From a pew it looks like flowers and a dress. The sacrament is older than both. God joined man and woman in the first pages of Scripture. Christ went to a wedding at Cana when the wine ran out. The Church received that joining and said that when two baptised people give themselves freely, faithfully, fruitfully, and for life, He is in the room again.
In the Latin Church the ministers are the couple. They marry. The priest stands as the Church’s witness so that the sentence cannot later be called a private mood. I take you. Until death. That yes is small on the morning. The house it makes is not.
This little book walks through the vows without turning them into poetry, through openness to life without slogans, through the hard mercy of indissolubility, through the difference between a declaration of nullity and a divorce, and through the Tuesdays after the hall is swept. Read it before a wedding if you can.
Read it twenty years after, when the flowers are a photograph and the vow is still doing its work.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.