This is the season of celebrations of graduations, weddings and the anniversaries on the annual return of the dates. Our family is celebrating several anniversaries within a month’s time — our 70th wedding anniversary, the 70th anniversary of my wife’s college graduation, the 200th anniversary of First Christian Church, and the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. All within a one-month period!
A biblical passage helps us interpret these events. ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart (family), mind (school), soul, (church) and strength (country) Mark 12:30.
Family, church, and country anniversaries in June and July embody our joy in being a family and our decades of fellowship in the church. Celebration of July 4th joins us with others in patriotic gratitude for being a free citizen of this democratic country.
Love is the concept associated with marriage, often conveyed, unfortunately, in the most sentimental and tasteless images. A wise person commented that one does not fall into love; hence, one does not fall out of love. After seventy years of experience, one learns that love in marriage is a verb and not a noun. Love is a continuous flow of actions focused on the wellbeing of spouse and children. I remember the time when as a teenager I realized that I could happily spend my life with my girlfriend. Then seeing each child in a hospital bassinet was a great joy. We were already committed to the child’s wellbeing while still in the womb and we still are today.
Marriage and raising a family require hard work and commitment. That’s what the wedding vows signify when binding two people through sickness and health, through thick and thin, until death do them part. That commitment is what brings security, satisfaction, and joy through the decades.
A unique event became part of our anniversary. We had Sunday lunch at Rancho Bravo and learned that a couple we did not know sitting at the table next to ours had paid for our lunch. I hurried to thank them in the parking lot. The woman explained that she paid for our lunch because our good example. She wished for herself the blessing of living into old age with someone who loved her. That is a great blessing, indeed.
Faith is associated with membership in a religious community. Each of the anniversaries involves looking back to events and people, but we realize that the most important aspects of any anniversary are to enjoy the present and to look forward with anticipation to the future. Current personal and communal activities support and look forward to the flourishing of the church and our neighbors.
Hope can be associated with our patriotism and citizenship. Patriotism is a powerful commitment. Sir Walter Scott’s poem states it well:
‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead/ Who never to himself hath said/ ‘This is my own, my native land!/ Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d/ As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, /From wandering on a foreign strand!’
That poem came to mind each time I returned from abroad. The feeling was not just vapid, degenerated patriotism. Celebrations of return or anniversaries should recall the solid guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in part by the freedoms of press, religion, speech, assembly, and guarantees in constitutional amendments. We hope for these are part of an anticipated future.
Love, faith, and hope are intertwined in all that we do in family, church, and nation. Together those help make us better people. We can celebrate that!
Raymond Brady Williams, Crawfordsville, LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus, contributed this guest column.
