Wedding Meditation

My great good fortune has been to know Allison since just before she was born.

I was returning home to Connecticut from performing another wedding. Allison's parents, Tracy and Brian, were in charge of transporting me from Milwaukee to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. But it wasn't to be because Allison decided this was her time to arrive.

However, I missed her actual coming into the world. Having delayed my breakfast that morning, I decided to take a trip down to the cafeteria for a hearty repast of cheese curls and quick read of People magazine.

Suffice it to say I also learned an important theological life lesson that day: always eat a good breakfast in a timely fashion so as not to miss out on God's finest moments of love and grace.

From the beginning God has been about the creative process of these fine moments, miracles really, of simply being among us. In Genesis we are told how God formed the world, then continued on by bringing us into being to care for it. Then, through Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth we discover how to care for one another.

How we are to go about this is with patience, kindness, humility and gentleness. Caring for one another means letting go of our need to be right, our need to be offended, our need to be cranky and our need to be resentful. Caring for one another, loving one another, means rejoicing in what is true, bearing and believing all things, hoping in and enduring all things, and doing this together. No exclusions.

It is not uncommon to hear these words at occasions such as we celebrate today. Romantic as our human notions of love can and should be, so should our understanding be of what love means as it grows and deepens through experience and time.

Marriage is one of the relationships in which love can show itself between people, but it does not stand alone. We hold out our hearts and souls each day and welcome others to do the same with us. God has blessed us with many kinds of relationships in which we can express the love about which Paul spoke. Parents, children, siblings and friends can all share this love with one another, the same love that God used to create the world. We were all created for community and we are all in this life, on this journey as one people.

T.S. Eliot, in a similar fashion, once likened our lives to a great exploration. He wrote that,

We shall not cease from exploratio

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Today we celebrate the love that Allison and Francis have chosen in each other. In their love, they bring together two families, two countries and all of us here today. We celebrate that love as their people, their community, their family. We shall not cease from loving, and the end of all our loving will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

And, so as not to miss out on another of God's finest moments of love and grace, I assure you that I ate a very good and timely breakfast this morning. I hope you did too. Amen. nn nnn nnn