Entering the Commonwealth of Joy

Since becoming engaged, I have been navigating a rather curious and frustrating dichotomization between 1) preparing for marriage, and 2) planning a wedding. “Marriage prep,” as it is colloquially known, is about having serious conversations with each other and older, wiser married people about everything that everyone seems to have assumed we have never thought about before or discussed together (money, children, family, sex, illness). I think marriage prep is an immensely good and helpful endeavor. However, it is often presented as a kind of fail-safe against young and naive couples getting themselves into something they do not understand. Or, perhaps more generously, marriage prep makes room in the hectic months before the wedding for the important conversations that set up a marriage for success. Even if the expectations we hold about marriage prep might need recalibrating, my fiancé and I have been blessed by the people who have helped us through our marriage prep.

Planning a wedding is another matter. It involves assiduously researching venues and vendors and anxiously pouring over guest lists. I often hear people tell me, “Do whatever you want! It’s your wedding! It’s your day!” while at the same time communicating – either implicitly or directly – what they want us to include at our wedding. When it comes to weddings, there are innumerable decisions to make, people to please or manage, and dozens of competing expectations to navigate. The mental and emotional exhaustion of having to become a professional event planner has undone me in a way I did not expect. Why do I revert to teenage levels of angst and moodiness every time my mother (very kindly, and with every good intention) asks me how the planning is coming along?

My general disillusionment is not so much due to the logistical demands of throwing a big, expensive party, but more to the pervasive vacuousness of modern wedding planning. In the twenty-first-century West, at least, practically all wedding decisions revolve around your budget and your aesthetic preference. For months now, algorithms have bombarded me with “3 Things You Must Ask Before Booking Your Wedding Photographer” and “Wedding Themes You Will Love.” The overwhelming volume of practical wedding advice, meanwhile, seems to trivialize an event which I believe has ontological and eschatological implications, and I have found the onslaught exhausting.

Photograph by Crystal Madsen / Adobe Stock.

Because the modern wedding industrial complex would have us believe a wedding is simply an exercise in spending money and picking the right outfit, there is no place for making sense of what the purpose of a wedding is, of preparing for a wedding. All of the deep, important, theological, and spiritual conversations are restricted to “marriage prep,” and “wedding planning” is the administrative conversations, bereft of any metaphysical significance. Of course, planning a wedding that includes a church marriage ceremony does mean a conversation with the priest about the content of the hour-long ceremony. But it seems everything holy or theologically important dissolves the minute after the priest announces, “Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.”

For some people, weddings as they are practiced in our day and age are unnecessary frivolities. Why spend money on a big party when you could put that toward getting a house? Sometimes this sentiment is dressed up in an ethical imperative – why spend money on a big party when there are orphaned and starving children? Sometimes there is a kind of piety about the lack of attention paid to the reception. (We assume that it is holier to give more attention to marriage prep, after all.) Some couples seem to presume they can throw together a 200-person party in a few months, proud of their ability to not get swept up in a bridezilla frenzy because they are spending more time focusing on what really matters. But this kind of attitude often means that the guests who take the trouble of going don’t really have a good time. It is hard to enjoy a wedding that consists of hours of standing around waiting for food, having the same conversations with people you don’t really know.

This is all anecdotal, and my observations are rather confined to a specific demographic and social class. I went to six weddings last summer and am close to four couples who have become engaged in the last three months, all of whom (as well as myself and my fiancé) are university educated and have families who can contribute toward the cost. Nonetheless, so many of the vibes I have picked up from acquaintances, friends, family, and Pinterest over the course of wedding planning grate me. The assumption that the perfect combination of food, music, and décor is most important is wrong, as is the assumption that the reception is not really that important.

I am currently studying food and eating in the earliest Christian communities, so I spend a lot of time thinking about dinner parties. I love throwing dinner parties. My fiancé and I love throwing dinner parties together (this is mostly how and why we fell in love), and so it has felt quite natural for us to think about our wedding as the biggest and most expensive dinner party we will ever host. This is perhaps best summarized by an idea I’ve picked up from Tara Isabella Burton: the kingdom of heaven is like a very good party. The kingdom of heaven is like a surprising and extraordinary conversation with someone you just met over food with great laughter. It is like spending five days chopping and stewing and cleaning for something that will last five hours. It is like thirteen drafts of the seating plan and five loads in the dishwasher. It is like opening another bottle of wine and pouring too much of the good whiskey.

I desire my life and marriage to witness to this kingdom in our present age. And so, my fiancé and I have decided that our first act as a married couple ought to be to throw a Very Good Party.

What does it look like for a modern wedding to be a Very Good Party? Firstly, I think it requires me to relinquish control and lean into the fact that I cannot in my own strength conjure the magic needed. In this sense, despite so much of the advice I have received, it is not my wedding. The wedding is an offering to the Lord as a living and breathing and eating and drinking and singing and dancing sacrifice.

Secondly, for our wedding to be like the kingdom of heaven, it must serve God’s beloved people. While that includes me and my fiancé, it – more importantly – includes all those whom God in his generous love has given us to love. It is everyone’s wedding. The host of a Very Good Party does not structure and plan the party to suit her own needs, desires, ideals, or preferences. The host’s role is to sacrifice, to give herself, to cater to the guests. To care for them and do all in her limited power to ensure they experience something like the kingdom of heaven. So, our wedding is not our own; our wedding is for the guests.

At the same time, our wedding will be inextricably linked to our own idiosyncrasies – from the hymns to the canapés, our wedding will inevitably be ours. No host is the same, and all the material goods and aesthetic details will reflect who we are and what is important to us. I do not want to write these things off as trivial or incidental. In his extraordinary and unconventional cookbook, Robert Farrar Capon writes, “The bread and the pastry, the cheeses, the wine, and the songs go into the supper of the Lamb because we do: it is our love that brings the City home.” The stuff of this world’s dinner parties contributes to the fashioning of the next world’s everlasting banquet. We realize the love of the kingdom of heaven in how we love those around our table, and we express and demonstrate this love in the details: the outfits and the jewelry, the flowers and the décor, the table name place cards, and the service sheets. It is with these things that we have the opportunity to communicate care, thought, consideration, and ultimately, love.

This vision of wedding planning perhaps comes across as overly ambitious, prideful, or just ridiculous and naive. What guest trying to have a good time notices the table setting and thinks, “What is the kingdom of heaven like? To what shall I compare it? It is like this color napkin paired with these forks.” But I believe that dinner parties and weddings are nevertheless opportune settings for the inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven. The first generations of Jesus’ followers ate together and hosted one another in the belief that their eating and hosting manifested the presence of divine love. I want to follow their example, even if it is difficult, in the midst of event budgets and second cousins twice removed, to continually reorient myself toward the kingdom of heaven.

I have often returned to some lines from “The Country of Marriage” by Wendell Berry:

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

In this poem, Berry reflects on his own marriage, speaking to his wife and presenting his words as an offering. Marriage, as I am coming to understand it, finds its ultimate purpose as a practice that orients us to the marriage of heaven and earth, of God with God’s beloved people. Weddings are a plunge into that “deep stream” of love, an entering into the “commonwealth of joy.”

Our wedding will only be like the kingdom of heaven, but I hope that it will be as like it as it possibly can be, that it will point me and my fiancé, the guests, the vendors, the stewards, and the musicians to the reality of God’s eternally abiding love. I hope it will be the first of many acts in our marriage where we return to the shore of God’s love and promises. Weddings are immensely profound acts, and deserve to be prepared for and celebrated as such. I hope that our wedding, when it finally comes, will awaken everyone present to the truth of their identity as beloved citizens in God’s heavenly kingdom. As my fiancé and I are baptized into the deep stream of unabating love, our friends and family likewise drink their fill of God’s rich waters.