Dec. 29, 2005

Dear Ken,

The blessings of family and good friends become more meaningful with the passing years. Achievements are nice, but each new year the realization grows that love is the only currency that matters.

The circle of love family creates is the context for most of the memories that form us.

As a boy, my Uncle Dave showed me the wonder of turning matchboxes into rockets we launched on his basement stairwell. Then he joined the Air Force, went into the West, and we rarely have seen each other since.

He was last here four years ago when his mother, my grandmother Ruby, died. Those were days when sharing the pain of losing her helped blunt its edge.

Dave and Aunt Marie are visiting from Seattle. They have seven children, eight grandchildren and two on the way. I reckon they've learned to live with each other pretty well.

Their daughter, Rachele, her husband, Scott, and their four children are visiting as well. DC immediately latched onto the children. The charm of children for DC and vice versa has always been obvious.

After 12 years of marriage, she has discovered some things about me that weren't obvious at first. For instance, the way I compulsively eat popcorn at the movies. It's just one kernel after another with me.

DC mutters that she is not sure she screened me well enough before we got married.

She's not the only one who has made allowances, of course. I thought I was marrying a twisted Martha Stewart. Turns out I married a twisted Lucille Ball, a woman who brakes for butterflies and stops for turtles, suddenly appears in her pickup truck loaded with lumber for a building project she has no plans for but was inspired to create, who sometimes soothes scared children patients by sitting our beagle on their laps.

She likes all-American religion. I prefer mysticism of all kinds. She likes Dr. Phil. I like Rumi. She likes "Antiques Roadshow." I like "Taxicab Confessions." I love the golf course, she loves the landscaping. I love "It's a Wonderful Life," she screams at the TV screen whenever George Bailey is once again forced to sidetrack his dreams.

In "The Seven Levels of Intimacy," Matthew Kelly writes that one key to a good marriage is accepting that some unresolvable differences will exist. Love is not understanding, he says, it's acceptance.

Many marriages exist on the surface of the intimacy possible between two people. Going further, deeper requires opening ourselves to being discovered by another and trusting this act of faith will result in more love, not less.

If the acceptance of differences is possible between two people, then it is possible between four and six, possible within a nation and possible between nations.

The Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote: "Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tide and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

Here's to a new year of discoveries.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.