From the distance, the
Sovereign Grace Church looked like a sublime white cake ofwood chastised by the
100 degrees of August summer. But up close, it was so…. nonchalant, so
indifferent in its simple beauty, so dignified by the self-convincement in its
own slenderness that the summer seemed not to suffocate it but to court it
without hope.
They invited my
mother, and she asked me to go with her. I was very skeptical about it. If I
have the tendency to play the outcast in ceremonies of any nature, how about a
Reformed Baptist wedding where everybody was a stranger to me and I to them?
We came late. The only free seats of course were at the front, where the shy ones don´t want to land in a hundred years; just at the core of the endogamic honeycomb of uncles, aunts, cousins, relatives and acquaintances. We reached, as fast and discreetly as possible - as if they were rabbit holes for us - the only last two places available. At this point, being in this wedding was in my imagination a kind of disembarkment, kind of a fight for the worst square yard on a Beachhead, kind of a polite Omaha Beach with every one shooting at me with their machine gun´s deadly bullets of “Who´s that? I don´t know him. I haven´ t seen him in the community ever. Not a Community type this one.” And they were right. I´m not the community type. I mean - maybe because I am from a big city - I vocationally prefer the unruly bunch. Notwithstanding, in the middle of the inclement fire, I remembered the dignified nonchalance of the Church and decided to remain as nonchalant as it. Immediately, my body temperature cooled down, and I found myself comfortable and indifferent.
The hymn “All I ask Of You” filled the space, which indicated me - as if a preexistent code was made for this moment - that the Beachhead was now secured. I felt the sober beauty of the music of the Sinclair children like a balm for the scratches in the skin of my shyness. Now at last, and thanks to them, I was invisible.
The turn was for the groom to make his landing. He was so well and graciously escorted by his Groomsmen, his Band of Brothers, and so belonging to that realm,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me…
that… I felt, again...a newcomer. The epitome of the uninvited without a single chance of knowing what was really happening in this martial parade. Well, not precisely that. What I was lacking was rather to know the antecedents of it. That was the final victory of this man, but I didn’t know anything about his previous battles, his tactics, his failures, his defeats or his gallant recoveries. I asked my mooning around, aloof mother, but she didn’t know anything about those epics. More than that, she didn´t care much because - at that point- she was so well integrated with the whole scene, that she was playing with someone´s toddler seated at our side.
“Sarah´s Wedding Song” then invaded the Church. It was now bigger, whiter, purer. The Bridesmaids and the Flower Girls appeared a sort of pastoral scene forward-marching. Not in the grave - almost concerned order of the previous male square - but relaxed, slight and loose in their dancing step. Their eyes, their blonde curly hairdos and their Empire-like new red dresses transported my feverish imagination to the Sister´s scene in the David´s painting “The Coronation of Napoleon” at the Louvre. I know. The comparison is too much, but you have to consider I wasn´t playing at home and had the hallucinating anxiety of the visiting team.
Music is sometimes like a life saver when you are wondering in excess. Music doesn’t makes you go back to earth, but at least it helps you wonder in a new direction. “I Want to Spend My Lifetime Loving You” was my salvation. The image of the beautiful Spartan girls in red attire faded away, and even the music didn´t help me when the Bride made her entrance. If her Bridesmaids and Flower Girls seemed to dance in their confident debut, an even if she, the Bride, was not dressed Empire-like, she was the very Imperial presence there, marching in her white dress like a Victorian doll, her head trapped by little flowers and leaves under the tulle net of her veil like an Ophelia resuscitated from the amphibious pond and now walking in beauty to Hamlet´s arms. I remember vividly her hair, the veil, the leaves and the flowers for only one reason. She sat down with the groom two seats away from me. Yes. Suddenly I was not anymore in the worst square yard of the beach, but in the best, the strategic one. The sniper´s nest of the chosen ones. Part of her majesty was his contrasting beauty. Every girl in this room was blonde. As I said, their curls fell like a cascade of gold over the river of their red, Spartan, dresses. But not the Bride. She had dark brown hair, which made her skin to look pearly rose under the milky filter of the tulle. I thought I wasn´t wrong saying to myself she was from another world on every side.
She had her eyes closed. It is evident that she was praying for the success of her marriage; it is evident that she was continuing a tradition of righteousness learned since her childhood. She was raised on the Bible, no doubt. But I saw something ahead. I never had seen that fervor, that concentration anywhere but in Buddhist images. She was far away, light years from this place, travelling fast through black holes of doubt, speaking with God while the groom seemed to hold the hand of a somnambule. Nevertheless, this girl didn’t looked like a saint, quite the contrary; when she awoke from her trance after her last journey to the Constellation of Pegasus and returned to this world during the Ring Ceremony and said “yes,” she had the sparkling glance of total victory and this enchanting subtext of mischievousness that young women have when they have won her war.
These days I have a reproduction of the David´s painting on my wall. I try to see it the way I´ve always had. But now I can´t help watch at it as the epiphany of Sarah’s wedding. The painting is solemn, hyperbolic, excessively sumptuous and artificial. Compared to it, the space that housed the fervor of the Bride at Sovereign Grace Church is a next door epiphany you cannot find elsewhere on earth.
