By Barb Arland-Fye
Faith on the Journey
My husband Steve walked into my home office, sat down on a bench covered with a rug that we purchased in Mexico on our 10th wedding anniversary and asked how my day was going. It wasn’t even noon yet, so I thought the question seemed a little odd.
Before I could respond, Steve said, “Guess what I found?” He opened his closed hand to reveal my wedding ring, its diamond and petal-shaped rubies looking as perfect as they did on our wedding day 40 years ago. I lost the ring 1-½ years ago and have lamented its loss ever since. The ring had been lost once before, a dozen years ago, but Steve found it several weeks later trapped inside the recesses of a cabinet in our main bathroom.
In March 2024, my wedding ring “vanished” again and I figured it probably slipped into the same spot in the cabinet. But it hadn’t. More than a year later, as we approached our 40th wedding anniversary, I told Steve that the only gift I wanted was that wedding ring.
That was not a gift he could give me on our anniversary May 25. We celebrated with a gift I will treasure anyway — dinner with our sons Colin and Patrick at a restaurant overlooking the Mississippi River in East Dubuque, Illinois. I wore a placeholder — a wedding ring that no longer fit my mom’s ring finger. The placeholder is beautiful, but it does not have the sentimental value of the wedding ring from Steve.
Sacramental marriage is not about the wedding rings that Steve and I exchanged lovingly on a summerlike Saturday afternoon at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Clinton during our nuptial Mass celebrated with family and friends. But the ring served as a visible reminder of the covenant we made before God and witnessed by the community gathered.
“St. Paul teaches that marriage is a pre-eminent symbol (or sacrament) of the covenant which Christ has with his people. This is because marriage is a commitment by which spouses pledge to each other all aspects of their lives ‘until death do us part,’” observes “For Your Marriage,” a website the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops created to strengthen couples on the journey. This paragraph, especially, resonates with me:
“… (In) daily acts of kindness, service, mutual love, and forgiveness couples are called to imitate, however imperfectly, the unconditional love which Christ offers to us. Seeing marriage as rooted in the broader covenant of love between God and humanity …”
As I write this reflection, the Church’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith has just released a new document on marriage, titled “Una Caro” (“One Flesh”): In Praise of Matrimony, Catholic News Service reported Nov. 25.
“Una Caro” focuses on the “unique reality” of the marital union between a man and woman, “embodied within human limitations” and “requiring a relationship so intimate and all-encompassing that it cannot be shared with others.”
The consent that the spouses give and receive mutually to one another “gives rise to mutual belonging, called to deepen, to mature and to become ever more solid,” CNS said, citing the document, released in Italian.
My wedding ring has been an inanimate witness to the lived experience of my marriage with Steve over these 40 years of joys, sorrows, challenges and strengths. That’s why it meant so much to me when Steve retrieved it a couple of weeks ago, underneath the stove in our kitchen! He had been vacuuming with a narrow attachment in the small space between the stove and the floor to prevent an errant blueberry or two from attracting pests. The vacuum picked up the ring … but didn’t suck it into the canister’s bag, thanks be to God! My joy was indescribable.
Why did the wedding ring show up now? Steve believes it’s a sign of my late dad’s presence in these early weeks after his unexpected death to cancer this past October. Steve and I teamed up to assist my mom and siblings in my dad’s final, arduous days on earth. Dad, a devout Catholic, embraced his sacrament of marriage with my mom, a union of 68 years at the time of his death. It would be just like Dad, to make his presence known through the recovery of a wedding ring under the stove!
(Barb Arland-Fye is the retired editor of The Catholic Messenger and is a member of Our Lady of the River Parish in LeClaire.)
