mama's 80th birthday

What does it feel like to be 80 years old?  No, I’m not asking how does it feel like to have arthritis and a gait slowed by age.  I believe I know the answers to those already.  But I am more curious about what does it feel like to have so many years in your life, with a memory still able to recall the good and the bad that transpired?  What does it feel like to have so many years in your life with a still vivid remembrance of the beautiful and the ugly, the triumphs and defeats, the successes and mistakes, the achievements and the regrets?  What does it feel like holding all the memories of those long years?

Today we read the conclusion of the parable of the wheat and the weeds.  It is a parable which reveals to us our own reality - the reality of our own community, the reality of our own families, the reality of our church even, the reality of our own personal history, a reality which we now hold in our memories - that we are wheat and weeds, that life in this world is far from perfect.  The Son of Man sows wheat but the evil one comes at night and sows weeds.  Meanwhile while harvest time has not arrived, the master prohibits the workers to pull out the weeds for fear that the wheat, the good seed, might be destroyed in the process.  And so the good and the bad will co-exist, the wheat and the weeds grow together, side by side until harvest time.  Isn’t this our life, is it not that our memories are filled with these thoughts?

In effect Jesus is helping us recognize through this parable that in reality we cannot fix everything, that there are things in our lives that only God can take care of.  This is the privilege of reaching a ripe old age - of being placed in a situation where one can only accept the realities that transpired, where one can only relinquish control and commend everything to the one who alone can really fulfil and fix everything in our lives.  This is the gift of old age, of being 80 - when it’s too late to do anything anymore except to trust and to let God.

Our gospel ends well this wheat and weeds parable.  The good will triumph, the just shall shine forth.  Because of God.  We pray so shall our lives be.

Ma, happy birthday.