Royal Wedding Fever
On the day of the royal wedding my husband made a quip that it was the ‘second biggest day of the year’.
‘What?,’ I retorted. ‘What could be bigger than Will and Kate’s wedding?!’
‘Ummm … we got married six weeks ago?’ he replied.
‘Oh yes. Yes, I guess that was bigger,’ I conceded, still slightly unsure.
It’s safe to say I was swept up in Royal Wedding Fever. For my part in the pageantry, I had a tea party with a gaggle of girls and one Mr Barratt, who claimed he was there for the ‘military regalia’ (of course). Our small celebration was shared by millions of others in the UK, its former colonies and around the globe.
The cold, hard fact is that very few of us—I believe we’re known as ‘the masses’—actually know Will and Kate. There is no real rational explanation for why we should share such jubilation over their ‘biggest day of the year’. It’s more than just a sense of history or romance: our hearts are made to yearn for something greater than ourselves. In rare moments like this, our individual lives join together and share in a bigger story.
Every wedding a royal wedding
The Bishop of London picked up on this in his address to the couple, where he beautifully brought together the grand story of this historic occasion, with the Great Story of the human race:
In a sense, every wedding is a royal wedding … William and Catherine, you have chosen to be married in the sight of a generous God who so loved the world that he gave himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
When we love—through the rich variety of human relationships—we allow the love of God to flow between us. It points us to something so much greater and grander than our individual lives can contain. We join with the great story of the human race: a God who loves us so deeply, so profoundly, that he became one of us—Jesus Christ.
The Bishop wisely commented that when we dismiss God from our story, we load our human relationships with ‘too great a burden’. We celebrate someone to share love with, but they are not the source of love. And no other person can take the place in our heart that longs for God. In the year 397, St Augustine wrote:
You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.
In 2011, an event like the royal wedding hints at that profound part of our souls. As royal wedding fever fades, other moments hint at this Great Story too: we have our own ‘biggest days’, a good conversation, or a day’s work well done. God promises us that these are equally significant to him. And then, there’s still the Rugby World Cup …
By Ingrid Barratt (from War Cry magazine)