Notes from the Luminous Life

In which I ramble about where I've been and what I've seen, Wedding at Cana themed.

Jul 10, 2024

So allow me to tell you some stories about where I’ve been the past month, no particular deep point other than just sharing some mystical reality with you.

On the schedule: Eldest daughter’s wedding, late June. (Spoiler: She’s happily married and off to their next adventures!)

Of course we knew this was going to be consuming. Everyone says so, and I remember how intense were the weeks leading up to my own much smaller, simpler wedding.

The SuperHusband and I are not by nature a big-wedding people, but it was profoundly important to my daughter, my son-in-law, and his family that we go big with this one. I had told the co-parents at the time of the engagement — before I knew what their celebratory wishes were — that I was fine with whichever they chose:

Groom’s family can be happy with what we can afford.
Groom’s family can be happy with what they can afford.

They opted for door #2 and mailed me the check to make it happen.

—> For the purposes of this tale, it doesn’t matter whether my “small” is your outlandishly “big” or their idea of “big” is your idea of an intimate, frugal affair. Just visualize whatever you think of as the most you’d consider reasonable, at a stretch, to budget for one of your children’s weddings, and then double it.

Mentally, the spouse and I had entered this engagement thinking, “How about we spend no more than half our planned wedding money on something small, and give you the savings towards graduate school expenses?” When the groom’s family actually came through on my offer to let them pay for what they wanted, we didn’t know how to act.

We were like: Are you sure?? Because that’s a lot of money!

They were sure.

And what got me over the hump was the second luminous mystery, the Wedding at Cana. My thought process last fall when I hit go on the Big Event was this:

I guess it looks like Jesus didn’t totally hate and condemn big weddings, no matter how strongly my frugal streak rails against them.
These kids aren’t wrong, their coming together to form a new Christian family really is cause to celebrate. And I mean, we love the groom, we love his family . . . they are solid.
I know only too well, mother of several young adults now, how hard it is for young Christians to find a good spouse, and how broken and fragile are the relationships in our society. Anymore there is something of the miraculous when two emotionally mature, personally compatible, Jesus-loving kids manage to find each other.

That was it. I stepped out in faith and agreed to do a thing that did not come naturally to me at all, and therefore to do it as well as I could.

I should add here that whenever the luminous mysteries came around during my regularly-scheduled rosaries throughout the year, I prayed them for our couple-to-be.

Also, down payment on the graces to come, during this time we received an unbudgeted salary bonus that covered any concerns about those unplanned incremental expenses that always creep in to these sorts of things.

I can’t know for sure whether we were cooperating with the Will of God, but He was certainly cooperating with the will of us.

I tell you this because of some of you will worry about money in the telling of this story, and that is not necessary.

So there were the odd minor moments during the lead-up, but other than the Case of the Disappearing Caterer, nothing particularly crazy happened during the planning season. Groom’s mom helped us get sorted on a new caterer well before it became a crisis, and it was fine.

Small miracle: My husband went dress shopping with my daughter and did not bat an eye at the price of her first-choice dress. Okay, that was a pretty big miracle.

I was really, really happy with this level of Cana-type moments.

I want to point out here that my spiritual life is not that advanced. I am terrible at praying. Sometimes I either “forget” or else genuinely forget to attend to basic spiritual things for embarrassingly long stretches of time. I will spare you the horror show. Just believe me: Not an award winner here.

I say that so you understand how much what followed had divine grace written all over it.

In the two weeks prior to my daughter’s wedding, we had all the usual about-to-get married little moments. Lots of details to pull together, minor crises when I vastly underestimated how long xyz wedding-related activity would take, my daughter and I completely forgetting things we meant to do . . . all that.

(Example: Ring bearers pulling into their pew during the ceremony after processing, looking at their white pillows, and asking their mom, “Aren’t there supposed to be rings on here??” Oops.)

I’ve been married myself. It happens. Don’t like it, but you have to just roll with it.

Also in the two weeks that preceded:

A very close relative (he had been my husband’s best man at our wedding) experienced a drug-induced psychotic break, threatened another close family member at gunpoint, and we had the heartbreaking and nerve-wracking job of sending in a recent photo to the parish security team and praying this guy had managed to lose his invitation and forget about the wedding. Our most recent photo was this person gathered with our immediate family for this past year’s Christmas dinner in our home.

A financial/legal situation came up which I won’t blog about, but which was deeply aggravating to me and highly stressful to my husband. Nothing urgent, nothing that big in the scheme of things, and indeed it was clarifying and pointed us towards some better options to consider, but which hit him very hard emotionally because it came out of left field and involved some close relationships.

One of our younger girls, maid of honor, came home from camp a week before the wedding super sick. Flu A, we learned when I took her to the urgent care when she started having trouble breathing. Yes, flu in June. The doctors were floored.

Fortunately she came home already-symptomatic, so we knew to take precautions. Nonetheless there was the triple worry of whether she would be able to attend her sister’s wedding, whether we could keep the bride from getting sick, whether we could keep everyone else from getting sick . . . and also who is going to hem this child’s bridesmaid dress, since no one can get near her?

And then, just a few days before the wedding my husband was woken up in the middle of the night (the rest of us slept through it) by the police banging on our front door. We were the next of kin and were being notified that our the close family member above was no longer a threat to anyone, he’d been found dead.

It was a lot.

And here is the mystery of it all: It was fine.

Yes, there was a lot of grieving to do, but also our extended family and friends came through and took care of the things that needed taking care of, and gave us a pass on what didn’t.

The sick child recovered and was asymptomatic and non-contagious by the time the elderly relatives rolled in and the festivities began (kicking off with my dad’s 80th birthday, and growing each day from there). No one else got sick.

My sister-in-law, tutored by her sister via Facetime, got that dress hemmed once it was safe to do so. This on top of doing the flowers, a far bigger job than either of us had anticipated, and rendered so marvelously that the coordinator at the reception was in awe.

A particular moment of miraculous grace: When I went to pick up birthday cakes the same day we learned of our close relative’s death, my friend who did the baking was able to say, “Yes, I understand,” because she’d been through it herself. I had an hour of sitting in the quiet of her dining room, unloading my day on someone else who knew what it’s like to have a close loved one self-destruct from drug addiction, someone who understands grace and mercy and hope and also the complicated feelings of a complicated grief.

More crazy stuff went down during the three days of wedding-events, mostly small stuff but also a few moments that were frustrating and sad, but nonetheless: It was beautiful and good.

Time and again in the official speeches and in small conversations, we were encouraged by the unabashed faithfulness and love of Jesus Christ from the groom’s family and from many of our own friends and family there to celebrate with us.

The ceremony was perfect. Father nailed the homily so marvelously that our evangelical guests were taking us aside to say how moved they were by his explanation of the sacredness of marriage in God’s plan for humanity.

As we were cleaning up after a banger of a reception Saturday night, the DJ said it was best wedding he’d ever worked.

So the trouble with the miracle at Cana is this: You have to get to zero.

And then, weirdly, just when everything should be an absolute disaster — not the worst possible disaster, but disastrous enough — your friends bring to the party whatever it is they have for help, and God covers the rest.