Trying to consider the line of a poem that caught in my throat at my brother Ian's wedding last weekend. I'm usually pretty good at speaking in front of people, loving the spotlight just for a moment, my voice a calm and steady stream, but this time I got caught on a line and couldn't go on, tears streaming down my cheeks while all the guests sat and watched and the sun blared, and the blue sky stared me down with a blank blue stare. "For better, for worse, splicing spirit-bodies to each other in the daily / Communion of light..."
Even now I'm having a bit of trouble keeping it together here on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I like to think of this line from Eamon Grennan's poem as a nod to the beauty of a good marriage, a wedding of two people whose "spirit-bodies" are suddenly realized. A wedding ceremony offers us the chance to join in this literal "splicing [of] spirit -bodies" and we are all there to share in the joy of that joining.
And even though the wedding last weekend on the coast of Maine was not religious, there was indeed this "Communion of light" that we all drank—it glimmered off the surface of the Atlantic, it sank into the pores of our skin, it lapped up against the rocks and the grasses and the fir trees. Though the toasts are all finished, the tent is collapsed and the chairs folded, I'd still like to raise one last glass of sunlight to my brother Ian and his wife Amanda: may your love be a kind of walk on water.
