In early August, Josh and I attended a secular wedding. The couple got married at a natural history museum; their wedding ceremony in the planetarium. The bride was beautiful in a black dress and slicked-back blonde hair. The groom was handsome in a suit with a bow tie, his tattoos peeking over the cuff of his collar. They were trained scientists, like Josh, and all three had attended advanced chemistry classes together in graduate school. Her bouquet and the table centerpieces featured fungi. Before the ceremony, wedding guests were invited to browse the natural history collections, where they could handle animal bones and peer at frogs and snakes beyond plexiglass.
The wedding ceremony included a reading of a poem by Erasmus Darwin (the father of Charles), who wrote an awful lot about the erotic love of plants. Their minister, who was just a friend with a certificate from the internet, alluded to stardust, to how we are all made of the stuff—the elements—of the galaxy. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Carbon.
We sat in the planetarium and watched the couple exchange vows. I leaned into Josh’s side as they promised to love one another, and when they kissed we cheered for them. Closing music started playing over the sound system, and it was one of my favorite songs by the Flaming Lips: “Do you realize / that everyone you know some day will die?”
In that moment, I couldn’t think of anything more romantic. The inherent riskiness of a wedding never fails to take my breath away. If all goes well for these friends’ marriage, it will still end in death. The Christian tradition teaches that marriage is a common grace for all people, even people who don’t believe in God.
Watching these friends marry stirred up this common grace inside of me. Their love, commitment, fidelity, and honesty defied the warnings I had internalized that only marriages between Christian believers could be happy or successful. That Josh and my unequally yoked marriage was somehow synonymous with tragedy: a broken and frayed bond.
After we filed out of the planetarium auditorium, Josh and I held hands as we strolled through the museum, my high heels clacking down the hallway. We walked through galleries that contained simulations about the creation of the world from the tiniest of elements, bursting and blazing into being. We walked by a gigantic wooly mammoth and read placards about the ice age. So many fellow created beings have inhabited this planet, so many fellow created beings have died, recycling their bodies into the soil. Billions of prairie grass stalks have fallen to the ground. Birds have alighted in trees since the age of dinosaurs. Staring at the planets, reading the timelines that represent billions of years, trillions of sunrises and sunsets, so many summers and springs and winters.
We are so small and, as the psalmist wrote over two thousand years ago, “The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” As we say on Ash Wednesday, from dust we were created and to dust we will return. Believers and nonbelievers both.
If all goes well for our marriage, it will end in death. Dust to dust. From nothing, to something, to nothing. Or, from elements, to creation, back to elements.
When Josh first deconverted, it felt like failure not to have “God at the center of our marriage” as all the Christian books had told us. But as time passes, I experience more and more the grace of our commitment, which has endured despite the ways we have both changed. I see all the ways we have sacrificed to make our marriage work.
When Josh and I got engaged nearly ten years ago, we held hands on a hiking trail at Afton State Park.
“I choose you,” he told me. “Will you choose me?”
“I will,” I said. I still do.