"You want a beautiful long white dress and the traditional veil. You want music and flowers and a train of attendants. Not to prove that you are a "mood-loving show-off". To us, sign and sound and symbol and movement are a part of worship and celebration, and you want your wedding filled with the visible, tangible, audible signs of the invisible and transcendent meaning." Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman
Reading this right before rushing off the train at Redfern Station (because I had spent the majority of the trip dreaming over various iterations of origami wedding decorations on Pinterest) gave me a new shock to my system. Thinking through and actually making decisions to put things into practice for this wedding has refreshingly made me think though a lot of new things! Praise God for the people (real and literary) who have provided fresh [to me] insights and provoked thoughts I were previously closed to.
I've been championing the embodiment and value of practising liturgy as transcendent ways of being and thinking and doing worship, while hypocritically[?] and being falsely-humble-and-spendthriftly reducing the wedding ceremony.
- to not strip away beauty for money's sake,
- that ceremony is its own kind of purpose,
- and that the Great Wedding at the end of the age will be filled with as much pomp and glory as exists, to befit the Bridegroom and the Bride which he made precious at such a high cost.
Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on proper occasions, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast - all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that hey are vain, but that they are obedient, they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone the proper pleasure of ritual." C. S. Lewis, in his Preface to Paradise Lost
