Wedding Bells are Ringing

I was going to write a different piece for today, but life happens, and it changes the way we approach art, right? 

My sister got married this weekend. Eckhardt weddings are wonderful, but there’s also this underlying tension. It’s one of the few times that my mom and dad are in the same place. There’s a certain irony in what brings us together: the backdrop of re-entering the hum and thrum, the incessant background electrical noise of all that has been unspoken since their divorce in 1990. 

My parents are divorced. My grandparents were divorced, on each side. Two thirds of my parents’ generation (i.e. them and their siblings) are divorced. I have a cousin who is divorced, and his brother who has divorced and remarried more times than I can keep count of (3 or 4? 5?). It’s messiness. 

So it was a palpable moment come together. My brother and I officiated, and there was this moment, as my dad is walking my baby sister down the aisle, and she’s such a woman, grown and beautiful. And we had this family moment at the front, this belief that we can be better than our past. This incredible sense of hope within the fear. Our family history is a constant, an unchangeable pain. And yet we keep trying, through that pain and heartache and fear, to make the story better for the next generation. 

Dearly beloved, we are here together today to celebrate the joining of two lives we hold dear: Caleb and Bethany. This union is the joining of two lives under the banner of a God who defined himself as love, and as we witness the fusion of two lives we point to a Creator who became one with his creation, to know and to be known, to serve in the mode and miracle of love. We join these two in an incarnational love, where they become one another, to know and to be known, to serve their united whole in the mode and miracle of love. 

Lots of tears were shed (classic Eckhardts), and I think there was healing available in that moment, and hope for a future that gets better. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. In the face of the awkward tension of us all in one place, we can see the resurrection of new faith, hope, and love. 

Two lives never join in a vacuum. In this space we are joining two families, and pulling together your upbringings, your histories, and your understandings of life. Bethany, as you become a Figg, you carry with you all of the weird and wonderful things that it means to grow up an Eckhardt. And both of you will quickly realize that Eckhardt norms are not quite normal at all. I suspect, as well, there are some quirks on the Figg side too. So your goal becomes carving out a new normal, to be patient and loving and kind, and to learn to choose the best in one another as you continually define this newly forms space, this nation of two, this Caleb and Bethany. 

Congratulations, Caleb and Bethany. Do better. We believe in you.