Thoughts Before a Wedding

My daughter is in town planning her wedding. This morning she made an interesting observation: many funerals make a deep impression, but weddings almost never do.

Despite the fact that wedding ceremonies are planned with great care, they end up gauzy creations, hard to remember. The readings, the flute solos, the carefully constructed candle lightings all blend into one undifferentiated haze. One’s mind drifts off.

Funerals, which are hardly planned at all, have far more solidity. Perhaps it’s because weddings are about the future, celebrating hope, while funerals are about the past, things realized. One is contingent, the other known.

In that respect all weddings are more or less alike, because the hopes are the hopes of humankind. But each and every funeral has its own distinct character, laid down in the life of the person remembered.

We live on the boundary between the future and the past, what we call the present. That thin and elastic membrane continuously and ineluctably converts hopes into realities. On one side we have our ideals and our illusions. On the other side, our honor and our regrets. Some of us have weddings. All of us have funerals.

The Realism of Hope

Quite an impassioned and inspirational column in the NYTimes this morning by Roger Cohen. (here) It’s about Poland and all it has overcome–about the real commitment to reconciliation in spite of everything. The plane crash at Katyn inspired Cohen, particularly the way in which Polish government carries on unimpeded, and the way in which both Russian and Polish leaders have joined together in the tragedy.

What Cohen really addresses is hope. He sees Poland as a sign for people without hope–those in the Middle East, particularly.

His message resonated with what I wrote last week on Most Influential Books. Thinking about Parting the Waters, a book I love, I realized that the example of the Civil Rights movement makes me believe that life in this world can be improved. Not easily, not perfectly, but really, when people motivated by the right principles are determined to make it so. Hope can be naive. People who hope can make life worse, by taking actions that aren’t well grounded and that crash into disaster. But hope can be realistic, too.

Cohen quotes Adam Michnik: “My obsession has been that we should have a revolution that does not resemble the French or Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.”

We need that kind of hopefulness in America right now too. It was the hope of the founding fathers–not utopian at all, and not naive about the difficulties facing the nation, but determined to do something for the good of the people of America. Such hope is never loved by people at the extremes.  Its optimism is so modulated, so cautious, that it hardly makes a bow wave. But if it flows from realistic principles, it can make an immense difference. See Poland. See America.