A Worthy Wife – Fr. John

11/13/2005

As the Body of Christ we know that all we have is a gift from God.  The question – raised by today’s Gospel - is what does God call us to do with our gifts: our talents, our treasure and our time?  We can be sure that it’s not to hide them away for fear of loosing them.  Rather God calls us to use our gifts to be the means through which He evangelizes the world.  God directs us to teach all nations.  That includes our own: our community, our parish, our family.  The measure that will determine our eternal destiny is “have we used our gifts to spread the Kingdom?”

Our reading from proverbs describes a “worthy wife” and mine fits that description very well.  Her presence was a gift to everyone who knew her.  She was a wonderful and skilled homemaker and she’d give whatever was needed to whoever needed it – corporate executive or street person – they were no different in her eyes.  Perhaps her greatest gift was the example she gave to others: how to live with childlike wonder, with confidence in the goodness of God and God’s creation and with determination to follow God’s will as St. Therese said, “in confidence and love.”

Diane was counter cultural.  During the 60’s and 70’s the culture taught that the role of stay-at-home moms was demeaning and that a woman who didn’t seek her identity outside the home wasn’t living up to her potential and lacked ambition.  Diane was vocal in her disagreement.  To her, the highest calling was being a mother and she reveled in raising our children.  She was the mom who took care of the neighborhood kids who hung out at our house because no one was in theirs. 

Just as our youngest was entering college – in 1991 – Diane’s cancer was diagnosed.  It was during this period of our marriage that she taught me the lessons I most needed.  As a project manager, I wanted to put a plan together, assemble all the resources needed and overwhelm her disease.  I thought I could control the outcome.  She was the one with real wisdom.  I remember her first visit with her oncologists.  They asked her - as their patient - what she expected of them.  It was a great question.  Her answer: “I want you to do the best you can.  But most of all, I want you to treat me like a person.”

As we made the rounds of treatments centers in Baltimore, Washington, Minnesota and Boston she uplifted her various medical teams with her openness and authenticity.  Two of her favorite expressions – and mine - during those times became, “pain is inevitable; misery is optional.”  And “situation hopeless…but not serious.”

When her doctor at St. Agnes hospital in Baltimore told that there was nothing more to be done, Diane immediately responded that she was at peace because she had done everything she could do to halt the disease.  Moments later, she asked me to get our friends – the Greenberg’s - to come over when we got home that evening because she wanted to laugh.

The day after Diane died, my sister, Ann, and I were looking through the funeral rite for an appropriate Gospel.  We came upon one usually selected for a child.  In it Jesus says, “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”  We looked at each other and nodded – perfect.

Diane taught me that Faith has to be living and growing.  It has to be vibrant and dynamic or it will – as I found out through my own experience - stagnate and atrophy.  When she died, I knew that I had to do something significant with that lesson or I’d fall back into the person I was before her illness.  That would be to dishonor who she was and who she called me to be. 

Diane’s life was founded on a deep trust and love of God.  So what she inspired in me didn’t originate in her.  She was the instrument through whom God reached out to me in love.

My wife is God’s precious gift to me.  Her genius was her cooperation with God in becoming the one through whom God’s presence became manifest to her husband, her children, to other family members and those neighbors and friends whose lives she touched.

I pray that each of you know or come to know true agents of God’s love like my wife.  And I pray that each one of us will use our time, our talent and our treasure to become the intermediaries though whom others come to know – intimately - the God who loves them so deeply.