The Sunday Letter
Two years ago this week, my daughter married the man she loves, and I have been carrying that day around with me ever since.
It happened in Madison, Mississippi, at a church that looked like somebody had drawn it from memory of what a church ought to look like. The kind of place that does not have to announce itself. The trees around it grow the way trees are supposed to grow down there, big and unhurried, with limbs that stretch out wide over the road because nobody ever gave them a reason to do otherwise. The land still holds its original feel. It has not been scraped flat and made into something else. It is simply still itself, and there is a kind of dignity in that you can feel the moment you step out of the car.
It was the South, all the way through. You could not have staged it anywhere else and had it mean the same thing.
I do not know that I was ever truly prepared for that day. For that moment. For that walk down the aisle. The rest of the party had already gone in, and then it was just her beside me, her arm in mine, and I had only a few seconds left to say what a father tries to say at the end of a whole childhood. My pride. My love. My joy. Whatever words I could get out while the tears ran down my face. Then the doors opened, and the longest walk I can remember began, the two of us together one last time before I gave her over to the arms of the man God had prepared especially for her. It was her moment. It was his moment. In the end, it was their moment, and I got to be the one who walked her into it.
And the wedding suited them. That is the thing I keep coming back to. It was not borrowed from a magazine or performed for anybody watching. It fit the two of them the way a good pair of boots fits, easy and unfussy and exactly right. Their joy set the temperature for the whole day, and everybody else just came up to meet it.
Then there was the family, which is really the heart of a Southern wedding. People drove in from wherever they were. Aunts who had not seen each other in years picked up mid-conversation like no time had passed at all. The old folks got the good chairs. There was food, and there was hugging, and there was that particular Southern noise a room makes when it is full of people who are genuinely glad to be together.
I have thought a lot about why weddings hit the way they do down here. I think it is because we understand them as more than a party. A Southern wedding is a whole community standing up and saying, we saw this coming, we are for it, and we will be here for the long haul. It is not just two people making a promise. It is everybody who loves them promising to help them keep it.
Two years on, I am watching them build something. That is the part nobody photographs. The ordinary Tuesdays, the small kindnesses, the learning of each other. The day was beautiful, but the marriage is the good part, and it is only getting started.
If you have a wedding in your family this summer, or an anniversary quietly passing, I hope you will take a minute with it. These are the days the rest of our lives get built on.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
At the end of a wedding day, after the rice and the taillights and the last of the family has gone on to the hotel, somebody always goes back and turns off the lights at the church. The flowers stay up a little while. The room goes quiet. And whatever was promised in there is now out walking around in the world, in two people who have to live it out on ordinary days with ordinary tempers and ordinary bills.
That is the part that matters. The vow is easy to say and long to keep.
There is a verse from Ecclesiastes that I have heard read at more Southern weddings than I can count, and I do not think we always hear it. “Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” — Ecclesiastes 4:12
Two strands make a strong rope. But the writer does not stop at two. He counts a third, and every couple who has been married a while knows why. There are seasons no two people can carry on their own strength, no matter how much they love each other. The third strand is the One who holds the other two when they are worn thin, and a marriage braided that way holds when it has every reason not to.
That is what we are really praying at a wedding, whether we say it out loud or not. Not that they will be happy, though we want that. That they will be held.
And what love turns out to be, over the long haul, is far less about feeling than we are told. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” — 1 Corinthians 13:4, 7. Read that again and notice how much of it is verbs. Things you do on a Tuesday when you do not feel like it. That is the whole secret, and it is not a very romantic one, which is exactly why it works.
So tonight I am thinking about a church in Mississippi with big trees around it, and two people two years into the keeping of what they promised there.
If you are in the early years, take heart. If you are forty years in, thank you for showing the rest of us how. And if you are worn thin tonight and the rope feels like it is down to one strand, remember there is a third you may have forgotten to reach for. It is holding still. The light is on, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.