Showing Our Kids The Place Their Story Began in Glendalough

“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one.  Lock it up, safe in the coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

~C. S. Lewis~

Some would say it is a stroke of sheer madness to settle down and marry just one person — just one — when there are so many people in this vast world of ours.

I like to think that John and I are a little bit mad.

We were crazy enough, 19 years ago, to believe that if we just allowed God to enter into our “yes”, than we were going to be just fine.

I don’t think either of us knew exactly what we were saying “yes” to on that sunny day in Glendalough, so many years ago.

This summer, we decided to go back to Ireland with our kids.  We wanted to make a pilgrimage of faith, and also to share with our kids the story of our love — because it is their story, too.

We wanted to let our kids know that their lives began in love — a deep, unconditional love that was blessed at the altar and continued with every new day and every new breath since then.

Don’t get me wrong.  John and I are very ordinary people.

We fight and we argue and we don’t always see eye to eye — but here is where the beauty of the grace of this Sacrament really comes into play.

We are a living testament to the grace of the Sacrament of Marriage.   If we can do it, anybody can.

To this day, we still laugh at our deacon’s words of reassurance after “failing” our focus test before we were married: “There is no such thing as failing, but having said that, I have never seen a lower level of compatibility  in any of the couples I have ever prepared for marriage”.

We told ourselves we would defy the odds, but would we have made it through without God?  I would like to think so, but I’m not sure we would have.

This world pulls and tugs at the hearts of every husband and wife — and many a more compatible man and woman have called it quits.

What made us different from them?

I wish I could say it was our amazing ability to work through issues and rise above our own selfishness and pettiness — but alas, no.

I can only atrribute our “making it through” to the grace of the sacrament of marriage.

We just need to ask Him to enter in and heal the damage done by our own selfishness and weakness — just ask for His grace, and see How he responds.

Speaking of “asking”, the first place John thought to propose was in the ruins of a chapel next to the graves of the ancient kings of Ireland.

We showed our kids the very spot this summer.

The day John proposed happened to be a bank holiday — which meant there were swarms of people everywhere we went — John wisely decided an audience of people wouldn’t do for a marriage proposal.

Smart Man. On to Plan B.

I had no idea John was planning to propose, so I thought nothing of his suggestion that we hike up a beautiful wooded path to the edge of a tree-lined cliff and watch the sun set.

It was beautiful.

As we were preparing to hike back down, John got a serious look on his face, grew unusually quiet and emotional and then he blurted out, “I want to marry you”.

Well, this girl had enough schooling in her background to recognize the difference between a declarative statement and an interrogative one — and this was most definitely not a question.

Besides, he wasn’t on one knee and he didn’t have a ring and I really had no idea what was going on.

So I just sat there and stared at him.

As my kids like to say, “Awkward…”

After a minute or so of our stare down, John finally said, “That was a question”.

Technically, it was not a question.  Let that just be stated right now, but I knew this wasn’t the time to argue the finer points of grammar.

So, I looked at John and said, “so I guess you want an answer”.

And as John sat there, in silence, all of these thoughts began filling my head.

I was a million miles away at the moment and maybe 40 years down the road, and I was paralyzed with the indecision that comes with realizing the seriousness of a moment like this one.

The truth is, loving someone can lead to a hurt that goes deeper than any sane person would ever care to experience.  But it can also lead to the greatest joy a heart on this Earth could ever experience.

I guess what I am trying to say is there is a risk involved in loving someone.

I could have been safe and said “no”.  It seemed at the time that might have even been the prudent thing to do, when saying yes would mean making myself vulnerable to all the hurt and sadness, as well as all the joy.

The truth is, none of us can see the future.  None of us can see the good or the bad, the sickness or the health, the better or the worse.

It all comes down to a leap of faith — a blind, unsettling leap into a void of what would only reveal itself as time went on.

So I said a simple prayer: “Lord, let me know your will”. I was hoping God would just make the answer crystal clear, but He didn’t.

Somewhere deep in my heart I heard God answer that prayer with the simple reply: “You choose”.

He wanted me to make a choice, and He wanted me to trust that no matter what that choice was that He would be on the other side of it.

And so I chose.  I chose John.  I chose him, in all of his beauty and all of his flaws.

I chose to love him, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, so help me God.

And God has helped us.  He has never failed us in all of these years.

As we walked that same path, 19 years later, we had 6 kids at our side.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind of whether I had made the right choice on that day in Glendalough, so many years before.

We couldn’t help but smile as we brought our kids to the exact spot where John asked me to marry him.

We showed the kids the spot where John planted the rose bushes and we let them know that they were here because of that fateful question so many years before.

And we took a series of pictures in that exact spot, which began with John and I and, one by one, added all of our kids to the mix.  Those will be fun to laugh at later.

Then John took the older kids to the spot where he almost plunged to his death immediately after proposing to me, years ago.

As we had made our way down, newly engaged, John decided to leap across a river to shorten our trek.

My, he looked like a gazelle leaping over the rapids! — that is, until he reached the other side, slipped on some Irish moss and smacked his head on an Irish boulder.

There I stood, watching the man I was going to marry semi-conscious, practically being dragged to his death down the rapidly moving stream.

Somehow he managed to pull himself out of that stream — and then he had the nerve to motion to me to follow his lead and jump into his arms.

Nope.  I decided to walk down to a narrower spot.  🙂

It was fun to share all these stories with our kids.  Clearly, Glendalough is a special place for us, but it is also a special place for Catholicism.

It is the site of a monastic city, where faith and learning were kept alive, even as darkness encompassed the rest of Europe.

Despite the attacks and attempts to pillage this place, the brave monks fought to keep faith and learning alive there.

Those monks were tough.  They were fierce. They were “all in”, and so must we be if we want our marriages to last.

If there is one takeaway that I hope will remain with our kids for years to come, it’s that they were born out of love and that God has continued to sustain that love all these years.

I want them to know that love is worth fighting for and risking for — to not be afraid to make themselves vulnerable when it comes to loving other people.

I hope they remember that love as they walk their own paths and make their own choices.

I hope they remember to invite God into their choices and to rest assured that they will be just fine, as long as He is there with them.

In fact, it will probably be way better than fine.  It just might be downright amazing.

 

 

Sharing over at Kelly’s