Two weeks ago, our daughter Yeni married Syd, a fine young man from my wife’s hometown. They had gone to the same law school and finished the course together. After passing the bar examinations, they worked in the same law firm. There they became more than friends. Later, with another lawyer, they established their own office and practiced law as partners.
After a year of preparations the day of the wedding came. Early in the morning, the “suppliers” descended on the hotel suite where we spent the night — the event coordinator with her crew: the makeup artists, the photographers, the gown-fitters, the florists. Finding myself an odd man out, I quietly slipped out of the room and repaired to the lobby. Having nothing to do, and taking my cue from St. Alphonsus, I stayed in a corner and prayed, which made me recall a poem, W. B. Yeats’ “A Prayer for my Daughter,” particularly its last stanza:
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
Ceremony, that must include the wedding rites, and, indeed, to a father, giving one’s daughter away in marriage must rank among life’s loftiest moments. I had such happiness that I felt, contrary to the common experience of fathers, that I would not cry, and this I proudly declared to those who before the march predicted the contrary.
But when the church door opened and the daughter began walking towards the altar, she floated in light. I found the sight too beautiful to behold without tears, and, to dissemble, used the edge of my palm to wipe them away, so that, instead of crying, I would come across as shielding my eyes from the brightness. But in no time the situation turned playful when a pillar of flowers installed at the edge of the aisle and the train of the bridal gown, which blocked my walking space, put me out of step with the wife and daughter, and this kept the crowd wondering how I would extricate myself from a checkmated position.
I love weddings. I have written poems about them, two or three epithalamia. If I remember correctly, Jesus used the wedding banquet to exemplify the kingdom of heaven, not to mention that his first-ever miracle took place at a wedding.
And I remember what Jesus said about marriage. Mark narrates in his Gospel how the Pharisees approached Jesus and asked him if it was lawful for a husband to divorce his wife. From the beginning of Creation, Jesus declared, “God made them male and female,” for which reason, he added, “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Consequently, “what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
Because, thank God, weddings frequently happen in this country, our regard of it could become lackadaisical, much like that of the speaker, perhaps Philip Larkin himself, in his poem, “Whitsun Weddings.” It appears that the British have a tradition of scheduling weddings for Whitsun or Pentecost Sunday to take advantage of the long weekend. The poem speaks of how Larkin while traveling by train from Lincolnshire to London noticed the wedding parties, the couples climbing aboard the train with their mothers and fathers and uncles, while the “girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared / At a religious wounding.”
I can’t be sure what Larkin means by “religious wounding,” although I certainly consider a wedding religious because of its being a sacrament, a source of grace for the couple, whose union God has blessed and fitted with a mission to make their love fruitful.
Which the wife and I wish for our daughter Yeni and her husband Syd–a fruitful love nourished by God’s faithful presence come rain or sunshine.
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Cebudailynews. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.
