When a Daughter Marries

[Summer is a time when for many young lovers wedding bells ring.

It’s been a few years since our youngest daughter’s wedding feast.

And the weddings of her three older sisters are an even more distant memory.

But this is what I remember, now dedicated to all the parents who will be “giving their daughters away” this summer.]

(An awful phraseology, really, but that’s a topic for another time.)

When a daughter marries, you smile and laugh a lot.

Partly from tension, of course.

But mostly from relief.

For all the hurly-burly of the preceding months (Adam and Even never knew what they were missing) is at last culminating in a peaceful ceremony of beauty.

The families are there.

Friends have come.

The dresses all fit, and the colors complement.

The music is melodious and joyful.

Bride and groom are radiant.

The vows are spoken, and no spurned lover appears at the last moment to object.

You smile with relief: it’s going well (though much too quickly) now.

And you smile and laugh because this is a festive occasion – this is a wedding feast!

Though the wine doesn’t flow like it did in Cana, the spirits are high, the talk is animated, and currents of warm affection float everywhere. 

The Creator’s gracious gift of love is celebrated!

But there’s another reason you smile and laugh a lot: you try to cover up.

For when a daughter marries, what you really want to do is cry a little.

You try not to, of course, for fathers don’t cry.

So they smile and laugh a lot.
But she’s flesh of your flesh, after all, and after all these years rather firmly attached.

And it hurts to part with what is part of you, to let go, to let your flesh unite with other flesh.

But it is the way of love: for man and woman to leave father and mother and to cleave unto each other.

God made it so, and it is right and it is beautiful.

And therefore parents say Amen to it; in fact, they would have it no other way.

Still, even the most beautiful things can hurt a little.

Maybe it’s especially the beautiful things that make you cry.

There’s something else you do when a daughter marries: through your smile and through your tears you breathe a prayer.

Up to this moment, bride and groom have experienced the delights and frustrations of romance: tomorrow their history of husband and wife will begin.

You breathe a prayer of thanks that it will begin in the Lord.

For in our time, marriage is a fragile institution.

The strains and tensions of this age wreak their havoc all too often.

God’s children are subject to that too, for they too are vulnerable.

Life can get messy; and marriage is part of that life.

That’s why you pray for a union that will be steadily sustained by the grace of God.

And in George Eliot’s words, you pray that this young couple may be joined for life:

“to strengthen each other in all labor,

to rest on each other in all sorrow,

to minister to each other in all pain,

to be one with each other in the silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting.”