In Defense of Children at Weddings

More than a third of the crowd is under fifteen.  Babies, toddlers, usually squirmy little boys in suit jackets two sizes too big, satin and lace wrapped pre-teens, all remarkably solemn and still.  Silence, waiting as bride and groom, parents, and witnesses sign their names and swear their oaths in the civil ceremony.  

Now, as the religious ceremony unfolds, every young gaze is intensely focused on the pageantry—the veil, the coins, the ring, the vows, the knot. 

My sons, sitting in the back row, sneak across the grass to the end of the make-shift aisle. The pronouncement.  The kiss.  Lane hurries back to me with a look of awe and wonder on his face and hugs me fiercely.

As the couple recesses the crowd gets to its feet, but the children—the children do much more. They rush, they push, they burst forth!  The boys—many unknown to each other—tumble into a pile of joyful, crazed, violent wrestling. They yell; they tear off their jackets and ties; they conquer.  The girls mob the bride, before any sense of a receiving line can be formed.  They squeal; they touch her face, her veil, her dress; they unite themselves with her beauty. 

Without understanding, they know.

“And Lucy felt running through her that deep shiver of gladness which you only get if you are being solemn and still.” –C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe