Wedding Days

On Saturday, December 20, 2008, my 29-year old daughter Melanie married Josh Clark. It was, as weddings go, a large one, at least by my lights--somewhere near 250 people. I have always thought of large weddings as extravagant, but in the days leading up to the wedding and during the ceremony itself, as the Church of the River became a container for a warm community of friends and family stretching across the depth and breadth of my family's life, I decided that things were as they should be. 

At the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, I sat with the Rev. Burton Carley, minister of First Unitarian Church/Church of the River in Memphis, where the ceremony would be held. We talked about how the culture has changed around marriage--starting with the later average age of marriage, then to some of the things that are currently fashionable. One of those fashionable trends is the "destination wedding" that stages the ceremony in an exotic location, like a Caribbean beach. I'm sure some of these weddings are lovely experiences, but they're also in some way mere consumer products. A traditional wedding is a powerful community ritual, bringing and binding people together. And at the Church of the River, a panorama of the wide Mississippi River formed the backdrop for the ceremony. As a location, one could do worse.

Historically, weddings have belonged to communities, groups of people that form the living context of the new couple's lives.  Our culture, in recent decades, has been more focused on notions of individual freedom than on the quality and integrity of communities. I applaud and embrace individual liberty, but at the same time I feel my own freedom most keenly in a community.

I am an individual, but in order to understand how my life and being are distinctive, I need my community as a touchstone. I can only know who I am in relation to others. An insular life--one as an island, so to speak, is no more possible now than it was when John Donne wrote that no man could be an island.  

As a community moves through the years, a history is recorded in the minds and hearts of people who in some way belong to each other. Melanie and her husband Josh wrote meditations for their wedding that were read by their friends in the course of the ceremony. One passage in Melanie's reading recalled lines from Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The lines were in the scene of the character Emily's backward-in-time visit from the grave to the day of her twelfth birthday, an ordinary day of "clocks ticking" and other elements of our lives that we take for granted. 

In her high school years, Melanie played Emily in a production of Our Town. I went to see it two nights in a row. I cried both times during that powerful return-to-life scene. So when I heard some of the lines she spoke on stage all those years ago, I went back to a special moment when I learned a little more than I'd known before about special moments. My eyes filled. 

At the wedding reception I talked with two of Melanie's high school teachers, one of whom had directed the same Our Town production--people still in the community, carrying the history in their own ways. Both of them also recalled Melanie's performance and were moved by the memory in much the same way I was moved. So the lines from Wilder's play nested in Melanie's original contribution to her wedding ceremony, read by her longtime best friend, traveled up and down the years through people in her life who had kept common memories with her and with me. The play's ideas, in the minds and hearts of all of us, resonated in the vessel of time, and across the space enclosing all of us who'd shared the same experiences. 

Now the community of my history extends once again, this time into the now-overlapping territory of Josh's family and friends. The collective human assembly of my life grows larger, more richly varied, and I have more life to savor. 

Josh eloquently wrote for the ceremony of his own thoughts and feelings.  A longtime friend of his read those wide-ranging thoughts. He even inserted a passage from Origin of Species, from Darwin's concluding words launching the still-reverberating bombshell of Origin out into the world: "There is grandeur in this view of life . . ." Grandeur indeed. From those "endless forms most beautiful" that Darwin described, to the minister who officiated at the wedding, to all the other members of the community who witnessed this passage in the lives of Melanie and Josh, I know with Tennyson's Ulysses that "I am a part of all that I have met." 

And "all that I have met" is too complex to unravel. But I do get a feeling about it sometimes, when so many influences on my identity are gathered at once.  People, places, history, life itself come together in a startling, irreducible admixture. I think of a stanza from Robert Penn Warren's "Whatever You Now Are":

Is it you that flows from distance to distance,

With the tune of time and blood intertwined forever?

Or does the dark stream of log-ripple and stone-chance

Define the pattern of your whole life's endeavor?

What elements, shadowy, in that dream interlace

In a region past categories of Time and Space?

Any doubts any of us may harbor about whether we have a place in the world can be erased or at least moderated by joining in a ritual enacted and developed over thousands of years, made new in the context of a community of people living it right now. 

To Josh and Melanie: Thanks for bringing something new and promising into the world, for adding to the "tune of time and blood" in your own inimitable ways.