The dark-haired young man with his grandpa’s blue eyes turned and kissed his lovely bride.
My heart stopped. This was a reenactment of a wedding 25 years earlier. The church was the same. Beautiful frescos adorned all the walls and gothic arches pulled your eyes to the ceiling where a magnificent candelabra of lights was center stage. My heartbeat slowed as my eyes fell on some familiar symbols …a cross, a nativity scene. This too was a Christian church, but oh, so different from my own.
The choir again, lifted its voice in words I did not understand and the ceremony progressed with chants and responses that were still strange to me. I remembered what had happened so many years ago.
I had stood in the same sanctuary, with only my white knuckles clutching the back of the pew, revealing my inner turmoil … waiting for the small form of my fair-haired daughter to enter the church. Finally I could see her. There she stood like a tiny tin soldier with a set to her shoulders I well recognized.
The service progressed and there were only a few words of English spoken. My tears began to fall and they never stopped. I had wanted so much for her to be married in the old familiar church we had at attended for so many years. Where as a young girl, her voice had blended with others in the junior choir, where a freckled face had smiled so sweetly at her first communion and where we had stood together every Christmas Eve, singing old familiar carols. I had longed to bake that special wedding cake, filled with nuts and fruit, mixed with love and happy tears and finally cut with pride and shared with all in celebration. But this was not to be, for this was a Catholic Ukrainian wedding. Finally the last note was sung and through the mist in my eyes I saw my daughter’s sweet smile. She had walked through unknown valleys and hadn’t faltered. I was never prouder of her.
This time, the wedding service, the setting and the music might be the same but I was certainly different. Gone were the tears and anxiety … the worry about my daughter’s future and her beliefs. There had been so many changes in those 25 years. My young daughter was now a mature woman standing beside me. I was now a senior with white hair crowning my head. She had made choices that had confused me at the time. But she was content in her beliefs, her children spoke and wrote the language of their father and I loved them all so much.
The present ceremony was over. Taller and darker-haired than my own daughter, this lovely new bride had made the same choices. But I knew my grandson. He would love and cherish her and time would meld us all together in our Christian faith.
