Birth, Death & Marriage: The Rituals We’ve Forgotten
Reclamation Radio Transcript
Stephen
[00:00:00] Anybody who calls a wedding a fairy tale event has either never been to a wedding or never read a fairy tale. If you’re taking fairy tales as your gospel, you are genuinely asking for it. Matrimony is not equivalent to marriage. Matrimony, the word tells you what it is. The word wife is not in the word matrimony.
Stephen
The word woman is not in the word matrimony. So what’s left? Mother. So it’s just another way of saddling women with motherhood. Think about a gathering around the deathbed. Think about the advent of a new baby coming into the house for the first time. Think about the disposition of the placenta with the little dried up stump of the umbilical cord, and then you get a sense of where my sense of the moment came from And what was at stake, where it came from
Kelly
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Kelly
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Kelly
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Kelly
Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I sit down with Stephen Jenkinson, who is a self-described culture activist, who holds a master’s in theology from Harvard, and who has written and explored the subject of death and dying, but recently put out a book called Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work.
Kelly
And the moment that I heard the title of this book from my [00:02:00] colleague Kimberly Ann Johnson, I said, “I’m going to be pre-ordering and devouring this,” because as you may know, if you’re a listener, I have been in my own personal exploration, and you could say reclamation of the covenant of marriage and, of course, the wedding day and its meaning, significance, import, not only for those individuals, but for their egregor and also for the collective that supports them is something I couldn’t be more curious about.
Kelly
So I’m gonna break the fourth wall for a moment and talk about the fact that many interviews have sort of an energetic arc, right? And I’m sure you’ve listened to interviews where you can almost feel when the two folks, like, drop in together, and before that it’s kind of this, I don’t know, like, uh, kind of a funny, sometimes awkward dance.
Kelly
So the arc of this interview is a really good example of that, where it takes, it takes [00:03:00] a minute for, for us to cook up. But if you stay till the end, you will have a very profound glimpse into the possibility and potential of a wedding Right? And I think you will be introduced to concepts around what a wedding could actually be, arguably what it’s meant to be, that you’re not gonna hear elsewhere.
Kelly
Before that, we unpack the cultural poverty that most of us are bringing to ritual, that leads us to feel like we’re kind of fabricating something out of the void, and also experiencing a kind of grief for what is missing. We necessarily define terms like patrimony, patriarchy, before we take up the mantle of what matrimony is, what it’s meant to be, what it represents, and what is possible through matrimony, which [00:04:00] Stephen says is the place where culture leans on love for its portion, its tithe.
Kelly
So this is quite a highbrow conversation, and I know you’re here for it or you wouldn’t be here. Enjoy. Welcome, Stephen, to the show.
Stephen
Thank you. It’s great. It’s a great invitation. Thanks so much.
Kelly
Amazing. So I was mentioning to you off-air that the subject we will explore today is very near and dear to my heart, and is one that I’ve been attempting to collect and curate perspectives on that, you know, offer nuance and depth to what we are understanding as marriage and associated ritual and ceremony.
Kelly
So I want to track back a bit, because my understanding of how you found yourself in this subject matter, in this arena, is That it was like quite an [00:05:00] unintentional, you know, sort of, um, adventure into this world. It wasn’t that you went out to study, you know, marriage and weddings and associated ceremonies.
Kelly
It was by invitation that, that I understand you started to explore the deficiencies in the current conceptualization of, of this, this framework. So I’d love to know how you moved from what I understand to be your primary arena, which is death and dying, into this arguably related subject matter.
Stephen
Very related, as I found out.
Stephen
Well, first of all, it doesn’t hurt to try your hand in marriage yourself, which I’ve done. And, uh, you find out your, um, well, your limitations, don’t you? It was severe encounter with what you’re not capable of, as it turns out, at least not in the present moment, you know, well, remains to be seen. And then I did it again.
Stephen
So, so there’s that. That was a bit of an entree. And then, [00:06:00] uh, I wouldn’t call it an invitation, actually. It was a little more adamant than that, much closer to a plea and a summons and a petition that young people started to come to me, uh, in, in the context of the Orphan Wisdom School that I was running for about a dozen years.
Stephen
And they’re, um, they were desperate. That is to say that, um, they had… They believed that they had figured out the love part, you know? But they, they were besides themselves trying to figure out How the love part could conceivably appear in the world in any way that doesn’t resemble a top 40 pop song. And they came to me imagining that I would be some kind of midwife to that kind of severity, and I don’t think they were wrong, although not out of the gate.
Stephen
Out of the gate, I was as, uh, I was as unsuspecting and full of, uh, ambivalence on the matter as maybe it’s possible to be. And, and this is literally what happened. I just paid attention to what they were saying to me [00:07:00] when they were doing the ask, and, uh, generally, it was a kinda… It was a combination of, “We want a re- a, a personal wedding, w- ones that we’re recognizable in.
Stephen
Our convictions are all of that. We want a, um, authentic wedding.” That was a big one. “We want a wedding that bears no resemblance to any wedding we’ve ever heard about, seen, or participated in, or a product of, or are a product of,” which doesn’t leave a lot of other possibilities, you know, off the shelf. And then the big word that they used was real.
Stephen
“We want a real wedding. God help us all.” They never said the, “God help us all.” That was my contribution. And, um, you know, I had to, I had to introduce them to what real meant. I said, “If you want real, you know, you’re not talking about sort of peak experience thing here, and you’re definitely not talking about a fairytale storybook perfect day or any of that other stuff that you’ve heard about, uh, during the course of your [00:08:00] travails.
Stephen
No, real means the whole damn thing Last time I checked, I think that’s what real means. It means, you know, your daily life is recognizable there, and your foibles and your frailties are recognizable there. And so if you want me to do it, I’m gonna have to see to it that, um, as sort of matrimony’s henchman, if you will, or sort of spirit lawyer I’ve come to call it, a little less severe sounding.
Stephen
Uh, my job is to see to it that matrimony is served, and, uh, your job is to surround you with people who will be your Greek chorus, your yes men and yes women who will high-five you come what may. You don’t need that from me. So I will, I will do something else, and there will be times as a result of that, that you’ll wonder whether or not we have somehow parted company in the course of the, uh, the preparations.
Stephen
And the answer is probably we have, but you’ll be hard-pressed to determine who is it [00:09:00] that’s moved because it’s fairly easily, easy for me to stay in the corner of matrimony once I had sort of got the feel for it and got the chops and so on. It was much more challenging for the betrothed to stay in matrimony’s corner.
Stephen
In fact, they couldn’t. They were… They had their arms full, if you will, occupying their own corner and trying to figure out what real and personal and authentic could actually become with enough hard labor. And my God, it was hard labor. I mean, uh, we took a best… Most of the time, we took a best part of a year to, to ready ourselves, and there was s- And the event itself was in the order of six, seven, maybe even eight hours So you can imagine then it wasn’t a walkthrough, and it wasn’t rehearsed, and, uh, it wasn’t repeat after me.
Kelly
You talk about some of your preexisting qualifications being that you chose to marry twice. And so I wonder, if I’m not projecting, [00:10:00] whether in retrospect you wish that you had some deeper appreciation for the nature of the covenant, for what you were getting yourself into, for what was even possible. And in this officiant role or the, uh, the henchman role, as you reference it, you yourself perhaps had the opportunity to reconcile that.
Kelly
Like, was there also a personal journey here, do you think?
Stephen
Well, isn’t there always? I mean, y- y- you know, that’s just part of the… It’s either considered a fringe benefit or considered a curse, but it’s… But you are always in, you know, no matter how official your, your little place in the proceedings might actually be.
Stephen
But you recognize life there, and your little life is recognizable there as well. So, I m- I like the word covenant. I don’t think I’ve used that word. That’s a, that’s a, that’s a dandy way of categorizing the oh-my-godness of it all.
Kelly
Yeah. To my mind, it [00:11:00] captures-
Stephen
Yeah …
Kelly
the deficiency of my own appreciation and understanding, uh, when I, you know, um, ventured down the aisle.
Kelly
I
Stephen
think I could tell you, you know, and, and to be fair to your question, I did have the opportunity, and it was not necessarily really welcome, to reflect back on, on, uh, my first time through and how, how along for the ride I tended to be basically to make room for or make allowance for the push and pull of the people who had a vested interest in the appearance of things and, and, and it was, uh…
Stephen
There was two… She was Jewish. I was sort of ill-defined.
Kelly
Agnostic.
Stephen
I don’t know. I, I don’t think I… I think I prefer ill-defined. It was… I was, I was non-aligned in the extreme, you know, which is not a helpful place to be, necessarily. So anyway, long story short, yeah, I watched it all happen as- [00:12:00] from a bit of a remove, as it turned out, and wondered, “Is that what that is?”
Stephen
Never having seen really anything else, any, any alternative to the kinda standard off-the-shelf, 15-minute in-and-out kind of enterprise, you know? And when it came time for me to- saddle up. I, I probably was mindful of it, but I don’t think I was trying to undo, you know, sort of, uh, the misspent part of my, uh, my first encounter with matrimony.
Stephen
No, I don’t think so. What I did do instead was I just examined with kind of relentless de- uh, uh, focus and detail what I took to be kind of the remnant shards or, or, or broken bits of what once was something that was fairly intact and fairly in good working order. I don’t know how far back we have to go and where in the world I’m referring to right now.
Stephen
That’s a separate question, but, but I, I knew that even in the, [00:13:00] even in the 15-minute wedding, as I called it early, there were s- there were signs that, that we were, we were in the sort of… What would you call it? The, the pollen trail of the… of some former deep understanding of this or some kind of chemtrail of it, you could say And I looked at the details.
Stephen
I’ll just throw a couple out for giving a feel of what I was talk- how, how I came to it. So I was observant, of course, of the seating arrangement, the ta- the standard seating arrangement, which is once you start thinking about it, it’s quite theatrical, isn’t it? It’s quite performative. That’s the scheme, and that’s the, the conceit of the arrangement as well.
Stephen
And then you have this aisle up the middle where no one sits. Gee, I wonder where that came from. And, uh, and this notion of everybody facing the front, but nobody facing each other. I wonder what that meant, and was it always that way? And, and then I, I, I w- [00:14:00] I was no, you know, I, I was very mindful of the procession, the no- the notion of making some kind of passage across some kind of ground, holy or troubled or otherwise.
Stephen
And once you got there, the notion of being given away in some fashion, being handed over. What about, what’s with the confetti, the throwing thing, the throwing of a foodstuff at one time? In other words, I started to think about these things, and rather than just take them for granted as, or as sort of goofball, um, uh, you know, slightly crabby, strange, ultimately empty, meaningless kind of arrangement, I took these things to be, as any archeologist would, a kind of shards of an old amphora or an old container of some kind.
Stephen
You know, that if you assembled enough of them together, you could get a sense of this, this thing’s or- original shape, contour, [00:15:00] design, maker’s mark, intent, purpose, decoration, if any. And, and that’s what I did. With each time out, I did my best to reassemble them, you know, with a lot of pieces missing, obviously, to get an idea of what this old shape must have been.
Stephen
And wow, what a, what a revelation it was.
Kelly
Yeah, I can imagine you almost, like, pulling the thread to try to get to some sort of- Yeah, shared source. And I hadn’t ever considered what you’re describing. There’s a quote I wanna read from, from your book that I think depicts what you’re referencing in terms of the spectacle and the performative nature of it that renders the audience passive, right?
Kelly
Passive participants. So you say, “Modern weddings are climate-controlled events. They’re too sure of themselves to be trusted as rituals. They’re trying too hard to be calm. They’ve short-circuited the ritual in favor of a kind of meet and greet with temporary [00:16:00] royalty. What’s with the script? What’s, what’s with the rehearsal?
Kelly
All of this is what Shakespeare warned us about when he wrote, ‘Methinks thou dost protest too much.'” And the journey that you took from this canned 15-minute ceremony, where it almost reminds me of the happy birthday song, you know, ritual, uh, that nobody ever considers, nobody ever thinks twice about, and it’s almost like this reflexive hypnotic trance is entered the moment the cue is, you know, is offered.
Kelly
So the road that you traveled from this, you know, rinse and repeat kind of a ritual to what you’re describing as a year of prep with six to eight hours of ceremony involved paying attention to, it sounds like, and observing the habits of matrimonial folks, but then also longing to contribute something and [00:17:00] create the conditions for something different.
Kelly
So you talked about realness, and I wonder if you could unpack a bit for us, like what is that something different? What is it to be in the corner of matrimony, as you said, uh, versus having this agenda, you know, to, to perform in some, you know, um, well-managed and curated way?
Stephen
Sure. Let’s take the notion of a, of a fairy tale wedding.
Stephen
This is, this a-anachronism is, uh, is offered up as a kind of perfect Storm of good intent, plenty of money , uh, people thinking well of each other and the rest. Well, anybody who calls a wedding a fairy tale event has either never been to a wedding or never read a fairy tale. Be- because, and honestly, I mean, I took one fairy tale to task, as you notice [00:18:00] in, in the book.
Stephen
And, uh, if, if you’re taking fairy tales as your guide, as your gospel, man, you are genuinely asking for
Kelly
- Get ready for some harrowing plot twists.
Stephen
I mean, the… not to generalize too much, but you could say it, it is in the business of fairy tales to, to reacquaint this world with the, with some kind of other world.
Stephen
And, and in so doing, our sense of decorum does take a bit of a jolt. And, and fairy tales don’t play by the rules, you see. So we would imagine that the, the strength, the intensity of feeling between two people is kind of the guidebook for the whole operation, right? And clearly in fairy tales, that’s, that’s simply the goofball occasion for things to get underway.
Stephen
That’s all it is. I mean, it di- it just rides people’s feelings for each other severely into town, dismounts, and proceeds otherwise, right? So I mean, it introduces, for example, the notion of a, uh, of an [00:19:00] intermediary. Not a chaperone, but someone who actually short-circuits the intensity of the feelings these people have for each other long enough for them to spill out over the container of, of decorum, romance, sort of you and only you, and, and begin to have consequences in the wider world And as you could tell from the book, this is probably my principal plea and case making in the book is that genuine romance, let’s call it, let’s call it the sense of well-being that is available to you in a circumstance of remarkable, authentic romance, okay?
Stephen
My plea on the matter is that sense of well-being has to be communicative and communicable. It has to be lucid and eloquent in its way, which is what the vows are supposed to be, and the participation of other people verbally in the enterprise is all brought to bear there. And then communicable meaning it’s [00:20:00] supposed to, that, that sense of well-being has to be available to the wider circuitry, if you will, to the culture, which is why I’ve spent so much time on the actual words, matrim- the word matrimony and patrimony in particular, to give people an understanding here that, um, that what we’re talking about is not how to safeguard or vote safe your feelings for one another.
Stephen
What we’re talking about is how to employ these feelings for the sake of the wider world, which once upon a time was its principal purpose in life, was to represent some kind of deep-running otherwiseness to the ordinary life just long enough for the ordinary life to, to be enhanced, to be deepened in some fashion, and, and more to be asked of all, all the participants.
Stephen
Yeah.
Kelly
I want to unpack the The etymological and semantic research that you’ve done, [00:21:00] because it was also very novel to me, and I’m very interested in, in words and, uh, their, their origin stories. Before we do that, though, I want to touch on a point that you made that I also had never really considered, which is the, the severe limitations of the nuclear family when it comes to what otherwise would be tribalism, right?
Kelly
So I, uh, and many of my colleagues are focused on the assault on the nuclear family and, uh, even the many arrows slung at marriage and feminism’s role in that and all these kinds of things. And so it almost seems like the prizing of nuclear family is, is a goal that I have upheld recently. But when you put it in this framework and you describe, you know, the focus on our family and even the elders in our family being the elders that we look to [00:22:00] versus a heterogeneity of community that draws all sorts of flavors and doesn’t necessarily prize the family of origin over others in the community, you make a case for a kind of participation and witnessing that is very different than most of us think about when we think about our wedding invite lists and who makes the top of those, those lists.
Kelly
So you have, I think, another super interesting quote I want to read and then, and then I’ll hand you the mic. You say, “Is it not likely that the seeking after sameness is the psychic off-gassing of independent, lonely, often predatory individuals? Homogeneity as an ideal seems like a kind of involuntary, unwitting tyranny born of the atrophy of village into nuclear family.”
Kelly
That’s quite a provocative sentiment, and I’d love you to unpack that a bit. Okay,
Stephen
sure. Somebody recently interviewing me said, as if [00:23:00] they were revealing something to me clearly for the very first time, they said to me, “You know, you are quite easy to misunderstand.” So this may be an example. I don’t know.
Stephen
Well, I mean, to me, I, I look around at the… Speak, speak of shards earlier. It would appear to me that the advent of the nuclear family, and God help us all, the single-parent nuclear fam, which is even more- Astringent, isn’t it? And more sort of hanging on for its own, for its dear life kind of thing. This thing is a, is a default something.
Stephen
It doesn’t s- strike me as any kind of goal, no real purpose, uh, buried in it. It’s a, it’s kind of when everything else passed from view, this is what was left. And, and it doesn’t end at the nuclear [00:24:00] family. I mean, the derision, the, the kind of disassembly is now, uh, being wrought upon the nuclear family so severely now that what you really have is tribes of one.
Stephen
You have the kind of towering Gothic cathedral of the, of the, the single person, the, the remote, single, austere, sovereign, noble, inherently inalienable. You get the idea. Uh, the notion that somehow a self is, is the finest of all conceivable achievements in life, just to maintain and take direction from yourself, which strikes me as, man, can it get lonelier?
Stephen
Can it? You know? So, I mean, fact now, when the Christian Church… And Christianity’s a fairly easy culprit to identify in this matter. Far from the only one, okay? But I’m, I, I point this out because it’s a, [00:25:00] it’s a piece of history that most people are not aware of. When the Christian Church undertook its conversion of, of Europe, which is the, the seedbed for so much of what became America and, and a- as a, as a fantasy, it took, it took dead aim at a couple of social institutions that were indigenous of the time and place.
Stephen
One of them was the function, role, purpose, standing of elders. The other one was, you guessed it, the nature of the family, the structure of the family, which up until then, you would say the indigenous people of Europe took for granted as a given of life. It was so demonstrably, quote, “naturally occurring” that there was no, there was no overreach about redesigning the enterprise.
Stephen
But man, the Christians were all about redesigning the enterprise, and what they did is all of their modifications all headed in the very same direction, to be, to make it smaller as a kind of footprint, to draw it in towards itself. [00:26:00] So no longer you would have the honorific titles of, of, um, nana and grandpa, let’s say, other honorific titles of aunt and uncle, which we still nominally employ for the friends of our parents kind of thing.
Stephen
But in those days, not at all. It was, especially from a legal point of view, the notion of heredity or inheritance of bloodline and property and all of this atrophied to make sure that people were no longer confused about the multifoliate nature of family, and were reoriented to the notion of that family is, is like a genealogy, as you would read i- in the Bible, and so and so begat, so and so begat, so and so begat.
Stephen
And, and that’s how it went, and it was kind of, it was kind of like the hereditary… excuse me, the heredity programs, the g- the gene-driven programming that we see on TV now, where, you know, follow your family line, and if you’re famous, it’s amazing, you know, kind of thing. All, all of that was in the offing from this.
Stephen
And so one of the [00:27:00] consequences, of course, is your principal affiliation, your principal sense of obligation and merit, and you derive your i- sense of identity and all of that from a smaller and smaller when it comes to a gene pool, and not a, a scheme of affection, affiliation, and kinship. All of this is functionally withered, right?
Stephen
So we see it today. We see the, the, the notion of the family as, is… I mean, people are talking now about families, whatever you want a family to be, as if this is reversing that circumstance. I would say to you, far from reversing the circumstance, it’s finalizing it. The notion that you, you can simply decide and you d- and you d- your decision is that your family constitutes everybody that you’d prefer, everybody that sounds and sha- and is shaped somehow like you.
Stephen
And I [00:28:00] mean, this was never the case either. In the, back in the day, a family was such, was such an unruly enterprise that you had no obligation to, to resemble people. You had an obligation to work out your living with them, you see. And so matrimony was one of the ways that these, this, this, um, I was gonna call it anarchy.
Stephen
That’s too strong. But the, all these possibilities were orchestrated in some fashion so th- so that the culture would be able to recognize itself and its fundamental principles and, and convictions and, and moral orders and sense of the naturally occurring and all of that. I mean, find something that’s comparable today, right?
Stephen
So, so I, I look around and I see a staggered, beleaguered sense of witnesses to some kind of horrible train wreck. That’s what you, that’s what I see on display at the 15-minute wedding. And when people are, as you [00:29:00] say, setting about making their guest list, I mean, the last thing they think about is what the culture could use today from their, from their enterprise.
Stephen
I’m sure it’s the last thing. I’m sure it’s not considered at all. It, what’s considered is, you know, what obligation you have to expunge given that you were invited to so-and-so’s kid’s wedding, so now you da, da, da, and all of that. And, you know, how long will it be and how long will it take, and do you really have to go, and is there an easy way out?
Stephen
And that’s on the one side, and then the other side is, you know, Uncle Frank’s too weird. You know, he’ll, he’ll wreck it. And, uh, as if a real wedding doesn’t deserve at least one Un- Uncle Frank, at least one. Not for color, not for curiosity. I mean, so that the, the wrinkles of life can appear and not take you by surprise, you know, three years into the endeavor.
Kelly
You talk about matrimony as being Like, almost like an [00:30:00] offering from the love between these two folks to the culture. And I think it’s important to unpack what you even mean by the use of the word, and to do that, matrimony. And to do that, it seems important to talk about other terms like patrimony, which is a word I, I had never really considered, and even, you know, patriarchy and some of the crystallized wayward conceptions that we are working with now that are maybe standing in the way of our appreciating what you’re getting at.
Kelly
So I wonder if we could talk about this… I, I love the, the metaphor that you used because I found it really helpful in terms of, uh, the complementarity between matrimony and patrimony of a house, right? And I wonder if we could share that, you know, with the folks listening and for you to help us [00:31:00] understand, you know, some of the ways that we’ve wandered off the path in our use of these terms and what they actually refer to and invoke, so that we can start to understand this more cultural context that you’re inviting us toward.
Stephen
Well, first of all, let’s, a distinction between the three big… The couple of the M words, right? So what’s a wedding? Let, let me start with wedding. What’s a wedding? And the answer is, well, it’s a, it’s a pretty discreet affair lasting certainly short of a day The special day, the big day, and all of that. And when it’s over, it’s really over.
Stephen
And when it starts, it’s really clearly that it’s, it’s started. So that’s wedding. It’s, it’s, uh, uh, the na- the nature of it, the wrinkles of it, we could talk about later if you’d like, but the gist of it is it’s recognizable in time in particular as having a discrete beginning and end. And you either did it or you didn’t do it.
Stephen
It’s pretty self-evident, right? It’s not a matter of opinion as to whether or not you [00:32:00] got married wedding-wise. Marriage, what’s marriage then? Marriage is just a lot of wedding? Well, clearly not. A wedding is, is too discrete to be extended over time. Marriage, on the other hand, is not discrete in that way and is, it’s a kind of career arc for people’s affection for each other.
Stephen
It’s kind of where it goes and what it does, and what it loses its way trying to do, and what it forgets about, and what it remembers, and what it restores, and what it, what it longs after and can’t find and you get the idea. Matrimony is neither of those things. Matrimony is not equivalent to marriage.
Stephen
Matrimony, the word tells you what it is. So the mony part, the suffix means something in the order of the kind of, you could say the toolkit or the repertoire or the, the kind of, um, signs and, and auguries by which a certain thing can be found, recognized, tracked especially. And then the root word, [00:33:00] which turns out not to be wife, nowhere to be found.
Stephen
The word wife is not in the word matrimony. The word woman is not in the word matrimony The word bride? No, it’s not there either. So what’s left? Mother. Oh, wait, so it’s just another way of, of saddling women with motherhood. Well, for… I didn’t say women. I said mother. And once you spend a little time with this word, you’re staggered to find that the repertoire of matrimony is not exclusive to or the particular domain of genetically identifiable f- human females.
Stephen
It’s not to say that it doesn’t live there, too, and probably that those people are its greatest exemplars and practitioners. But it’s also to say, in a working culture, everybody [00:34:00] knows intuitively the repertoire of culture mothering. That’s what the word means. It’s the repertoire for mothering culture.
Stephen
And everybody in a working culture knows the repertoire, and everybody by virtue of tradition and formality knows their place in the delivery system of that repertoire, you see. And the s- the same is true for the word patrimony, with the fundamental difference being we’re not talking about mothers now, we’re talking about fathers.
Stephen
Or more particularly, it’s, it’s really a verb. It’s not really an identity at all. So you could say fathering. The fathering of culture, the mothering of culture, that’s what the two words are pleading for us to come to re- some recognition of. So I’m going to read something to you that gives… puts some meat on the bones of the notion of patrimony, which, as you kindly pointed out, kind of surprised you.
Stephen
Not something you really had, had thought much about. I hadn’t thought much about it either, to the point where when I was being asked to do [00:35:00] the weddings, I said that my first thought that I remember having was, “You know, I’ve heard it referred to as the holy state of matrimony by the officiant at the front of the hall.
Stephen
But I have ne- especially in an age of sort of radical, uh, inclusivity, which this one, uh, claims to be, I have never heard anybody invited into the holy state of patrimony, ever.” In fact, I’m sure, not sure that the word holy and the word patrimony can be found in the same sentence today in any way at all, right?
Stephen
So, so maybe this little quote here- brings holiness and, and things patrimonial back at least into the same area code. Okay? So take me just a second to find it, ’cause I didn’t know I was gonna do this, and I can tell you where it is as soon as I find
Kelly
- I probably have it earmarked already.
Stephen
Here we are.
Stephen
It’s on page 206.
Kelly
Yes, I do. I was gonna make a- You
Stephen
got it too?
Kelly
Yes.
Stephen
Come on, it’s a killer quote, [00:36:00] isn’t it?
Kelly
Well, uh, we’ll see if it’s the same one.
Stephen
Okay. Well, it’s not my quote. In John Burgess’ novel Once in Europa, there is a peasant woman sitting in her stone kitchen on her farm in the French Pyrenees late in the 20th century.
Stephen
Given the obligations to innovation for its own sake that progress binds us to, she is probably among the last generations of her kind. She’s giving life advice to her young daughter, advice that she knows isn’t likely to survive the girl’s formal education in town. It’s matrimonial wisdom, tradition bound and life affirmed, trained upon patrimony.
Stephen
She says, “I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labor so that those close to them can eat, men who are generous with everything they own, and men who spend their [00:37:00] lives looking for God.” And the rest, she says, are pig shit, which is a little severe at the end there.
Stephen
But, well, the whole, the whole rig is severe, isn’t it? It’s remarkably… Well, what I, uh, what I… It’s, it’s severe and it’s, and it’s alchemical at the same time. This is as close to the bone definition of patrimony in action as I’ve ever seen or heard, you know? Generosity, labor, and a life spent in thrall to the divinity of the world.
Stephen
That’s the work. So you asked me about the, the sort of metaphor of the house. So yes, you could say, and this is very quick and dirty as a, as an analogy, but it serves, I think. You could say that the, the work of patrimony is the work literally of making shelter, of making a kind of domestic possibility that something of our soul’s [00:38:00] life and striving can find something, s- something of its kin in the world structurally.
Stephen
That structure is patrimony, the fathering of culture. So you could say it’s, it’s house building, and you could say that the, the work of matrimony as culture mothering is the work of moving into that house and making of it a home for the culture and for its individuals and for the souls in question and the souls in flight and the souls in despair and the souls in, in pilgrimage.
Stephen
That’s home and house. These things are conceivable one without the other, and God knows lots of people try to do one without the other. So that’s, that’s kind of a given. So I’m not saying this as a formula, okay? Or as an intolerant kind of recipe, but I am saying it’s pretty clear to me, and to at least [00:39:00] a few other people, that there’s a kind of sequence that’s in- that’s implied by this kind of structure, and the sequence is you gotta build a house first In order to have something to move into to give the utter- the, the, the best part of you some remarkable, soulful work to do.
Kelly
And that this translates in ways quite literally, right? To, to the planning and structuring and organizing of, let’s say, the, the marriage experience itself beginning with the wedding. But that the, this- the s- almost soul of it, the spirit of it is, is the matter of matrimony, is the domain maybe is a better way to say it.
Kelly
And it seemed important to you, and it is to me as well for related reasons, to also reframe the understanding of the word patriarchy. You know, a couple of years ago, I endeavored to, [00:40:00] as I refer to it, end the war with men, which, you know, I guess Jung would describe as integrating the negative animus, right?
Kelly
So, so beginning that work, whatever that looks like, uh, for a woman. And part of the commitment that I made was to no longer use the word patriarchy as a slur, you know, because that’s essentially what it’s become, and I thought it was so beautiful. I could read another quote, but I thought it was so beautiful how you, you really call the reader to task in a way, I mean, that’s how I would describe it, around the, the misappropriation of that, that term.
Kelly
So I, I just wanted to give you a chance to speak on, on that ’cause I think it’s so important, and I don’t hear many people offering this correction.
Stephen
Well, it’s, it is as you describe it, I think. It’s not a sin. Uh, it’s exceedingly poor judgment It’s sloth to use the word patriarchy as it’s typically used.
Stephen
It’s [00:41:00] ill-considered. It’s very easy to do. It’s kind of that, what do they call it, virtue signaling or something of that-
Kelly
Yes, exactly. That’s right …
Stephen
certainly that, and it just, by the way, it calls into deep and ir- irreconcilable disrepute huge swaths of the population in one fell swoop. So anything with that much consequence should be, should have some kind of licensure attached to its use, don’t you think?
Stephen
I mean, you know, and I, I’m not being coy or, or clever in saying so. I mean, I genuinely mean it. I mean, you’re obliged to qualify to drive a car given all the consequences that ensue from doing so. This is at least as consequential to say patriarchal a- and sneer at the same time. Okay. But what about the word, though?
Stephen
Let’s just give the word a chance, okay? Never mind all the other stuff. And what do you, what do you get? Well, the root word is father. Here we are [00:42:00] again, father, not, not masculine, not man, not father in a way. So th- then you realize you’re not in the realm of, uh, identity here. You’re in the realm of function, culturally endorsed, culturally employed function, right?
Stephen
And then the, the arche part of things, which is our, the root of our word archaic, archeology, archetype, architecture. It means… Okay, well, this is not easy to say quickly. We have a shape, the arch, an architectural shape, and it’s a quite a mysterious thing. And people, when it was first built, you had to persuade people to walk through the opening because they had no reason to believe that that tremendous weight that was above the opening would not fall upon them at the moment of their passing through it.
Stephen
In other words, to say it the way I like to say it, this is everything upheld by nothing. That’s what an arch [00:43:00] is. It’s a, it’s a mysterious, extraordinary event that speaks and speaks and speaks again of the mysteries of life. But the, the fundament of the thing is subliminal. It’s below the surface of what you can see.
Stephen
That’s why we have the word to understand, you see. Function of understanding is to occupy the from beneath perspective, which is where the fundament of the function of arche lives, right? It lives on either side of that portal or that opening, but it’s below the ground, and the ground is sustaining all of that remarkable mystery and energy and counterintuitive openings and solid places and stuff like that.
Stephen
So, so what’s patriarchy then? Patriarchy is the old The old order, sadly it’s old for the most part now. The old order capacity and expectation [00:44:00] That all things masculine answer the bell for the sake of a better day. Not unlike that quote I read to you from John Berger’s novel, right? Live as if there’s a God and proceed accordingly.
Stephen
See to it that by virtue of your labors, the people around you can, can be acquainted with the better day that they can sometimes only dream of, and you participate in that. I actually forget the third one right now, but I think you get the gist of it by now. So far from being a slander, it’s a covenant, to use your word earlier, and it’s a kind of plea patriarchy, you know.
Stephen
And it could use a little– uh, it could use a day off of, uh, calumny and s-slight, you know, just long enough to consider the real possibility that, that we could find other words for that thing that we mean by the ravages and the trespasses of, quote, patriarchy, unquote. And I think we should try to find words that are much closer to the bone [00:45:00] of what we mean and who we mean to hurt and slay when we use it.
Kelly
You might have a sense that supporting your energetic and subtle body is important, but how exactly does one do that? Like short of scheduling regular sessions with an energy healer, how do you do that? Most of the time I find that when we take supplements, it’s from the energy of fixing ourselves, and honestly, it’s really no different than taking a medication at that point.
Kelly
That’s why I love flower remedies, and specifically my girl Katie Hess’s elixirs from Lotus Way. The formulations that she creates are so nuanced that sometimes it feels like I wrote the descriptions myself. The last one I took was designed to dissolve go, go, go mentality as well as fatigue, weakness, apathy, and resistance to self-care.
Kelly
Relatable? Okay. I have a monthly membership called Flower Revolution where I get a new and super powerful on-point remedy sent to me every month, and it blows my mind how [00:46:00] resonant each one is with exactly where I am in my process. I think of this as a truly feminine investment that harmonizes my process and allows me to walk, talk, and interact with grace.
Kelly
You can try it for a month or six at the link below, and
Stephen
if you just wanna dip a toe in to learn more about how flowers heal you, you can take their quiz.
Kelly
Absolutely. And I think of the almost the, the meta role that you’re playing in this treatment of, you know, this material as a kind of almost like a, has a fathering energy to me, you know, that you’re, you’re holding it with that kind of responsibility, reverence, and also action in, in ways that I want to get into ’cause I do wanna talk about what this actually looks like so that we can seed the imaginations, you know, of, of folks who are listening.
Kelly
I wanna touch on one thing first, though, Steven, which is A discussion that you have in the book [00:47:00] around the, the poverty, and that’s the word that you use, of our experience. And as somebody who uses the word remembrance a lot, and I sometimes, you know, fancy myself somebody who, who helps not only myself, but other women to remember what it is to be a biological woman and to play the part, you know, of, of a woman’s role in society, et cetera.
Kelly
It often feels like this is what always made sense. I just was, you know, under some kind of a spell. But then when it comes to, in my experience, ritual, there is an experience that I’ve had, I’ll, I’ll share one example of it, that is a kind of combination of grief and the fabrication Right? So when my daughters en-entered menarche, right, which is the medical term for it, um, and they first started their menstrual [00:48:00] cycles, it was extremely important to me, to the extent that I, you know, I made my girlfriends, you know, agree in advance that they would be available, you know, for this kind of a ritual that I wanted to, uh, host.
Kelly
You know, and I, I put together, I invented you know, some kind of a ceremony to acknowledge and celebrate their womanhood because so many in my generation, you know, it was never even discussed with our moms, you know? It just kinda happened, and you dealt with it, and maybe you asked a girlfriend about how it works, and we moved on.
Kelly
And I felt like this initial relationship to their own wombs, that it was essential it be, you know, a shame-free experience, and beyond that, one where they began to understand how this connected them to the other women in the community, et cetera, et cetera. But when I was reading about your description of the, the poverty of our, um, ritualized [00:49:00] lives these days, and we’ve talked about some of the, the, the root cause drivers of that, I really related to that.
Kelly
You know? That there was a grief for what was inherently missing, and this kind of self-consciousness around drumming something up rather than, you know, sort of stewarding something, um, down the line. And I’d love to hear you speak more about this because I think there is maybe a bit of a gaslight, you know, uh, that, that some of us are experiencing around how ritual should feel when we know that it doesn’t, and we don’t really know why it doesn’t.
Kelly
Um, and we really don’t know what to do about it.
Stephen
Great. Uh, that’s a great setting for the question too that you’ve asked. Well, okay, let’s start with the, uh, innocuous pla- in an innocuous place. See if we can warm to the subject a bit. So we have this thing called, um, the invitation To the wedding. [00:50:00] And generally speaking, it’s cursive script, isn’t it?
Stephen
So it’s quite… I mean, nobody writes like that, but somebody somehow does or a machine does or whatever. So you go the cur- cursive script route, so auto- automatically it seems like you’re, you’re flirting with kind of s- a regal proposition. And then, and then you inflect in a certain direction by saying, “The honor of your company is…”
Stephen
And it’s way over the top. I mean, you’d never say that to anybody. But, uh, I mean, excesses of this kind are s- the order of the day, apparently, so we just roll with it, isn’t it? And then we come to this other thing, which, which no one has ever pointed out or been troubled by in my presence. I’m s- I remain the only one I know who, who, who this bothers.
Stephen
And it goes like this. Uh, the honor of your company to, to, uh, to, uh, to attend to the celebration of love of so-and-so for so-and-so. What’s the problem? Well, the problem is this notion that this [00:51:00] thing has become a celebration of love. Don’t get me wrong, the more celebrations of love, the better, probably. Just let’s not mistake them for what we’re talking about now.
Stephen
A celebration of love is what? At its core, if there is a core to it, okay? At its heart, if there is a heart to it, and I mean that seriously, then it’s an affirmation of something that already exists. It’s an imprimatur, isn’t it? It’s a s- kind of stamp of approval, a kind of outward-looking, to certain degree, recognition of a fact that’s already established, has a history, and is well underway.
Stephen
Let me translate what that means. So all of these people whose honor of their company you were asking, not one of those people was necessary for the advent and the i- and the invocation of this event called the, the, the intensity of these, the feelings that two people [00:52:00] have for each other. Not one witness was required.
Stephen
Not one. What does that tell you about celebrations of love? It tells you that there, there are no witnesses. There’s an audience, and it tells you because it’s an audience, it’s a spectacle, and these people principally are spectators. And that’s all you’re asking of them, and that’s why when you walk away from it as one of these spectators, you kind of…
Stephen
Some place inside you goes, “Is that it? That’s, that’s that, then?” And before you know it, Sunday becomes Monday and back to the good old used to be, I suppose. What could it be if it’s not a celebration of love? What it could be is a sequence of vows that make something happen. Okay? The word ritual basically means- It’s, uh, it, it, the same root is in the word rhythm, right?
Stephen
R-I-T-E, of course. [00:53:00] Arithmetic is, it’s there. It means something like the kind of cadenced, syncopated something by which you can recognize the signs of the presence of something. That’s essentially what it means. So when you’re ritualizing, you’re tracking the place and the shape and the consequence of the gods in your little life, okay?
Stephen
Including summoning them, petitioning them, inviting them. When was the last time you went to any public event where the other world was formally addressed in the second person, from the first person to the second person? I mean, probably never. And my God, I mean, when you think about the, the oversight, I mean, that be- doesn’t begin to describe the consequence of doing so.
Stephen
So very briefly then, when you’re making vows, which is, and that’s the word [00:54:00] we reserve for that event, and you c- you probably can’t think of a time that you’ve used the word vow to describe something that you’re doing outside of that context, maybe ever. It’s that specific… You can feel the specificity of it.
Stephen
You can feel the, the kind of bloodline of the word, can’t you? Just intuitively, with no education, you could still… You, you know you wouldn’t play fast and loose with the word. You’d, you’d reserve it for a certain something. This is that something. The word invocation means to put to voice, right? You’re putting to voice by vowing something, a sequence of utters, if you will.
Stephen
Uh, it’s not a word, of course, but you, uh, you take the point. S- s- certain incontrovertibles are put into the world as a consequence of you saying them, and this is why the officiant says, well, they don’t say, “Will you? Shall you? Would you?” [00:55:00] Da, da, da, da, da. They say, “Do you?” Utterly present tense. No future required, no future inferred, no future looked to to make sense of this event.
Stephen
This is all happening now, or it’s not If anyone here knows any reason why this should not come to pass, speak now or forever hold your peace. I didn’t invent that phrase, as you know. So why did it appear for s- was it a legal requirement in so many jurisdictions for the longest time? Aside from, you know, bad bookkeeping, bigamy, and things of that kind, which were true and part of the deal back in those days.
Stephen
But the other reason, of course, is there’s probably very good reasons indeed why this thing should not proceed, and if these things are not given voice to, then these vows are misshapen. They’re, they’re, they’re asymmetrical in a hazardous way. They, they don’t quite belong to this [00:56:00] life, to these days, to this troubled world and our corner in it, and they’re supposed to.
Stephen
That’s what they’re for, to take place here and now, and if they don’t, they’re kind of ghosted propositions, it seems to me. Not unlike when people, when people who look like me use the word the ancestors. Man, it’s just nothing happens. That’s, uh, that’s what I’m saying. So take, take all of this and squeeze it into one or two sentences.
Stephen
I guess the point I’m making is We are by virtue of the gift of language, and it’s what it’s connected to internally and in our meaning-making apparatus, in our sort of psychic surgical, uh, intuition, we are standing in a, a kind of Holy ground of sorts when we’re entering into the [00:57:00] proposition of vow making, and we ought to do it with a lot more deliberation and a lot less concession to our personal style, right?
Stephen
And this is where the, the fundament of formality is so important. I, I, I know I officially now sound like an old white guy. Here we go. Mi- might as well keep, might as well keep going. So what do you mean formality is a big deal? I mean that I’m not talking about, you know, renting a suit here when I talk about formality.
Stephen
I’m talking about the received structural wisdom of culture when I’m talking about formality, okay? And why is it there in moments like this? It’s there to rescue you from the excesses of your autobiography. That’s what it’s there for. That’s all. It doesn’t impugn you. It… The fact that it doesn’t feel like you, it’s not supposed to feel like you.
Stephen
You already feel like you, [00:58:00] and here you are. So that’s not the measure, is it? It doesn’t feel natural. Well, compared to what? I mean, when was the last time you felt natural? And is it what you think it is? And when you use the word natural to describe what’s outside your window, is that what you mean? And would that place conceivably recognize your presence in it as being a naturally occurring thing as a human?
Stephen
I mean, we could go on. The point… I guess I’m sounding a bit argumentative too, clearly. I guess the, the sad point that I’m making here is that the sophistication that we moderns, urban modern people tend to proceed with is that the… there’s casualties afoot, and one of the casualties is the utter unwillingness to recognize that when we undertake these self-penned vows and, and self-designated elders and so on, [00:59:00] we’ve…
Stephen
w- we can feel something slipping past the window, I think. We can feel a, a sense that there’s a would have been, could have been, should have been that never turns into an is, right? There’s a, there’s a sense of a, a phantom proposition that remains phantom after our best intent is brought to bear upon it, and that’s the poverty that I keep recommending that we have to begin with.
Stephen
We begin with an understanding that we don’t know how to understand, and you know, we could do worse than confess that and to have the confession operational in this this remarkable episode called trying to make a go of it with another person.
Kelly
So I feel indicted on some level, as I imagine many listening do, because in my wedding ceremonies, the personal vows were of utmost importance and, you know, [01:00:00] the officiants being very specific figures in our, in our lifescape because I didn’t want the 15-minute conventional meaningless, quote unquote, kind of a generic wedding.
Kelly
Like, that was the worst fate, you know, that, that the, the wedding could befall. So I’d love for you, if, if you’re willing, to, to describe in whatever detail you feel comfortable one of the, the six to eight hour, you know, kind of, uh, ritual experiences that you… I don’t know if you would even use the word facilitated, it- you probably not, in, in the past, so that we have a sense of what is possible.
Kelly
Because if, if, if it’s not the 15-minute drive-through experience, uh, cookie cutter experience, and it’s not this sort of atomistic, I’ll have it my way and I’ll make sure that my authentic mark is on this so that everybody knows that I really love this person and I feel like something special has happened, and [01:01:00] yet, you know, there’s some deeper roots that are never tapped, right?
Kelly
So, so between those two poles is something that I feel you’re, you’re here to offer the possibility of, and, and I just don’t hear many other folks talking about it. So I’d love for you to depict for us, like, what, what could that look like, maybe even through an example?
Stephen
I, I probably have to take only one detail, and then hopefully it’ll serve…
Stephen
It’ll kind of expand and you’ll get the hang of things a bit. So there’s a chapter in the book called, um, Indi- Salt and Indigo, I think it’s called. Yeah. And in that, I, I was doing what you were doing when you were trying to craft your vows. Was I, was I inventing or was I remembering? Is it possible to remember something that you have no lived experience of?
Stephen
Is that just pure fantasy or is it rooted in something that’s, that’s transpersonal in some way that doesn’t [01:02:00] really come from your biography? Is it possible that that’s what the persistence of, of ancestry over time amounts to, is you being on the receiving end of things you thought you were inventing?
Stephen
So this is what I was trying to do. I was tr- not just trying to reimagine things. I was trying to remember something I’d never seen and that’s why I took all those shards I mentioned off the top and, and employed them as kind of, um, rudimentary archeological indicators of a, of a could be of things, right?
Stephen
And one of them I took, uh, in the Salt and Indigo chapter, I said, “So here’s what happened once upon a time. This is called the sacraments of trade, not commerce.” Commerce is the, the spirit of commerce is how much can you get for how much little, how little you have to part with to get it? Not even sure the word spirit belongs in there, but anyway, let’s call that the spirit of commerce.
Stephen
The [01:03:00] spirit of trade or the sacraments of trade are considerably different order of things to that. In this arrangement that I was imagining, you have these two peoples characterized by their, their principal patrimonial genius, okay? The people who are salt people lived obviously close to the shore of a big body of water, and by virtue of extraordinary, uh, observation and the rest, figured out not only how to come by salt, but man, how to employ it.
Stephen
And man, if you think of a saltless life, it’s n- it’s not, it’s just not a condiment, salt. It’s a fundament. Okay? Yeah. So these people were, you could say in that whole region, they were the heirs of the genius of salt. It was given to them in the primordial times, you could say, to care for and to see to it that it went out into the greater world through them.[01:04:00]
Stephen
Oh, monopoly? Let’s see. And then you had these other people, which I call the indigo people, and you can guess what their genius was and how they came by it, and the cultivation of the indigo plants and all the rest, and the genius of… I mean, if you’ve ever seen indigo happen, it is an absolute mystery. It, it’s a dull, dishwater greenish gray.
Stephen
It’s kind of, it’s kind of that color of that kind of registers. It’s, it’s really not much of a color, right? Until that fabric with that kind of treatment hits sunlight. Direct sunlight makes the indigo that is more or less the color that I’m wearing today. It’s more or less… Not more or less, it’s exactly the color on the front of the book.
Stephen
Okay. So in the chapter, basically what I tried to give people a feel for is what it looks like when people who are understanding what’s at stake in a circumstance of trade, the de- degree of devotion they, they [01:05:00] arrive at in order to transact this, this beautiful mystery of parting with something so dear to them and trying to f- in, in so doing, trying to qualify to be on the receiving end of the beautiful cou- cultural patrimony of another people, the salt for the indigo.
Stephen
And this, and in that ar- arrangement, I was trying to establish an understanding for what the fact that the sacraments of trade, to my mind, are probably the precursors to patrom- to matrimony, to the event of matrimony as we’ve been talking about it here together, right? And the way that probably worked out seems to me to include the following.
Stephen
You were at pains to see to it that the people who are g- likely to be on the receiving end of your young person, a young person from your midst Would know something of the lineage, not just of the person, but of the kind of people they came from, right? [01:06:00] And that you would be looking on the other side for a sign that these people did in fact understand these kinds of things.
Stephen
How could they, since they weren’t of your people? And the answer is, they were still of a people, and they had their ways, and their ways were, were mysteriously available to you because you had your ways. And, you know, the, the, the mark of seriously cultured people is not that they think that their culture’s the best one that’s ever been on ever, ever, ever.
Stephen
The real mark of cultured people is the capacity to recognize other cultured people. That’s where the real marker is to be found, and that’s, that’s the, the deity of this sacrament I’ve been describing to you just now. So this is, I think, what was probably animating the trade of young people, which was the origin of matrimony.
Stephen
And I, I can hear it, and you can hear it too, the hackles going up. People are not to be traded [01:07:00] in. People have always been traded in, and they’re still being traded in today. It doesn’t mean that people are shackles or, or, what’s that other word? The legal term. I can’t think of it now. It- it’s not to say that people are possessions.
Stephen
It’s to say that our understanding is that the, the best from among us carries an enormous, vibrant, life-affirming power, and that’s what you’re parting with to see to it that the better day that you hanker after can be served by what you’re doing now. Okay, so you’re asking me, what does this look like if you actually do it?
Stephen
Yeah. I know, I know. See how much takes it-
Kelly
I’ll have to hire you to find out. I’m sure you don’t, uh, yeah, offer these services at scale.
Stephen
No. So, so what I did was, apropos of the seating arrangement, I maintained the, the aisle down the middle But I turned everybody’s chair. So instead of facing the front with an [01:08:00] aisle down the middle like that, I turned it so that everybody was facing everybody.
Stephen
All the invited guests, oh my God, are six feet away from somebody else’s face, and they’re looking at each other, and everybody knows that the other side is the family of or the, the friends of the whoever it might be, right? This is the salt and indigo people represented again with the aisle down the middle being what?
Stephen
That holy ground that they have to, uh, traverse to come into contact with the beauty and the, the preciousness that the other people have borne with them. And rather than… I mean, you would s- you imagine that I did all the talking in these things for eight hours. It’s not quite what happened. Nobody would have tolerated that, not even me, and I enjoy it.
Stephen
But, uh, after setting the thing in motion, basically I had to stand back and let it unspool or do what it will. And what I obliged all of the invited guests to do [01:09:00] was not wait for the drunken fest, you know, of hours from now to, quote, “have their speeches”, but they were gonna make their speeches now. And, you know, when people came with prepared speeches, you know, you know the setting that they’re imagining.
Stephen
This was not it. And so suddenly that prepared thing on the paper in your pocket, it doesn’t feel like it’s called for somehow. And of course, a lot of people blanched, as you’d imagine, and a lot of people balked, but not everybody did, and, and, and some stepped forward, you know, and began to address, not me, not the void, the people on the other side.
Stephen
And suddenly this thing becomes real, you see. And I’ll give you one detail that kind of manifests the whole thing. So at one point, a woman stood up, and I didn’t know who she was, ’cause this can be casts of hundreds of people, right? But it turned out she was the former romantic partner of the groom to be, who was now [01:10:00] on the bride to be’s side of the holy ground there.
Stephen
She stood up, and she began to talk, not about him, to him, so everybody could hear, and she began something like this. “I know you, and you know that I know you And we’re not talking about wh- if it’s true. It’s already true. And I know what you’re like with women, don’t I?” That’s how it started. Oh my God, man, the whole place just…
Stephen
You could feel the collective spine of the thing just kind of become very erect and very sort of on point and very f- sort of lurched forward and, and it was a staggering moment that you could never rehearse. And basically what she was doing was appealing to the very best in him to come forward in a way that it may not have done for the two of them when they were together, but might still do [01:11:00] for him and the woman sh- she was sitting close to.
Stephen
I mean, I could go, I could tell you so many things, but that gives you a feel for… You know, I’m not, I wasn’t thr- throwing the whole thing up in the air and seeing what would happen. There was, there was still a choreography, and it was a recognizable choreography too. And it employed the presence of people instead of counting on it or assuming it.
Stephen
It actually required it. And the case to be made as to whether or not this thing should go forward was in the hands of the people who were invited. So they weren’t spectators, were they? They weren’t an audience either, were they? No. What were they? They were sacramental participants, is what they were. And they were…
Stephen
It was very clear to them that they were needed, and not just today. Because if this was their function now, imagine what their function might be five years from now when the glow is completely off the rose, when things are not as they were, and you’re 2.2 kids into the enterprise, and your [01:12:00] memory’s not good.
Stephen
And these people are your living memory who you would never have recourse to necessarily because you’re sovereign and it’s nobody’s business, right, how it’s going. I mean, and when the, the question, “So how’s married life?” ceases to be an invitation to jokes and, and becomes a kind of, “Well That’s when you need the witnesses.
Stephen
And witnesses is what I turned them into. And, you know, we have the phrase in English, to bear witness. Witness is something that you actually carry around at some considerable, almost as a kind of burden. And this is what makes you a citizen, it seems to me, of a troubled time.
Kelly
And now I’m greedy for details.
Kelly
Um, and then we’ll, we’ll wrap this up in a moment. What, what would you say were the recognizable choreographed aspects? You know, was it the, the language? Would I recognize, you know, the, do you [01:13:00] take this, you know, man kind of a thing? Or was it really more, uh, an invocation of this participation? I mean, I’m trying to envision this, like, over the course of six to eight hours, and it just sounds so wild to me that I wonder what parts I would actually recognize.
Stephen
Okay. So you’re familiar with the practice of people bringing their gift to the wedding, right? And quote, “Everybody knows who the gift is for.” You don’t have to be told. It’s actually freaking choreographed, what do they call it? For bridal registry, right? Okay. So I took that, and I s- I th- I said to myself, not unlike the seating arrangement, I said, “You know, the, the germ, the kernel of the old thing is there.
Stephen
I know that it is. But it’s been, it’s been misapprehended, and it’s been siphoned off in some other direction.” So now it’s just how to g- how to equip these relatively young people, who are apparently not so well equipped, to equip [01:14:00] them for the fray. That’s basically what the gifts are for now. I didn’t think that was the origin of gift giving at all.
Stephen
In fact, I didn’t think that the n- the soon-to-be-weds were on the receiving end of any of those gifts, and I can tell you why in a moment. But, but here’s what I did instead. Oh, everyone was encouraged to, to bring a gift, and bring a gift they did. But you remember when I employed them all to talk? Not all at once, I should say, but they s- very formally stood up and addressed, once they got into the groove, addressed the people on the other side.
Stephen
And with the gift, they made their formal petition. So the gift was laid down in that holy ground between the people, and the grift, the gift, excuse me, was a tangible petition to the other side To, to let this precious young person from their midst [01:15:00] come across the line and join these people. And as a sign of us being, of being very lucid about what we’re asking and w- our understanding of what you’re parting with, we incorporate all that understanding into this gift times as many people as is making the gifts.
Stephen
It was, I mean, most people were immediately dismayed that they had chosen the gift that they had chosen once they realized what it was h- what it was heading for, who it was going to, and why. Yeah. Well, shouldn’t that be the way with all gifts? Shouldn’t the notion of gift as a, as a, as a kind of event inform the choice of it a little more than it tends to?
Stephen
And rather than relying upon a bridal registry to tell you what people need or want or prefer from you, that you go into the, the kind of mystery cave of your understanding of life and draw from a, some- some forth from [01:16:00] it something that you never imagined having to part with. But you will now for the sake of this better day that’s more than lip service suddenly.
Stephen
Stuff like that.
Kelly
Amazing.
Stephen
It was, I have to tell you. It was utterly amazing. I should also say, and you, you read about this Things didn’t go swimmingly well typically. I mean, I’m making it sound like, man, we had the time of our lives, and we did, but it’s, it wasn’t without, I mean, almost anarchic hostility and, uh, pushback.
Stephen
And, uh, I mean, people dug in their heels. A lot of people came after me one way or another. I was accused of all manner of cultish things you can imagine. I mean, oh, yes. Oh, yes. I mean, I’m describing it to you now literally the way it happened, but if you were to listen to these people’s description of what took place as best as their memory serves them, you would hear [01:17:00] something you wouldn’t even recognize what I’m telling you in.
Stephen
So where does that come from? Where’s all the pushback come from? And the answer is, you know, you were good enough a few minutes ago to say that you feel that your, your enterprise, your marital enterprise… Not marital, your matrimonial enterprise was a little bit impugned by what I was saying, or you felt in some way-
Kelly
Indicted.
Stephen
What was the word?
Kelly
Indicted, yeah.
Stephen
Yeah, indicted. Very good, yeah. Yeah, and so, so this is why. This w- people don’t react well to feeling indicted. They don’t, they don’t wonder inside themselves where this feeling comes from. They immediately look for the source, who’s pointing the finger, who’s making the accusation, as if that’s what I was doing.
Stephen
All I was doing, frankly, was delivering on a promise I made to their kid. That’s what I was doing, but you’d never would’ve known it in their reactivities. So that was there, too.
Kelly
And were the vows something that they could reorient around? Like, what did the vows look [01:18:00] like?
Stephen
The vows between the two culprits, let’s call them-
Kelly
Yeah
Stephen
they came absolutely last. This was after everyone else has spoken. So in other words, no matter what they prepared in their minds, no matter how ready they may have felt, bear in mind they’ve heard all these people talking about them for hours, people they know, people they don’t know, people they kind of know, people they wish they didn’t know, and all the rest, right?
Stephen
And they’re hearing it from the other side, too. They’re hearing what they seem to be like to people they’ve never met. I mean, this is… You have to die for this to happen in your life.
Kelly
Yeah, exactly.
Stephen
Don’t you? Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about, yeah. See the parallel, right? Well, there is a kind of death that’s being transacted here, isn’t there?
Stephen
It’s the death of the life that you’ve lived up until now. Yeah? That’s what you’re parting with. You’re parting with the notion that your life is some kind of infinite potential fest, right? And [01:19:00] you’re, you’re cashing in basically, and you’re saying, “All the things I could’ve, should’ve, might’ve, wished I had’ve,” and so on, including all the people that I could’ve been with and why and how and in what wrinkles and all the rest- This I part with for the sake of this one actual something, with this one actual, you know, frail, flawed, fatal human.
Stephen
That’s what you’re doing. So it’s, it’s a scary ride, you know? And cold feet doesn’t begin to describe it, does it? Of course not. When you get… When you, when you sort of… You c- you draw up close to the notion of what’s being transacted here and what’s going away, what’s, you know, disappearing over the horizon, never to return, this potential life that you clung to so desperately, keeping your options open and all the rest.
Stephen
I’m not talking about polygamy. I’m just… I j- It’s a subtler notion than that, [01:20:00] what I’m talking about, eh? Yeah. You can feel it so. So I asked a lot When I agreed to do what people asked me to do, I asked more of them than probably anybody had a right to ask. Why did I do it then in the way that I did, aside from keeping my promise?
Stephen
The other reason was I, I thought, you know, I have no doubt there’s such a thing as living ancestry. I have no doubt that it’s not just a genetic disposition, that it’s a lot of things, and many of them are present and accounted for, and valent and consequential. And I knew I was proceeding, mingling myself temporarily with the ancestral inheritance of these people, and I knew I was putting them in some kind of display for the sake of their collective ancestry, so that their ancestry could be held up in something more than just [01:21:00] disrepute or guilt induced, you know, regret or worse, that it could be some kind of redemptive enterprise, and that this kind of thing was at stake, and that the notion of kind of retroactive healing of ancestral wounds was available in this day.
Stephen
That’s why I did what I did, and to this day, I remain very proud of that striving.
Kelly
What do you think that you would, lastly, invite a couple, let’s say, who’s listening, who is looking at a wedding, I don’t know, in the coming year, to consider? Because my, my sense is, and I’m still not entirely clear, but my sense is that there are aspects of the ring exchange and these sort of tropes, do you take this man type of thing, that you find valuable, that you do think have important origins.
Kelly
And I [01:22:00] also sense that there is, um, like a, a deeply personal, as connected to the greater, like tribe of your culture, I don’t know how else to say it, exploration that you’re asking people to consider, right? So, so what would you, what would you say to this couple, you know, t- to consider, um, over the, over the coming year that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise?
Stephen
I would say pay attention to your aversions, first of all. So you have a kind of nightmare scenario working or lurking somewhere about the worst conceivable shape and, or event or aspect that would ensue. Pay attention to that and ask yourself where that comes from and what, to what extent you’re obliged to obey it just ’cause it’s there, one.
Stephen
Two, you could ask You’re familiar with this notion in principle called the teaching of the seven generations? I think people are generally alert to the notion that when you’re [01:23:00] trying to decide abo- about a matter of import in your present life, that you consider the consequence seven generations from now in whatever action you’ll take.
Stephen
And people say, “Well, that’s fantasy. I mean, it’s a nice idea, but i- it’s inconceivable that you could… I mean, things are changing so fast, blah, blah, blah. How could you ever do it?” My answer is, “Oh, relatively easily. Not without labor, but easily. Here’s how. You, my friend, are the seventh generation from some other time.
Stephen
You are the one they were talking about. Your dispositions come to you that way. Your wisdoms, such as they are, come to you that way from then. You are the midway point between 14 generations. Please proceed accordingly.” I would say stuff like that, yeah.
Kelly
Amazing, Steven. Thank you. And I wonder if there’s any- anything that you wanna, beyond the book, obviously, which will be, you know, uh, linked in show [01:24:00] notes, anything, um, in terms of resources, support, where to go from here that you might, uh, you might think is important for people to have access to?
Stephen
Well, if you’re talking about sort of wedding-specific stuff, nope. I really, genuinely don’t. That’s what I
Kelly
thought the answer was.
Stephen
No, I mean, I, I had no recourse to nothing, and so why should it be different for you? No, I don’t really.
Kelly
Trial by fire.
Stephen
But yeah, uh, there’s… Look, th- these things are exceedingly doable.
Stephen
But man, they are… You find, you find out why the 15-minute wedding, the non-event, is so widely practiced, and you thought you understood enough to know it would never come for you. But m- virtually everyone has their version of a kind of 15-minute wedding-itis. Not just for weddings, but think about the funeral stuff.
Kelly
Right. Any, any meaningfuls, otherwise [01:25:00] meaningful.
Stephen
Yeah, think about a gathering around the deathbed. Think about the advent of a new baby coming into the house for the first time. Think about all that. Think about the disposition of the placenta with the little s- the little s- dried-up stump of the umbilical cord.
Stephen
Think about all of these things which are made to arrest you, and think about the mania for proceeding at all costs that in- almost inevitably persists and prevails. And then, then you get a sense of where my sense of the moment came from. And what was at stake, where it came from. And, uh, I, I assure you, there’s nothing special about me.
Stephen
I mean, I worked at it, yes, and I have a gift of the gab, that’s true too, and it, they held me in good stead. That’s all true. But none of this is conceivable by virtue of having a special information line or pipeline into the, into the realities of things. Not at all. I slowed down until the words happened one at a time, and I [01:26:00] started to think about them and what they meant, and then I took their hint.
Stephen
I took their, their, the education that they offered. So it wasn’t all my deciding. You know, I was very much on the… I kinda had the fire hose in my mouth, and at some point, the thing just opened up, and then I did my best over the course of a year’s time to translate what was coming to me in a way that was workable for, frankly, for the most part, urban hipsters.
Stephen
God bless them, I should say. Taking a chance on me, it made no sense at all. But we, we made a serious go of it all those times we, we went after it, and we really went after it. And I mean, they lost a lot of unexamined kind of, quote unquote, “friendships” as a result of this, these kinds of undertakings.
Stephen
Surely they did. So I have nothing but regard and respect for, for everybody who wanted to give it a, a [01:27:00] whirl, you know? Because no matter how glib they may have been, you know, out of the gate, it didn’t last long in the sense that, man, we’re really in something. And this is the last thing I’d say. That we kind of cultivated a caveat, a kind of humility enforcer for this enterprise.
Stephen
‘Cause you can start to feel like you’re inside of something really special and feel quite esoteric and, you know, your funky quotient just rises intolerably. You could… That could happen. So, and I saw it happening, so I introduced a, uh, a phrase that we would employ when we were referring to the weekend to come, right?
Stephen
“If we get there. If we get there.” There’s nothing to say that we will. So everything that may be depends on, as Leonard Cohen so gorgeously said, you know, bless his bones. He said, “And everything depends upon how near you sleep to me.” Details, baby. It’s all in the details.
Kelly
Amazing. Thank you, Steven. I know that [01:28:00] I hope that there’s some sort of a, a how-to manual sequel because I do think that you, you are a special portal and that there may even be things that, that you, uh, have access to, you know, psychospiritually that you take for granted in this arena.
Kelly
So I, um, I’ll just put that in the suggestion box, and, and thank you. Thank you for this, this offering and what I experienced as an invitation to expand possibilities, you know, for, for myself.
Stephen
Lisa, I don’t know if… I hope you can tell that I enjoyed myself immensely.
Kelly
Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. Thanks, Steven.
Stephen
Thank you, too. Thanks for your [01:29:00] time.
