The Quenching At Midday

The Quenching At Midday

My husband and I were married in a simple yet quite charming wedding ceremony. Now what is left of that nuptial ceremony we had is our marriage. The nuptial ceremony we had was short, about three hours, the marriage we are living out, because of it, is now going onto 24 years. At the nuptial ceremony we had so many gifts. There was one we didn’t notice at all. But in our marriage we have become acutely aware that it is that one gift alone that is most important.

While it is brief, the nuptial celebration is a sacrament and a sacrament is a sign of grace and the grace it signifies. It holds the grace necessary to live out, endure, and fulfill the marriage. This is the only nuptial gift that remains new, untarnished, unbowed and unceasing in its offering.

This grace is at its greatest availability when it is most needed. It is like an alarm clock that rings not at the time you want to wake up, but at exactly the time when you should wake up. It wakes you up when you have fallen asleep in your obligations to the marriage or somehow are weakening in their performance.

When does this lethargy occur? Well, when do we take the siesta? After the dawn and morning freshness of the wedding celebration is over; after the thrills and excitement of discovering one another is over; after the Monday to Friday program of your life has been fixed; after the children are finally settled in school. At midday! At mid-life!

The mid-life crisis comes when everything becomes a routine, mundane, usual, matter-of-fact dull; when you think you know everything there is to know about your wife and there is nothing more to discover; when the children are so noisy you suddenly shout your head off to get some quiet in the house; when your work for your wife and your family seems a slavery that you’re stuck in and isn’t so exciting any more and you wish you had gone into some other kind of business; when the silences between you and your wife become more frequent and for no reason at all; when the fights become a little bit more bitter; when you come to thinking that somehow everything has been a mistake. When the sins of your youth come back to haunt you. This is midday.

It is then, as what my husband and I have experienced, that this “Amazing Grace” comes out of the closet and up from the bottom of the gift-box to wake us up. We have seen with our own eyes this gift of grace signified and given in that short wedding ceremony was prepared to be inevitably utilized every day of our married life.

It is there with us, we have only have to use it. It is there for all these instances and for even more disastrous occasions. It is invincible! This I speak from my experience.

There are signs that appear the day of grace is at hand : to be for and to see in each other the “man” as Pilate introducing Christ said “Behold the Man!” A yearning to open our hearts to woo each other again and yet again after the tears have dried from our eyes. We have gone back to this fountain on many raw moments to seek solace and we have not been dissappointed…ever.

At midday the sun strikes us at its hottest but also at its brightest. In the abundance of difficulties we always stumble upon flickers of hope and possibilities. We take a step and every once in while take a drink from this wellspring and soon looking at the horizon a feeling overtakes us, a feeling that we can move mountains!