The Diocese of Long Island yesterday honored couples married fifty years and more. The longest marriage (so far!) is 69 years in the making! I was asked to toast those we honored with a lunch following the celebration of Eucharist. Here is my effort:
In one sense the passage of time is just the flowing of a massive stream that began at the very beginning of all.
We haven’t visited its headwaters, and we won’t be there when time’s current pours at last into eternity’s embrace.
But in another sense time is the space within which we live, and find each other, and bring our lives together into one. We call that time together ‘love’, and that is the truth.
That is our truth. And in that place called time we know one another better, we struggle and strain, we suffer and exult, we deepen our commitment to one another and we tell the story of who we are.
Now, in this moment in time, we pause to invite you to this:
To recall the time gone by,
To give thanks for all that has been,
To embrace this present time, and your beloved,
And to walk on in knowing love along the banks as time’s mighty stream moves still.
To each of you, and to the story, told and untold, of your life as husband and wife!
(9.6.14)
Believe it. 