I was forced to watch.
Stuck (I mean, lucky to be) in a small hotel room with my wife, who is a royalist, the television came on at 5 am. I had nowhere to go, so I watched the royal wedding.
Even then, I was prepared to hurl mockery at the screen. Didn’t we fight a war against these people so that we wouldn’t have to watch them get married? Well, my people didn’t fight them exactly. In 1776 my people were still in Poland probably fighting off another invasion… unsuccessfully. But still, we joined up later in the struggle against monarchy. To hell with King George!
And yet, long before Harry and Meghan emerged from the church, I was won over. She was beautiful. The dress was beautiful. (I was told that she wore the dress instead of it wearing her, whatever that meant.) St. George’s Chapel was beautiful. Harry was beautiful and he wore spurs even though he didn’t have to, which held significance of some sort. The resident choir sang beautifully. Welsh soprano Elin Manahan Thomas beautifully sang Handel’s Eternal Source of Light Divine while Meghan walked beautifully and symbolically alone down the aisle. Bishop Michael Curry gave a beautiful (if somewhat long) homily. The royal family was beautiful as they sat uncomfortably listening to Bishop Curry talk passionately about love. (If I ever return to religion I will join the Church of England, because I don’t like expressions of emotion either.) The Kingdom Choir, which sang “Stand By Me” just before the vows, was really beautiful. The vows were beautiful even though she didn’t (many would say because she didn’t) say “obey,” which, let’s face it, nobody ever actually did in practice anyway. The 19-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason played so beautifully while they were signing the wedding registry that we forgot to ask why the hell that took, like, half an hour. Even the weather was beautiful, in a place where the chances of that are about the same as they are in the Midwest.
The whole thing amounted to a skillful mashup of English tradition and multicultural modernity. It was all done so well that it got across the point that these things don’t have to be in conflict and that, in fact, they can work beautifully together, that respect for everyone is possible.
We are living through a time when people who want to convince us of the opposite — that everything is transactional and that it’s all a zero-sum game and that when they win it must mean that we lose — are running a lot of countries and a lot of companies. (And wasn’t it nice that through the entire endless telecast the name of the man who has done more to make the present time so ugly was not so much as mentioned? Let’s not mention his name here either.)
I know it was just a stupid royal wedding and God knows, given the track record of the family, it’s anybody’s guess if the marriage will last. But at least for one day we got a look at how the world can be if we try to emphasize the best things about what everybody is. It was nice. Before we went to sleep that night, we watched it again. And it was my idea.
