| Two Years of Attempted Flowering
Two years ago, on July 1st, 2011, I stood in a rather old building in a small town of the hills of Pennsylvania and declared to the world that I was giving my life away. It was a unique occasion calling for much decorating and dress, I, in a rare moment, wearing a tuxedo complemented by my white shoes (Because I love my white shoes). The building looked magical in its own way, capturing the descending July sun as the heat lifted, something that gave the room a colorful glow. And here were all these people staring at me as I wept like a small child and handed my life over to another.
I died that day.
Yet, at the same time, I was given a new life from someone else, one that had become increasingly less foreign over the past couple of years.
A bunch of people gathered and watched two people give their lives away. Because, as we serenely repeated throughout the evening, "My lover became mine and I became hers."
Which makes the event kind of like a funeral. A different kind of funeral.
Because in my death, I gave my life over to another being.
And she became my wife.
It is an interesting thing, these weddings we do. And despite its familiarity, it is still a mysterious and beautiful thing. Where we gather in front of our closest companions and acknowledge this encounter that has happened between two individuals who have continually become less and less of the individuals they were. And so they stand there and they announce with the rawest of emotions what they are entering into and what their lives are culminating in.
This is what my wife Vanessa and I did back on the warm summer evening in July.
And, for us, it was certainly special. And to help navigate the mystery, we took this celebration and attempted to infuse it with meaning. So everything we did to commemorate the event was us taking some element of how we understood this whole marriage thing and putting it into a picture. It was lots of ideas and thoughts and images being put into symbols. And central to the entire thing was one overarching metaphor:
"A Flower That Pierces the Concrete"
Because this is what we believe a marriage is. This is what we hoped our love could be. Like a flower that pierces the concrete.
It is the idea that two people die to themselves, they take their lives and give them to the other.
They enter into this kind of funeral.
And they become something beautiful.
We could even say that two people empty themselves for the other and become one.
It is sacrifice and selflessness and entering into the sort of intimate community with another being that we are created to discover.
Which is the same kind of language that Jesus uses to describe what it means to follow him.
"Take up your cross..."
For Jesus, to follow him, to participate in his movement, to get caught up in this thing God is doing in the world, it involves dying. Laying your life down. Sacrificing. Giving up to enter into something bigger.
And it is this that leads to Resurrection.
So for Vanessa and I, marriage was just a way for us to take up our cross. We understood that marriage is a way we can follow Jesus. We marched to the altar as a way to symbolize our march to the death that Jesus calls us to, we laid down our life in those moments, and it all culminated in us entering into this bigger thing as one, into a resurrection.
Because entering into a marriage is entering into the way of life that Jesus seemed to have in mind.
And it leads to Resurrection.
Two people making the other whole - it is two deaths that brings life to the world.
And the world needs this.
The world needs the Jesus movement to began restoring this place. It needs people taking up their crosses, whatever that looks like for them, to enter into this bigger thing marked by resurrection. Because we live in a dark and dead and difficult world.
And it needs some life.
It is like we live in a world full of concrete.
Which makes marriage a bit like a flower that pierces that concrete.
This is what Vanessa and I understood this whole marriage thing as. That in a dead and dark world, we were supposed to be bringing light and life. That in a world full of concrete, by entering into this marriage, we are attempting to contrast the grayness and bring a little color.
We are trying to pierce the concrete.
And so our wedding was us putting that into words and pictures and committing to what that ought to look like. So when we got to the part that is traditionally called the "vows", rather than some standard sort of approach or ritual that you are just supposed to do at that point in the ceremony, we asked, "So if this is what we are doing, what do we need to say to one another to commit to that? How do we put into words what we are doing with one another?"
It was us articulating our commitment.
And then as I was culminating my thoughts, I added a final vow to Vanessa. I wanted to do something that would manifest this love and this idea of marriage we were deciding to own. I wanted to give us a picture that we could always have, that could remind us and correct us and continually point us in the direction we were committing to go in.
So at the end of my vows, I told Vanessa that, to do this, I was starting a garden. I knew nothing about gardening. I had never done it before. I just knew that if we were going to try and be a flower that pierces the concrete, it might be nice to have some flowers around to constantly put this on display for us.
The problem was that I had no idea how to garden. It was just this romantic idea that I had in my mind with no practical sense of how to actually pull it off. So I dove in anyways. And though I was way in over my head, I soon began realizing that not only would the garden be a picture to remind of us what we were doing, a nice thing to talk about at a wedding ceremony, but that it was also going to teach us how to do the very thing we were hoping to do. Even from the beginning, my experiences with the garden was that it was teaching me how to be human. These plants had a lot to share in how to follow Jesus.
So there I stood in that old church building and told this woman that wherever we lived and wherever we went and whatever we found ourselves in, I would always plant a garden; I would always have this thing to remind us to be like a flower and to pierce the concrete.
And so for all of you who were there, who witnessed my vows and who pledged to hold us both accountable, I just wanted to show you that I have kept this vow. That we have the garden and we are still attempting to pierce the concrete.
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This was the first garden. Pretty basic. I had no clue what I was doing. I probably still don't. But it was beautiful and we loved it.
Enter California. Our 1st full year of being officially married happened here. And luckily we had a nice South facing balcony.
Pretty basic, but it continued to expand and develop.
Please note my resourcefulness of hanging buckets over the rail for most of the plants. Also note that beautiful watermelon vine...we actually managed to grow some watermelons.
And it was after this first year that we finally felt like gardeners. We had begun to own the way of life and immerse ourselves in it and we noticed it was shaping us immensely. We were so excited of how much we learning from this vow we had committed to.
But time goes on, you learn a little, and, now, we have this.
And this is my favorite plant in the whole garden. It is a flowering herb called Borage.
They are beautiful.
And...you can eat them!
This is our garden. And we couldn't imagine life without it. Everyday we spend time by it, we become fascinated by the plants, and we look, again, at what we are participating in.
And, as is visible in the pictures, there is one constant object that is always present. In the middle of the garden, we keep this:
A picture of a flower bursting out of some cement.
Just so that we don't forget.
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