STUBBORN FAITHFULNESS: MARRIAGE IN CORONATIDE
Photo courtesy of author.
I am writing this on my wedding day. Well, what would have been my wedding day. For the same reason we wear masks to the grocery store and second-guess things as simple as haircuts and coffee dates, I am not getting married today. I am, like so many, a pandemic bride.
In the fall of 2019, my partner asked me to marry him. After months of coordinating with the schedules of two bishops, a dean, and an entire seminary, we chose October 23rd 2020 as our wedding date. We had a grand vision for a big Sewanee wedding; the height of Anglican liturgy, a chapel filled to the brim with singing and smoke, the rich tones of the organ spilling out into the night on the campus of the University of the South. I bought a dress. We chose a preacher. We met with the chapel wedding coordinator. Ben and I spent every Monday for 8 weeks driving from Louisville and Sewanee to Nashville for premarital counseling, fulfilling our obligations to our bishops and to our future together. Our guest list climbed past 200, and our moms called every other day with ideas and questions and excitement. We were well on our way to planning the kind of wedding we hoped would embody the hospitality and abundance we see as a central virtue of our life in Christ.
And then, the news got ugly. Our brothers and sisters around the world and across the country were getting sicker, and rumbles began about limiting travel and closing schools. Two weeks before Ben's Spring Break, when we had planned to visit dear friends in New York and take in a show, the Governor of my state called for church leaders to cancel worship and to suspend operations. As a parish priest, I spent a very long day consulting with my colleagues before the decision was made to cancel worship and all activities through the weekend. At that time, we thought our choice was being made out of an abundance of caution, a temporary situation. When, a week later, Broadway went dark and Ben drove to Louisville with a milk crate of books and little hope of returning to his seminary campus, reality began to sink in. Ben suggested it might be worthwhile to discuss moving the date of our wedding and I dismissed him out of hand, claiming it was much too soon. I prayed he was overreacting. Soon we learned that he wasn't.
After weeks of discussions, tears, prayers, and phone calls with loved ones, we made the heartbreaking decision to let go of our big October wedding. We had no idea when it would be safe again to ask over 250 of our dear ones to travel to see us, and an indefinite postponement was inconceivable. For us, entering into marriage was not another party to reschedule. As soon as it became possible under our Diocesan and local guidelines, we traded in the big black tie wedding for a small, immediate family only liturgy in a cathedral that had been emptied of its pews. Our parents and siblings sat on folding chairs, six feet apart, in the custom masks I commissioned for the occasion. The closest women in my life styled my hair and applied my make-up in their living rooms. When I walked down the aisle, my face was covered not by a veil, but by a lace-trimmed mask. Our rings were not blessed on the altar, but rather in our own outstretched hands, from a distance. We received communion in one kind, breaking a fast that had been kept for almost four months.
There was no singing at our wedding, nor was there incense. We did not have a crucifer, or torchbearers, or bridesmaids or groomsmen. No bells tolled. Our hospitality was not embodied by open invitations or a crowded reception hall. Instead, our closest friends held us in prayer from their homes all over the country, as requested by our modified Save The Dates. Ben and I stood before the altar and wept our way through our vows, and a bishop of the Church pronounced our blessing from six feet away. Our first meal as husband and wife was the Eucharistic feast, which we shared with the people who raised us in the faith that led us to one another. Despite every strange pandemic reality, the Church witnessed the beginning of our marriage. Despite isolation, separation, loss, and fear, we stepped into our future, trusting in God's faithfulness. In a season of senseless death and overwhelming anxiety, making our vows before God became our small act of defiance.
Today is not my wedding day. That day has come and gone. In a year that has pierced the hearts of so many, in a season that has stolen so much, Ben and I chose to make promises about a future we can hardly imagine. I am struck by how utterly Christian that is. Jesus told his disciples that they would suffer for his sake, and they walked with him anyway. The women knew the tomb was sealed with a great stone, and they went there anyway. Paul spent his ministry comforting persecuted converts, and they practiced their faith anyway. The world keeps trying to end, and we got married anyway. The Christian life is always a little bit like planning a wedding at the end of the world. Tomorrow will remain unknown, and we make plans anyway. The human heart will falter, and we make promises anyway. Death and loss and grief happen, and we sing anyway. In our little pandemic wedding, I saw a God who delights in the joys of his children. I saw the Church at her best, a small glimpse of the abundant table set for us and the radical reunion we crave. I saw a stubborn hope in the promise of tomorrow. I can’t think of a better birthplace for our marriage than that.
