My youngest granddaughter, Evangeline, was recently baptized. It was a beautiful event filled with love, family, and delicious cake of course. The music selection for the celebration of Evangeline’s baptism was excellent. I ended up beside my son, Patrick, as we sang the closing number. Patrick has a demanding career and a growing family and so my time with him is limited. Hearing his beautiful singing voice filled me with such deep familiarity and love, with memories of his childhood, and with a profound sense of how deeply bonded and connected we are. I am always caught off guard by the small moments that connect us to one another.
My father died eight years ago. I am surprised by the things I remember about him. I remember the way his hand looked as he used his finger to show me the running route he wanted me to take to catch the football in our backyard games. I remember those same hands crushing big Snyder’s pretzels into bite sized pieces for my nighttime snack. I remember the way he sat in the living room playing solitaire as we all gathered together to talk and reminisce. I rarely think of anything like advice he gave me, or wisdom he shared. Instead, I remember the love in his hands and the calm of his presence.
In the first years of my marriage, I often felt insecure. I wondered if John would continue to love me when he really and truly got to know everything about me. When he didn’t communicate with me the way I expected, it would stir that fear. Often my insecurity led to disagreements as I accused him of not caring about me because he failed to tell me one thing or another. We have been married for forty-one years now. I still don’t always understand many things about him. I still wonder sometimes why he doesn’t tell me things that I think are important. But my wondering is very different than it was in our early years. I now know with utmost certainty that John loves me as fully as any one human being can love another. Because of that certainty, we rarely have disagreements now. I accept my inability to understand because it is a small ripple in a sea of calm, enduring love.
In his published journal, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton writes about a sermon one of his confreres, Father John of the Cross, gave about friendship with Christ. Merton writes,
Speaking of friendship with Christ, he said that in all friendship there is first a stage at which we see the acts of our friend and come, by them, to know who he is. But after we have come to know who he is, then we see his acts differently, only in the light of who he is. Then even acts that would otherwise disconcert us and would seem ambiguous in themselves are accepted because we know who he is. The transition point comes when we know the inmost desires of our friend’s heart…. Therefore in friendship with Christ, we do not need to know and understand all about the Cross, the Kingdom or the way to the Kingdom. What we need to know is the inmost desire in the heart of Christ, which is that we should come to the Kingdom with Him.
Thomas Merton
Learning to know someone might begin with ice breaking conversations that slowly invite deeper sharing. The most profound knowing comes when we no longer need words, and when we can accept our limited understanding because we trust the love between us. The deepest love can’t be communicated very well through words, but is felt when we sing, when we break bread together, when through prayer, we listen together for God’s loving presence, and when we participate in joy and suffering with one another.
