Kirkepiscatoid

Yeah, I bet you are wondering how a post about love and marriage starts with a can of Diet Mountain Dew. Well, keep reading!

It's June. The month of weddings. It's the month I'm hearing about a bunch of weddings and sometimes even attending a few of them...and sometimes, I think the older I get, I am starting to be the grumpy old curmudgeon about weddings. Just recently, Lisa's post reminded me of that. It seems that, as the years roll by, the wedding industry becomes more and more predatory. Practical old me keeps thinking, "My God, you could have put down a sizable deposit on a house for what you are sinking in this wedding!" But I worry that how the wedding industry preys upon people is by letting young couples think that buying the illusion of Disney-esque storybook happiness will somehow show the world how much y'all are in love with each other. But I guess what bothers me the most is that even in the church setting, so many of these weddings seem essentially devoid of God, or at least my projection of God.

This is going to sound a little out of it here, but the wedding I most felt God was on the premises in recent years was a totally secular wedding. One of my cousin's weddings was a totally secular outdoor affair officiated by a circuit court judge and a carry-in meal afterward. But I thought about the up and down struggle that brought these two to each other, I thought about how from the get-go, their desire was for us all to share their union to each other--fully share a meal and good times, and our lives with theirs. To me, a "good" wedding feels like a baptism. It's not a union of "two" but a union of many. It's all the in-laws learning about each other. It's about making new friends on the other side of the family. It's about DOING all the things that really say we support this new couple in their journey, and about their desire to belong to all of us--not just each other.

What happens in these unions, these "good" ones, is far, FAR from storybook. There will be disagreements. There will be issues of control to negotiate. There WILL be tears. But there will also be moments that we all find ourselves profoundly glad this bevy of new people came into our lives. I think about my cousin's wife. Her aunt and her grandmother have been two of the best additions to that big group I call "my family." I knew that a couple of weeks ago, when I had posted on Facebook that I was mowing the church yard and had run out of Diet Mountain Dew and was kind of grumpy about that. I found it incredibly profound that the two people who came to my aid were my priest associate and my cousin's wife's aunt. Mind you, I would have survived. It was not a dire thing. But to be cared for in such a tiny and easy going way by those two people really floored me, and made me feel profoundly loved.

You see, anyone who truly knows me, knows that my signature drink is Diet Mountain Dew. Everyone at Trinity-Kirksville jokes that they know I've been working at church because there is a trail of Diet Mountain Dew cans lying around. When I'm sick, people are very likely to bring me a Diet Mountain Dew. The floorboard of my truck is often littered with empty DMD cans and bottles because I try to recycle when I can. That neon yellow liquid is the road to my heart.

But within an hour or so of each other, I realized that both my church and my in-law side of the family loved me more than I wanted to let on, and they both knew how much I love them back...and that moment would never have happened, had my cousin not married that wonderful bride of his a few years back. God was on the premises that day more than either of them ever realized, I think.