Transfiguring experience is not granted to people as an easy and ready access to glory. Only in going up the mountain, rejecting and being rejected by the world, identifying with those who are most broken, does one encounter the divine refulgence...Our substitution of consumer tourism for pilgrimage, of canned experience for life-changing risk, is symptomatic of our inability to entertain in any way the reality of our own transfiguration.
Fifty years of marriage is the essence of a journey that spans uphills and downhills, goals achieved; unexpected joys, and times of failure, disappointments, and offenses that sought forgiveness. The thirteenth chapter of Corinthians is a discipline and a constant for the days and years. Love is not arrogant or rude, love glories not in one-upman-ship or being right, love suffers and is kind, love hangs in there. And ultimately this delicate, gentle but tough bond supersedes all else and becomes the one imperishable gift we can have if we are humble enough to receive it.