The normal routines of life ground to a halt yesterday for the Mead clan; my father’s older brother got married yesterday to the woman he loves.
The wedding was held at the Washington National Cathedral; the bride has worked as a volunteer there for many years and knew exactly how to arrange the most glorious setting possible for this joyful event. The guests sat in the elaborately carved choir stalls listening to the stunning music pouring out of the Cathedral organ as the bridal party processed up the aisle past the fascinated tourists who took seats in the nave to see the old church come alive.
The priest who presided was an old friend of both bride and groom; he had arranged for the two to meet at my parents’ house one New Year’s Eve; I was there both for that first ‘date’ and for the family caucus following, at which all agreed that this was a woman of unusual charm and poise. Over the years we have gotten to know her much better, especially after an accident last fall left my uncle temporarily incapacitated; my newest aunt is a class act and we are much richer for having her in the family.
What struck me most about the wedding was simply this: it worked. That is, before the ceremony Mary Evelyn was a dear family friend. During it, she became more to us. She’s family now. Something very important happened as she and my father’s brother exchanged vows before the high altar, and it didn’t just happen to them. It happened to their families and friends as well. Their vows changed the world.
There was a little bit of snickering in the choir stalls as my father read out the prayers for the blessing of a marriage in the Book of Common Prayer. The part about one purpose of marraige being for the ‘procreation of children’ seemed a little out of place. Both the bride (who retired some time ago from a long and successful government career) and my uncle (with a chronological age steadily creeping up on his golf score) are more interested in enjoying their grandchildren than in bringing more kids into the world.
But none of that matters. This wedding was about enriching existing lives rather than creating new ones; the result in my mind at least was to strengthen my sense of the importance of marriage as a social institution. I’ve known many people, some quite close friends, who have lived together for long periods without, as they used to say, benefit of clergy. Some chose this path because they rejected the idea that social or religious institutions should define or constrain their relationship and commitment. Some had no other choice because the laws did not recognize their union. Most have chosen this path because while they were committed enough to each other to live together for a while, they weren’t quite ready to take that final step. They felt they were too young, or they had lived through their parents’ divorces, or for some other reason felt that it just wasn’t time.
One of the biggest changes in American life since the 1950s has been the widespread acceptance of young people living together. It’s the natural and inevitable result of two factors. The increased reliability of birth control has reduced the chance of unwelcome complications, and the extension of the interval between the onset of puberty and the end of education has made it harder and harder to expect that young people will ‘save themselves’ for marriage — especially in a sex saturated consumer society like ours. We’ve come to accept that many serious young people will spend ten to fifteen years in a series of relationships as they negotiate graduate school and professional start ups that may take them all over the country and the world.
The wedding yesterday reminded me why I think that can be damaging. It’s easy for a crusty old bachelor to say, but commitment matters. Especially as I’ve spent more time in the last few years teaching and working with young people, I’ve been struck by the costs and pain that the current arrangements can leave in their wake. Young women suffer most obviously; already struggling with difficult questions about integrating a serious professional commitment with a desire to build families they also have to negotiate the very treacherous emotional terrain of commitments that aren’t quite real and relationships that are open ended and undefined.
But young men suffer too. Human beings have a vital need to act: to do real things, take real steps, to change the world. That involves taking risks and making mistakes — but to avoid these is to avoid life. Turning ones twenties into a second decade of adolescence has a price in lost dignity, lost potential and a more tenuous hold on the things that really matter.
We need to rethink the way our society manages young adulthood. Study and work need to be better integrated and we need to try much harder than we now do to make it easier for young people in love to start families in their twenties without foreclosing important professional and educational opportunities.
In one of my earliest blog posts I wrote about the need to take ten years off your age when it comes to professional and intellectual development. The world is so complicated, on the one hand, that it takes more time to catch up with events and figure out how to steer your course through it. On the other hand, advances in health care increase the chances that your productive life will be extended by at least ten years on the far side.
But that is a statement about professional and intellectual life. Starting families and raising children is something else; older parents are often wonderful parents, but from the standpoint of nature and personal development the twenties are a great time to have and raise children. Even as young parents continue to work out their own paths through adulthood, by starting a family and creating a nurturing environment for the newest generation they can do something real, something important and do it well. They can be adults, carrying their share of the burdens of the world and taking an active part in the creation of the future.
But juggling that extended period of educational formation and intellectual experiment with the deeply seated human need to be responsible and take action isn’t going to be easy. While we seem to spend most of our intellectual energy today debating whether we should extend the definition of who can marry, we should maybe also pay some attention to how we can make marriage more available, and make it work better, for the people who need it most.
When two people make their vows to one another in the presence of God, they speak and God answers. Reality changes as a new bond is born. Families change and relationships take form that will echo through many lives for years to come. That is what happened when my uncle and my new aunt made their vows; it works when two twenty-somethings in the dawn of adult lives commit themselves to each other without reserve.
Marriage makes families, including extended families, and it makes homes. We can argue about who should be able to marry, but we should not argue this: a good society is one that supports people, young and old, who want to take that wild and risky step and vow themselves to one another in the sight of God and all the world, for richer or poorer, better or worse, in sickness and in health, until they are parted by death.