The Dance of the Ordinary & The Mystery
“Jesus said, “Not everyone is mature enough to live a married life. It requires a certain aptitude and grace. Marriage is not for everyone… But if you’re capable of growing into the largeness of marriage, do it.”
Glad to get to officiate in Wills’ and Jessica’s service this weekend, I have been remembering weddings along the way.
The first wedding I remember was for my Uncle Bobby and Aunt Martha. Bespectacled and curly haired (!), I was barely ten. Younger cousins Michael and Myra Lynn were ring bearer and flower girl. To express my sentiments over being only a spectator, I threw the little nets bags of rice whole.
I have a sweet memory of my cousin Jenny’s wedding. But my really clear memory of the next wedding was Dianne and mine at Avondale Methodist Church, still a wonderfully welcoming church for all now!
The first wedding I conducted as a seminary student was for my cousin bride Becky and groom Buddy at Central Park Methodist, now a vibrant predominantly African American Cumberland Presbyterian congregation.
The second wedding I did was at the little Gurley Methodist Church I served, while I was a Vanderbilt Divinity School student.
One Saturday, a couple knocked on the parsonage door, which was next to the church. It was a sort of an elopement. The girl’s father had died unexpectedly a few weeks before their planned wedding. So they had decided to simplify things and get married this way.
Dianne still remembers looking out the parsonage window. She watched all of us in our bell-bottomed jeans, standing under the big tree in the vacant lot across the street. The wind blew the tree branches as our dog Pepper playfully ran around and between us. I felt blessed to be a part of that bittersweet moment.
Early on, John Davis, my father-in-law, suggested that I keep a list of all the weddings of people I would do as a minister. I so wish I had taken his advice.
What weddings are big, even bittersweet, in your memory?
Anyhow, getting ready for Wills’ and Jessica’s wedding homily, I am pulling some words together or maybe some words are pulling me together to talk about what can be called the dance of the ordinary and the mystery in marriage.
Where to start about the array of the ordinary?
The going to sleep and waking up that frame our days. Buying groceries, having meals, an occasional takeout. Laundry. Walking the dog. Getting the car oil changed. Going to work and coming home. Managing the money. Dealing with all the sorts of family daily drama. The mix of enjoying each other’s company and getting on each other’s nerves. The roller coaster of moods. Across time, the sharing of joys and griefs. The navigation of the iffyness of health and illness. The speed and drag of time…
Well, too much and too little. I trust you get the drift and can add your own take on the ordinariness of our days.
BUT then…there is the dance of the mystery interwoven in the ordinary. Here are some words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer about the mystery.
You may know Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who took part in an unsuccessful plot to overthrow maniacal Adolph Hitler. Arrested, Bonhoeffer spent his last two years in Nazi prisons before being executed just days before the Americans liberated the area.
Pastor Bonhoeffer no doubt, did many weddings. Yet he never got to marry his beloved fiancée, Maria.
OK, remember the ordinary. Here are Pastor Bonhoeffer's words about the mystery. I urge you to read them aloud and slowly, and let the wonder in...
+ The greatest mystery is not the most distant star; on the contrary, the closer something comes to us and the better we know it, then the more mysterious it becomes for us.
+ The greatest mystery to us is not the most distant person, but the one next to us. The mystery of other people is not reduced by getting to know more and more about them.
+ Rather, in their closeness they become more and more mysterious. And the final depth of all mystery is when two people come so close to each other that they love each other. Nowhere in the world does one feel the might of the mysterious and its wonder as strongly as here.
+ When two people know everything about each other, the mystery of the love between them becomes infinitely great. And only in this love do they understand each other, know everything about each other, know each other completely.
+ And yet, the more they love each other and know about each other in love, the more deeply they know the mystery of their love.
+ Thus, knowledge about each other does not remove the mystery, but rather makes it more profound. The very fact that the other person is so near to me is the greatest mystery.
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in I WANT TO LIVE THESE DAYS WITH YOU, p. 359).
We are in a time of big debate over who can be included in the mystery of love and marriage. Seems to me the mystery of such love is not under our control. It is gift from the Gracefull-Generous Giver of Our Lives - the God we know in Jesus.
In a world where it is so precarious to love and be loved, we are at our best when we bless, not make it harder for, those whoever they are, whom the mystery of love has chosen.