More blessed in you than I know

How could anyone know what it means to promise life-long monogamous fidelity? … the question is not whether you know what you are promising; rather, the question is whether you are the kind of person who can be held to a promise you made when you did not know what you were promising.” Stanley Hauerwas

Truly, we were just kids, taking our lives in our hands and offering it to the other. So utterly unaware of what lay ahead, of who we would become and fail to become, so oblivious to what it was we were promising (and thank God for such blissful ignorance!). But for 29 years – today – my beloved wife has been the kind of person who can be held to a promise.

 

 

To celebrate the goodness of this graced and lovely woman and this anniversary, these photos of the ravishing glass work of Dale Chihuly (which we took in today), a poem from Wendell Berry, and a very fine and silly song from Peter Gabriel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage

And Peter Gabriel’s The Book of Love. Grab someone you love and share a dance with us tonight.