Biopsies, Roasts and Weddings

Sixty is how old your grandparents are when you are a child.

Sixty is how old your parents are when you are "finding yourself" and perhaps in the middle of your first permutation of real job/career/marriage/children and you don't have much time for them.

Sixty is when you start talking about colonoscopies, noticing spots on your skin you think look "iffy", and your doctor wants to do biopsies and take enough blood work to have an open bar at a vampire wedding.  My life insurance rate is more than my first house payments... all these are flashing warning lights that the road not too far ahead is indeed closed. 

At sixty I also know beyond a doubt I'm leaving a legacy, a lot of which is carved in stone by an amateur.  I see a bigger picture than I could at thirty or forty. I kind of knew a big picture existed when I was twenty, but when you've only lived less than 20% of your life conciously you don't really know what "big" even looks like.  So now I see the wrong colors chosen, the errant brush strokes, the unbalanced composition of everything I've done and everyone I've touched. So now, if nothing else, I will spend my days trying to re-shape and erase and incorporate all the indelible strokes of my past with the goal of leaving something somewhat beautiful in the end.

Sixty is how old you are when you bless your kids as they pursue their own lives, even if it means getting less of them than you'd like.  That is not a bad thing.... Sixty year old doting, guilting, controlling parents is an ugly thing.  The helicopter has to run out of gas at some point, and looking back on six kids, the sooner the better.

The Wifey had a "Roast" of me for my 60th birthday.  I wish I could post the speeches, but I guess I'll just say that if I died today, I would die a happy man that everyone knew me so well that they could point up my faults and goofiness so clearly, and yet in spite of knowing me so well, still showed up and brought me gifts and honored me by being there to mark the event with me.  I am a blessed man, even if the Synod of Orthodox Bishops decreed that my birthday never be commemorated in any Orthodox Church henceforth and forevermore.   (It was a joke... kinda.)

And now I am in Montana for a week.  I can "telecommute" in my job. So I came up for my sister's wedding.  She asked if I would say some things at the wedding. Considering a "prophet is without honor in his own country" I considered that one of the biggest blessings of my life.

I gave the "wedding sermon" and basically talked about why be "married" after being "engaged" for eight years. I talked about being created in the image of the Trinity, "being as communion", and what it means to live eucharistically "in love" rather than just "sharing stuff legally because the State gives you a piece of paper".  I talked about wheat and wine and how they are transformed sacramentally by grinding, crushing and work... much like human beings in marriage. The highlight of the evening for me was when, after 80 people consumed over fifty pounds of bratwursts and burgers, 60 bottles of wine, two kegs of beer and sundry other adult beverages, my sister and brother in law's HARDCORE atheist friend who had downed more than a few and had been in a heated discussion with a couple of evangelical wedding guests earlier in the afternoon, sat down at the table next to me. He kind of tipped/leaned toward me, opened his mouth and pointed before he made any words (like drunk people do) and said, "I gotta say... I don't believe ANY of that Christian shit you were talking about,... but you sure made sense, that was really beautiful what you said. I'm gonna have to think about all that s'more. Thank you."

It was a perfect day in their back yard.

May God grant Todd and Lani many more years.