years!).  It's not a prime number, but composite, with a prime factorization of 23 x 397.

Our sons had a life sized photo cutout of us made and restaged the wedding — right where it happened in our parish church. It is an entirely different take on renewing your vows.  They photographed the 'event' and gave us the photos (and the cutout) for an anniversary present.

It seems unthinkable that we've been married more than 13 million minutes, millions seem so large and the time so short.  Other significant dates to come?  On January 22, 2020 we will have been married 10,000 days and on Monday, May 13, 2024 for a billion seconds.  Billions and billions. And yes, these days are on my calendar!

Engaged in espionage

"I Love You!"

These days Math Man and I are watching The Americans, a series loosely based on an actual Soviet program to place spies in the US disguised as nuclear families.  (This piece in The Guardian describing the experiences of two kids who found out in their teens that their parents were spies is great.)

The episode we watched last night had a spy leaving a message inside a toilet paper roll, which Elizabeth (one of the two undercover KGB spies) discovers because the toilet seat was up in an apartment where a single woman lived.  This morning, as I pulled out a new roll of toilet paper to put in the upstairs bathroom, I joked to Math Man that I had thought about leaving him a coded message inside the roll.  I mimed peering inside to find....someone already had left a message.

Walking down the aisle at Our Mother of
Good Counsel, where we still go to Mass.

OK, it wasn't in code, but still. And then I noticed the toilet seat was up.  "Did you leave it that way to suggest the message?" I demanded.  He did.

I love that I married someone as crazy and goofy as I am. Tomorrow it will be 24 years.

DotMagis: Love is patient and kind, but am I?

Not the St. John's Bible by any means...

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, love is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. 1 Cor 13:4-6

St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians.  It was proclaimed when I married Tom, and again when I married Victor.  It was hardly a novel choice.  But what happens when I hear it at a funeral? I hear hard questions, not a poetic description — however powerful.

"Have I been patient? kind?
Was I jealous, pompous, or self-important?"

Read the whole reflection at Ignatian Spirituality's DotMagis blog.

...but in my own hand nonetheless

It was interesting to be reminded of the other readings we chose. From Matthew's Gospel  - the call to be salt of the earth and light for the world.  From the Song of Songs,  set me as a seal upon your heart. And Psalm 30, the psalm that ran through my head all night when Tom was dying.  Then the line that I held close was at night weeping enters in, but with the dawn joy, but for this day, you have changed my mourning into dancing, you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.  A bridge between two lives, an acknowledgement of the mystery that I would not willingly have given up the first for the second, nor now, forgone the second to have clung to the first.

One Flesh

It's a complicated Sunday. World Communion Sunday. Respect Life Sunday. Opening of the Synod on the Family in Rome. Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. On my more local calendar, we are anointing the sick at my parish this week, I gave a talk at the a nearby Episcopal Church on science and religion, and went to a friend's husband's funeral. In the greater world, there are floods and shootings and mudslides and "collateral damage" at hospitals.

It has me thinking about what it means to share in the sufferings of the Body of Christ, of the world.

And in this reflection, written many months ago for Give Us This Day, I wonder if we are missing something about the sacramental sign that is matrimony.

Do we weep for each other, as we would weep for a beloved spouse?

"'Are you trying to tell me that my husband is dead?' I asked the surgeon. 'Yes.' In that harrowing moment of my first marriage’s dissolution, I finally grasped in my bones the reality of these words: They are no longer two but one flesh. Half of me had been torn off, and what remained was pouring out onto the floor in a pool of tears.

It is tempting to hear these readings from Genesis and Mark as mere marriage instruction, demanding husbands and wives to cleave to each other no matter the cost. I see in them instead potent images of what it feels like to be one body, not just in marriage but as the People of God: you are bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. We proclaim in the Communion antiphon that we are one body. But do we feel in our bones that we are one flesh, mingled with Christ in our communion, as the water and wine mingle in the cup we share? One. Inseparable.

These readings point us to realities beyond marriage, challenging us to deepen our fidelity to one another and to Christ as members of his One Body. This indeed is a hard teaching for all of us, not just those struggling with marriage. Are we torn open by the sufferings of our brothers and sisters? Do we weep for each other as we would weep for a beloved spouse? We are no longer two, but one flesh."

From Phaith: Pearls of Great Price

Philadelphia's Archdiocesan magazine, Phaith, is now being published in an online version. This column appeared in the October issue.

Victor was a bit dubious about this column, worried that he didn't come off very well, sitting in that conference room.  He did his fair share on this project, even relinquishing his favorite part (the tiling) to me.  I love the phrasing, partners in the whole of life. Marriage in my book isn't about going halvies, but about going all in.  Whether it's patios built amid the heat, or children or illness or no lights in a storm...

“Dad says this is your anniversary present,” said Chris as he tipped a wheelbarrow of sand into the form for the new patio. He sounded dubious. Covered in sweat and dust on a sultry afternoon in August, I was piling up 20 pound slabs of stone, while my husband of 20 years sat in a cool conference room at the college, sliding papers around a table. This do-it-yourself project did not look much like the anniversary gifts touted on TV. No pearls?

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.  I’d been contemplating this line from Genesis since I’d heard it read at Mass the week before while Victor and I stood on either side of our oldest son, Mike, at the opening Mass for his freshman year at college — almost 19 years to the day since we discovered we were to become parents. Bound by our vows, we found ourselves bound up anew in this child. A gift on our first anniversary from God to us.

Through the years we joked with each other that we each did 75 percent of the work of being parents, as Victor paced the floors with a disconsolate Chris at 2 a.m. or I tutored Mike in algebra after dinner. Laundry, dirty dishes, play dates and college visits. Fall hikes, family dinners, water fights and choral concerts. A full measure of challenges and joys nurtured equally by each.

 St. Augustine once said that miracles “have a tongue of their own … let us not only be delighted with (their) surface, but let us also seek to know (their) depth.” So, too, do these sacraments that hallow our lives have “tongues of their own” that speak to us not only when we first celebrate them, but again and again, drawing us into the depths of the mystery that is our relationship with God.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church begins its discussion of the sacrament of marriage by reminding us that it is a “matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life.” After 20 years of marriage — after 20 years as partners in the whole of life — my labors on the patio truly felt as much a gift from Victor to me, as it was my own gift to him. Caught up in this sacramental marriage, we are mysteriously one body. 

Chris’ comment made me think not only about the bond that Victor and I share, but nudged me to seek something of its depths. God dwells in me, and I in God. I have nothing to offer, but what I myself have been given. What work I do is not my work, but God’s gifts, at work in me. God offers to do not just 75 percent, but 100 percent, and calls forth the same in me, in each of us.

Where are the pearls? I have been given them. A string of days, dark and light, each built over time of many layers, knotted together. To have and to hold – and to share –from this day forward.

Column: The Best Wine

[Michelle is on retreat, but the blog appears courtesy of Blogger's scheduled posts feature!]

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times15 January 2009]

Jesus told them, “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, “Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.” So they took it. And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine, without knowing where it came from (although the servers who had drawn the water knew), the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.” Jn. 2:7-10


“Jo-Ann will play the violin for you now,” I can hear the gentle voice say through my cell phone. I hold the phone out to catch the music as it swirls up to the roof, following the ghosts of the incense that curled about the altar earlier. Piano and violin intertwine to make Handel’s music come to life. A thousand miles away, Jo-Ann’s father holds the phone to his wife’s ear, so she can hear her daughter play.

The nurses in the ICU told Jo-Ann that they couldn’t keep their eyes off of her parents. Everyone who passed by, they said, was struck by the tender love expressed between them, by her father’s gentle and unwavering care for his wife.

Listening to Jo-Ann talk about her parents, I heard the echoes of the headwaiter’s words in this passage from John: “You have saved the best wine for last.”

I’d sometimes wondered why this Gospel is proclaimed at weddings, other than the obvious aspect of its setting. For the most part, the wedding couple and their guests are off-stage in John’s recounting of Christ’s first public miracle, and the marriage ceremony isn’t even mentioned — just the party. It is a Gospel about beginnings, the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry and, too, the beginning of a marriage.

Married twice, for six years and now 16 years, I feel like I’ve been a beginner at marriage for almost a quarter of a century, and so tend to hear in this passage of the graces God grants to such beginnings, filled to the brim, like the water jars. The overflowing joys of finding a companion of soul and heart, creating a home and family and welcoming children are like the wine at Cana, gifts not only to the couple but to us all.

These graced beginnings reflect for us God’s joy in our community of faith, deeply grounded in His covenantal love for us.

In focusing on the brimming water, I’d overlooked the wine. Good wine is often old wine; wine aged in knotty wooden barrels, under conditions that aren’t always perfect, over many years. When the time comes to pour out this wine, it is fragrant and complex. Here, at the end of a long marriage, in very difficult times, extraordinary wine was poured out, shared not only by husband and wife, but by everyone who saw them — all the guests at the feast.

In reflecting on this passage, St. John Chrysostom suggested, “Our Lord wanted the power of his miracles to be seen gradually, little by little.” The grace of a sacramental marriage is not static but continues to reveal God’s glory to us, little by little. The wine of a long marriage is a sign not only of God’s enduring love for us but also of God’s ceaseless revelation of Himself to us, in endings as well as in beginnings.

God saves the best wine for last.

---

God of wonders, at Cana in Galilee you revealed your glory in Jesus Christ and summoned all humanity to life in him. Show to your people your transforming power and give us a foretaste of the wine you keep for the age to come. We make our prayer through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen. — From the opening prayer for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C.