Are there any who object to this union?

Mawaige! Lacey, frilly, bell-tolling - oh, yes, mawaige. Immaculately cleaned males dressed in oak-solid suites; Gloriously adorned females wearing dresses directly imported from some magical flower realm. Weddings are nothing if not replete with eye-candy.

This past weekend I went to Minnesota to bear witness and testify to the union of Anisa Smith and Stanfano Ascari. It was a lovely ceremony. Austere in it's simplicity yet dynamic in it's depth and meaning. Then it was done, they was mawwied, and we danced the night away.

In the Baha'i Faith marriage is described as the "fortress of well-being." It is cited as the very bedrock on which a stable and successful society is founded. It is as elementally necessary to our continued progress as fire was to cavemen.

Weddings are a different beast, however. While I appreciate as much as the next man a good rite of passage, and while I love as all do friends and family being near at significant life moments, I can't help but think of the classic anglo-saxon wedding as two parts opulent, one part silly, and one part fun. It's a monstrous machine, functioning now like some terrifying AI of the future, functioning outside of human control and fueled by it's own longevity and weight. It has attained cultural inertia, and the best we poor mortals can do is try to dive out the way without being entirely crushed.

The wedding this weekend made me think of this specifically because it wasn't a denizen of this terrifying beast. It was a breath of fresh air; something of a trend with Bahai weddings that i've attended. Sitting there, listening to the simple collection of readings, read by a diverse number of people each of whom meant something to the couple being wed, I felt a glimpse of hope for this bloated institution. It turns out you don't need a solemn man in a large hat to conduct a lengthy and established ceremony (although solemn men in large hats are not strictly unfavorable either). You don't need pillars of gold leaf and angels performing fly-bys in tight flight formations. You just need two people, their love for each other, and some simple method of connecting with an essence beyond the ordinary world. Song, ceremony, men in large hats - all are aimed at this last goal, and all are acceptable in their own way. But in my experience, God, spirituality, Allah, our emotional selves - whatever you wish to say - is more responsive to sincerity than to lavish displays.

The required vow in the Baha'i Faith is simple: "We will all verily abide by the will of God." And whether or not you believe in God per se, it strikes me as a good idea to base such an ambitious vow of commitment in something beyond humans. Humans fail. Humans falter. Humans are limited. But a concept of the Divine can transcend all these things and last eternally - just as we want, on the most basic level, for the proposed union of two souls to last. Thus, to me at least, weddings are not just a ceremony. They are a pledge to strive, for as long as we live, to seek our nobility over our depravity. Our solidarity over our fractured selves. For surely we have the capacity for both, and at some point we will have chosen by our actions which direction we favor. How much better, then, to choose conciously and wisely, and to do so with someone there to help us when we (as we must) falter.