Inseparable from my childhood memories are a group of individuals with whom my parents, quite early in their marriage, established a tightly knit friendship. For the most part these couples shared a common faith and even attended the same church. Others were employed at the same business. All were deeply committed to partaking in the sacrament banned by more fundamental Protestants: Card playing. After all, these men and women were a bit more unorthodox. With the exception of the Belgian Catholic DeClerks, they were mostly Swedes and thus Lutherans. Oh how I loved card club night, watching my mother set up the card tables and chairs in our living room, noting the addition of extra beer stocked in the basement fridge and even receiving a sip or two of that forbidden beverage, and yearning for the ubiquitous chocolate covered raisins and peanuts which no respectable card club night would be without. There were Barb and Pete Peterson, Bob and Nancy Wiklund, Harold and Barb Johnson, John and Jo Welander, and Jo and Gene DeClerk. Together they would enter our home, their coats and purses flung onto my parents' bed in mass disarray, their laughter abundant and permeating that space I called home, their lives becoming inexplicably entwined with my own. Collectively these friends have journeyed throughout life, rejoicing at the birth of children, accepting roles of godparents, attending high school graduations, celebrating at children's weddings, fawning over pictures of grandchildren, mourning the loss of parents, reaching milestone birthdays and anniversaries, bearing each others sufferings through illness and disease, and now, within the last couple years, grieving spouses. Ripening together.
Sunday morning my husband and I stood in the nave of our church to witness the baptism of our daughter and celebrate her entrance into the Orthodox Church. Our dear friend Tawyna held her goddaughter in her arms, her husband Nick standing by her side. Surrounding and supporting us were members of our church community, our own parents, and many of those friends who held our other children in their arms on their baptism day. Earlier that morning I had considered the magnitude of the approaching event and wept. I reflected on the passage of time and the years that have so quickly passed. Our lives have been complete with joy–the finding of love and the engagements, the weddings, the births–but not untouched by tremendous, faith shattering sorrows which could have resulted in resentment or bitterness but instead produced a deeper faith. We are no longer passionate youths in our early twenties or even our early thirties. Our hair has begun to thin and turn gray, the lines have begun to increase around our mouths and eyes. It is undeniable we are marching into middle age, ripening together. As the words of that ancient creed declared each week during the divine liturgy formed on our lips and as I heard my own voice and the voices of those so dear to me proclaim, "I believe..." the pregnancy of the moment was unmistakable. I was fully present, love immense and sweet, and Christ was truly in our midst. May God grant us many, many years.
Ripening
Wendell Berry
The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepared. But this is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!
