Weddings

At the wedding reception, the toasts were made. They were standard wedding toast fare- some prepared and rehearsed and some from the hip, some emotional and some funny. At the end, Doug, father of the groom, came to the front and accepted the microphone. His toast, I later learned, was completely unprepared. He started to tell a story about helping his son move across the country. On the drive, Dustin asked him, “Dad, how did you know Mom was the one?” It’s a normal thing for a young man contemplating marriage to ask. Half the audience exploded with laughter. We laughed because we knew how Doug knew. He knew because his girlfriend was pregnant. Nearly thirty years later they’re celebrating the marriage of their third child.
We’ve got a lot of romantic notions about “the one”. Despite the statistics, the rumor goes that there is someone out there for everyone. And we think it’ll be thunder clear that we’ve found our one. But in most marriages, those moments of clarity come in small, almost imperceptible slices: washing the dishes, planning a vacation, laughing at a shared joke, fighting about the same damn thing for the hundredth time, in sickness and in health. Marriage is less about fate, a calling from the future into the present, and more about memory and commitment.
In Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology, marriage is a sacrament. I used to be a good Protestant and object to that notion, but anymore it seems like all of life is a sacrament, or at least sacramental. A sacrament is a physical act (commended by Jesus) which draws us toward the Divine. Marriage has at least the possibility of doing just that.
But what doesn’t, really? Eating and drinking with friends or strangers opens me to God. So do the pain of running uphill, the pleasure of skiing downhill, parenting, chess, and good stories, so why not marriage?
When Doug and Val got married, a bookie wouldn’t have given them very good odds for success, and they probably wouldn’t suggest it as a good beginning, at least not in theory. Remarkably, they stayed together, not because they’re exceptionally strong, or destined to be together forever but because in the ins and outs of life together, they began to live sacramentally with one another. Doug’s fumbling toast bore witness to that.