The Love of Old Friends
Last weekend, my class reunion was much better than I could have imagined. It was because of love.
A good friend told our prayer group about an app called Centering Prayer. In the app, you choose a beginning and an ending prayer or passage, and then you meditate or pray or observe silence, in whatever way you choose, for ten minutes in between.
Right now, the beginning phrase I read every day is this one: “Open my heart to your Love.” Sometimes that’s easy, and other times it takes a minute to settle down and try to open my heart, to God’s love in particular, and breathe in not just air, but love.
I sometimes forget that my first and most memorable examples of God’s love came from my friends and family. Kurt Vonnegut said that one of our greatest spiritual needs is to find “a stable community of like-minded individuals with whom to share life experiences.” After the class reunion I attended over the past weekend, that makes complete sense. I see God most easily through other people with whom I’ve shared my life.
Our high school graduating class was small, compared to most graduating classes, and also unusual in that so many had been together since first grade, or even since birth. We lived in a small town where our parents worked together in a church college or in nearby businesses, medical practices, and other organizations. There were several congregations of our church in town, and almost all of us belonged to one of them. Our school taught us the Bible and tried to prepare us well in all the subjects needed to attend college. We were as close as family, and like family, we had our squabbles and we didn’t always do the right thing, but we still loved each other through it all.
When we got together this past weekend, we were a smiling bunch of self-described “old people,” and we picked up where we’d left off. We put out a display of yearbooks, newspapers, and athletic memorabilia, and played a film from our football successes on pull-down screens.
I think most of us have retired, but not all, and many of us had already sent in a bio so that we didn’t have as much catching up to do on the spot. We talked about the here and now, what our dreams are going forward, but we also reminisced; then a bunch of us stayed around after dinner, further reliving our school escapades and experiences, like the time a few (not me!) poured some pickled pigs’ feet on the principal’s front porch. I’d say the sound heard most throughout the evening was laughter.
Our lives have taken many turns and reaches. We’ve spread out across the country and even overseas, and only a few still live in our little town. We’ve lost parents, spouses, siblings, children, and four of our own class members over the years. We’ve dealt with crises, worked hard, and tried to make a difference, in a really wide range of careers: health, business, education, the arts, and much more. We missed the ones we’d lost and the ones who couldn’t be there this time, and we all agreed that we need to get together a lot more often. Maybe even go on a cruise!
Before coming home, I wrote in my journal that being with everyone had been “restorative.” It made me feel like I was home with them — if not immediate family, these folks were at least as close as cousins to me, and I felt surrounded with love and kindness. Opening my heart to God’s love involves opening my heart to my friends — to those I haven’t seen in fifty years, and to those I speak with regularly. It involves opening my heart to my church family, to my neighbors, to my own family, and of course it needs to expand, in some way, to the whole world. It starts with a group like this, though, because it was God’s love that I opened my heart to, when I opened my heart to them.
Much love to the Harding Academy class of 1973, Searcy, Arkansas.
