Footloose

They say we dance through life
A dance macabre with death

You say we dance in Trinity
A dance of eternal love

We dance in bodies
We dance in The Body

Slow Waltz? Quick foxtrot?
Who knows the steps?

Tiptoeing, testing
Afraid of false moves

Enter into Your rhythm
Following Your lead

Slowly, stumblingly
we mirror, we trace

dancers for grace

A Wedding

I have just come back from easily one of the best weddings I have ever had the privilege of attending. Something has shifted within me, and I shall carry this day with me for a long time to come. I am writing, trying to distill it, to memorise it, and to come back to it for renewal when I might need it for the future.

The day slips away though, as I am trying to remember it. It's a bit like an impressionist painting - the overall image, and the sensation, stays. But soon as you try to focus on an individual part, things blur. But let's try anyway.

Some things I loved about this wedding. The surprises:

Matthew and Miranda are some of the most intelligent, witty, character-full and educated people I have ever met, so I was expecting something unique and sophisticated with the service. I think I had in mind something formal: hymns echoing to vaulting ceiling, a long, white lace train, lilies, and words sung in Latin. Instead, it was held at Queens' College chapel; we were crammed in, and the heat was making everyone somewhat sticky.

Yet into that warm, gathered silence, they came. Singing. The opening song was also the processional for the bridal party. The "best men" were women - Emma and Benita, and amongst "bridesmaids" was a man - Matthew's brother Michael. And then Matthew and Miranda walked in. Together. She wasn't on the arm of her father, and he was obviously not waiting at the front of the chapel for her. Matthew had said to one of my friends that he was planning to break tradition, by going back to an older, Mediaeval tradition - that of crossing the threshold together. Entering, the promised land, as it were, side by side.

There were no flowers. Flowers are lovely, but Miranda didn't carry a bouquet. She simply walked in with the bridal party and then promptly sat in one of the pews, as a member of the congregation. The minister had declared, at entrance to the chapel door: "Let us worship God together!", and so it was. Incidentally, that's one of my favourite things about Christian wedding services. It's about the community of saints, gathering together. The bride and groom, beautiful and central as they are, merely pointers, to the greater grace of God with us, God in us, God amongst us.

The girls in the bridal party didn't wear matching dresses. They wore party dresses that they obviously enjoyed and reflected their personalities. Benita is Matthew's little sister and bears the Champion family resemblance: dark-haired, long-legged and lithe like a gazelle. She had on a simple sleeve-less shift in blocks of navy blue and black. Rachel, Miranda's sister, is the funkier, edgier one, and came striding in a back satin dress with black and white Japanese inspired ruching pieces and lots of marvellously complicated tied bits that I find hard to describe.

The music. They had a choir. There was harmony (seriously. You could take alto sheet music from the ushers). And, as one friend commented - robust, proper hymns. Nothing twee or sentimental.

I loved the way the minister conducted the service, he didn't try to bring his personality into it too much, simply announcing when we were to stand and what we were to sing. But he placed his gifts and attention into the prayers and sermon, beginning with a prayer in the tradition of the Jewish "baruch ata adonai elohim" (Blessed are you, Lord God) - or, as he phrased it: we praise you Lord ...

The wedding vows themselves took the shortest time. There were no promptings. They memorised their promises to each other, and spoke, while exchanging rings. The kiss came as a surprise: he simply leant over and embraced her after the vows were done. Without the inevitable and cheesy "and now you may miss the bride" and giggles from the congregation. Natural and understated. No ostentation.

And then the sermon. I don't remember having ever wanted to cry at a wedding; I just am not that sort of girl who gets sentimental at weddings. I rejoice and I laugh a lot, sure, but never cry. Crying, I suspect, I reserved for the sublime: the beauty or humanness that moves me. This sermon made me cry. I don't think I can talk about it properly, even, and I won't be able to capture the entirely of that wonderful piece of truth, beauty and god-ness (for want of a better term).

The passages were difficult, I thought, and certainly not common wedding scripture that I've ever heard. Deuteronomy 26:1-11 marks the entry into the Promised Land by the Israelites. Thus begins the covenant relationship between God and his people, so integral that we can no longer, after this, speak of Deity without speaking of Relationship; of a God that is always with his people. It was a hard passage, and the minister did his best to contextualise. Then a seamless move into the NT passage, II Corinthians 1:16-20. So seamless that I've almost forgotten how he did it!

I liked that the minister related it to current culture, without too much contrivance. He's very much an "ideas" preacher, reading the signs of the times in terms of changes in thinking and assumptions. So he spoke of promises, that our society is fearful of the air-tight certainty of promises. Promises that seem tyrannically, unchanging despite a changing world. Are Christians naive, blindly walking into something so binding? Making vows to another person for a lifetime. A commitment that says, regardless of the future unknown, the uncertainty, the changes and losses that shall come, that I will commit to you. Not a contingency plan, a phrase about how I shall be your wife/husband until I no longer feel love for you, but a life-long commitment, till death do us part. Unambiguous words. An unambiguous yes.

Such a commitment, he went on to say, is not possible, until we have heard and understood the promises of God. If we believe in a history; a past, a future and a present that is not constructed by chance, by happenstance, but shows the hand of a Creator, a relational Father, then, and only then, can it be possible for a man and a woman to make such promises. Oh, but he put it better than that ...

Christians marry in Church in order to be ikons: in the man and woman we see the promise of God. In the Yes that resounds in us, we see our God. Our response, for those of us who have heard the Yes of Christ, must be, is compelled to be, a Yes, and an Amen.

Thus, we enter courageously and confidently, into the Yes of marriage. Into the Yes of a friendship. The Yes of a Conversion too, I suspect.

Amen, amen.

I'm making a little list

I am terrible at making lists of "favourite" things. I've always thought it's because my opinions were not strong enough, or perhaps my personality wasn't defined sufficiently. I still don't have a favourite colour (it's buried somewhere amidst the changing colours of the sky); I'd be hard pressed to list my favourite books (there are so many and for so many different reasons); and I maintain my permeable status as both a chugger of coffee and a sipper of tea.

I once asked a good friend the usual banal barrage of 20 questions - what was his favourite food, his favourite colour, blah blah. His response was strangely affirming. He liked most food, and his favourite colour used to be, in principle, red, but now he finds he gravitates towards blue. I suspect I would have gotten a more spirited reply had I asked - what was his favourite virtue, or his fondest childhood memory, or his favourite piece of music to listen to when he was sad. But really, he wasn't a "favourites" kind of person, nor a type to make lists and commemorate themselves thus.

He had no preconceived notions of hierarchical structure. He wasn't going to allow experiencing the world as it comes be him, sweeping and fragmented, be forced and bent out of shape by too many value judgments. He had strong opinions, but on things that actually mattered. Things that were Right or Wrong. True or False. And it wasn't that he didn't think it important to talk about the respective merits of tim-tam originals and the new flavours, or Bach vs. Beethoven (who will knock each other out in 3 rounds?!), he just didn't hold to those ideas so tightly, and was happy to adapt, or have his opinion swayed. It wasn't symptomatic of a man lacking in passions, or a weak personality.

It reminds me of the confusion of conflated categories that CS Lewis famously described in the Screwtape Letters. On the modernist thinking clouding the mind of Wormwood's patient:

He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

Conversely, we seem to take singular pride in having strong opinions on such trivialities as TV shows, favourite actors, favourite ice-cream flavours, as if our character, our personalities, are defined by merely these tastes. In our topsy-turvy world we place defined ideas where a string of adjectives might better go. We argue naive matters rather than weighty truths of eternal import.

And then we judge each other by these: he's very cool because he's into entry-level Indie music, she's nerdy because she praises the inside of the Bodleian library... and so on.

I like Chesterton on this too:

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place ... A man was meant to be doubtful about himself. but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part of doubts his exactly the part he ought not doubt - the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubt if he can even learn ... The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping' not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility mad a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

(Altho' this is moving us into the mountains of epistemology, which wasn't where I was intending!)

I don't mean to say, let's not ever have silly conversations. We need to laugh, to play at argument simply for the joy of flexing intellectual muscle (and helping me exercise off the flab of mine!). But a balance must be struck. And judgment remains with God, not with us.

Next time someone asks me whether, stranded on a deserted island, whether I'd like to have Fuji apples or Granny Smiths with me, I shall smile, and say both. They will frown. They will say: but if you had to choose one. Ah, but I like them both. One is honey sweet, the other tart with skin glossy and gorgeous. I shall reply. I feel no need to have a strong opinion on this. They will judge me bland, and the topic of conversation shall move elsewhere. I shall sling back my wine, thus adding to my beverage options, and move on too.