"Can anybody guarantee that we'll make it to our golden anniversary?" the wife asked.

"Only a fool is confident he will live until evening, "I replied. So, we marked our 45th or "sapphire anniversary. Pardon us being personal for once. Here's what Lydia and I told our kids and friends who joined us.

J: The Broadway play "Camelot" featured a song that described our state of mind 45 years ago. It's an experience, we think, many couples go through on the day they get married.

"I wonder what the king is doing tonight?" goes the opening line of the song heard on the eve of the Camelot ruler's marriage. He's numb, the singer continues. He quakes.

He's scared. "He wishes he were in Scotland fishing tonight."

O.K. So, I didn't quake. But like many other grooms, I was numb. Wedding details also left Lydia with little sleep. "I'm faint," she murmured as the priest began to read those questions on free choice that anchor marriage.

Thus, the ancient exhortation is often smothered by "m-e-g-o" (mine eyes glaze over).

It's a pity. For the rite capsulizes what marriage is all about. "Covenanted love" is the phrase used in the modern text. This will date us. But we prefer the pre-Vatican II version: "married love, loyal and true to the end."

L: That vision was not pulled out of thin air. It comes from 2000 years of the church's deeply human experience. For this sapphire anniversary, we revisited the text. Listen to this:

"You begin your married life, by the voluntary surrender of your individual lives, in the interest of the deeper and wider life you are to have in common. That future, with its hopes and disappointments, its pleasures and pains, its joys and sorrows, its successes and failures, is hidden from your eyes now. Yet, these elements are mingled in every life. They are to be expected in your own."

An iron-clad commitment follows: "And so, not knowing what is before you, you take each other for better or for worse; for richer or for poorer; in sickness and in health, until death do you part."

J: What was the future then is now the past for us. So, where did those 45 years go? In the play "Fiddler on the Roof," Tevye and Golda sing: "Sunrise/ Sunset...swiftly flow the years/ One season following another/ Laden with happiness and tears." Is this Broadway's inimitable rendering of Ecclesiastes?

A sapphire anniversary provides invaluable premiums. By then, you've put aside rose-tinted glasses. Your eyes, in Wordsworth's lines, have now "kept watch o'er man's mortality". And was it not the Little Flower who spoke how we all need a "spirituality that is without illusion"?

L: A sapphire anniversary also gives one time: to remember, time to be grateful. You give thanks for the good days as well as the not-so-good days.

Every marriage has its storms -more times than young couples imagine and more times than elder ones, like us, care to remember. All too often, the snapping point seems to come. One or the other wonders: Is there any point in going on? " They have no more wine," Our Lady told her Son at the wedding feast at Cana.

J: Yet, there is no other way forward-but through each other.

Fulfillment is only possible, you discover, through the person you vowed to honor and cherish, in good days and in bad. Indeed, there is a kernel of truth in the old joke that there are only six, not seven sacraments-because marriage and penance are one.

Re-read the ancient exhortation. "And if the unselfish spirit of sacrifice guide your every action, you can expect the greatest measure of earthly happiness that may be allotted to a person in this life," it pledged. "The rest is in the hands of God."

L: Forty five years later, the gift of children has become, for many like us, a reward of adults, able to stand on their own. They enrich your twilight years with the love they give back, but specially for the grandchildren. " Your children shall be as olive plants around your table."

What about the next 45 years? friends will ask you half-jokingly: The only answer we can give is what the past 45 years have taught us. Without fail, God's love always rose before each dawn. That will not change in the little time left for us.

Indeed, we can attest that God can change the water of tepid human affection into His wine-"pure married love, loyal and true to the end." And He does this by His presence.

"There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee," John tells us in his gospel. "And the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were likewise invited." That presence is a glint of sapphire´ because it is the sacramental grace of marriage.

J: A sapphire anniversary also allows you to catch your breath. "And now, both weary with our silly quarrels, we can rest awhile," George Bernanos writes. "We sit together and breathe in the deep peace of the evening - which we shall enter together."

Many couples have their favorite lines on what "covenanted love" can mean .We have ours too. In his poem "When You Are Old," Yeats writes: "But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face."

Then, there is, of course, Broadway. "Golda! Do you love me?" Tevye suddenly asks.
L: And Golda replies: "For 25 years, I've lived with him;/ Fought with him, starved with him;/ cleaned his house, cooked his meals;/ Given him children/ For 25 years, my bed is his;/ If that's not love, what is?"

And for first time in 45 years, we sang together the last line of the song-to blow the socks off our startled children. L & J: "It doesn't change a thing/ But even so / After 45 years, it's nice to know."

(E-mail: juan_mercado@boholchronicle.com)