Photograph
by the ever-awesome Eric Steuer
A wedding is a big day.
It’s the joining of two people. It’s the joining of their friends and
families, and their friend-families. It’s a piece of minor theater. It’s
a party. And more.
So take a moment and breathe it in. Weddings don’t happen often,
especially between two people with a community like this. Let’s all
savor the moment, that we are here today, in Toronto, with these two,
chosen to be part of their big day.
A wedding is also two things we don’t often think about when we think
about weddings.
Since we’re a legal crowd it would be remiss to ignore that a wedding
is, most formally, a contract.
It’s a contract between two people to fight together against the tides
of the world. It’s a contract to push through the hard times. A contract
to celebrate the good times. Because when pain is shared, it is
diminished, and when joy is shared, it is increased. A marriage is an
agreement to share as deeply as it’s possible to share. As Dorothy
Parker once noted, it’s an agreement to sit amid bowers of neuroses, and
match psychoses. Marriage shares everything.
Since we’re all kind of about sharing here, let’s recognize and honor
that commitment to share.
But a marriage is also about forming a new entity – a “we” that gains
legal status in a wedding. It’s a status that people have fought and
died for the right to have. This moment, now, we are all graced with the
chance to watch that “we” come into being.
And those of us here, and others scattered through the world who
couldn’t make it? It is our job to help raise that new entity. Because
that new “we” comes into the world needing support. And that is one of
the reasons we’ve got this ritual, handed down through time, in which a
community comes together to watch that “we” be born. Because it’s also
up to us to hold Ryan, Kelsey, and their “we” up when they are down.
To share their pain to diminish it, and to share their joy to increase
it.
We’re part of the “we” – and we should take that obligation to Ryan
and Kelsey just as seriously as they take their vows to one another.
And what a joyous obligation that is.