I Said The Words And Barely Heard Myself

There is a recording on somebody's phone and you have never played it.

Your cousin filmed it, or an uncle did, and it was sent to you in the first week, and you said you would watch it properly when things calmed down, and things calmed down about four months ago.

And the reason you have not played it is not that you are busy.

It is that you cannot remember saying the words.

You remember the room, roughly. You remember being extremely aware of the number of people behind you, and a sound somebody made, and the fact that your hands were doing something odd. You remember her face. And somewhere in the middle of all of that you said a series of sentences that were the entire legal and spiritual point of the day, and you have almost no access to it.

You could not repeat them now without looking.

And there is a small unease attached to that, which you have never said out loud, and which sounds something like: does it count if I was not there for it.

I want to answer that, and the answer is not a reassurance.

It counts. That is not the same as everything being fine, and I am not going to hurry past it.

But the thing you are quietly worried about, that the promise was not properly made because you were not properly present, is the wrong way round, and once you see it you will not be able to unsee it.

When thou vowest a vow

There is an instruction in Ecclesiastes about vows, and it is more useful than the sentimental version of this subject.

When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed. (Ecclesiastes 5:4, King James Version)

Pay that which thou hast vowed.

Notice what that sentence assumes and what it does not ask about.

It does not ask how you felt when you made it. It does not ask whether you were fully present, or moved, or whether the words landed in you at the time. It does not ask whether you can remember the moment.

It assumes the vow exists, as a fact, independent of your experience of making it, and it moves straight to the paying.

That is a colder sentence than people expect about a wedding, and it is exactly what you need, because it means the validity of what you promised does not rest on the quality of your attention on one Saturday afternoon.

And there is a second thing in it. Defer not to pay it. The whole weight of that verse is forward. It is not looking back at the moment of vowing to check whether it was done properly. It is looking ahead at the keeping.

Which relocates the entire question you have been carrying.

You have been asking: was I present enough for it to count. Scripture is asking: are you paying it. And the second question is one you can actually do something about, today, whereas the first one is about four minutes in a room in the spring that are not available to be redone.

What you promised exists as a fact apart from how present you were, and a vow has never once rested on the quality of your attention that afternoon. Ecclesiastes 5:4 moves straight past the vowing to the paying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man's eyes off four minutes he cannot get back.

You did not fail to be present

Here is the thing I actually want you to have, because I think you have been slightly unfair to yourself.

Nobody is present at their own wedding in the way you meant.

That is not a lowering of the bar, it is a physical fact about what was happening to you. You were in a state of extreme arousal in front of every person you have ever known, doing something irreversible, at the end of a fortnight of poor sleep. Under those conditions a human being's memory does not encode ordinary detail. It never has and it never will.

That is not distraction and it is not a failure of reverence. It is what a body does at a high stakes moment, and the same thing happens at births and funerals and in accidents, and nobody thinks a father was insufficiently present at his son's birth because the hours afterward are a blur.

So the gap in your memory is not evidence of a gap in your commitment.

And I want to add one more thing, because it may be the most useful sentence here. Something in you did register it. That is why you have not played the recording. A person does not avoid a video of something that meant nothing to them.

The unease you feel is not the residue of an absent moment. It is the residue of a moment that mattered enormously and that you cannot get back to, and those feel identical from the inside and they are not the same thing at all.

Something in you registered it entirely, and a blur has never once been evidence of a gap in what you meant. The written word treats the vow as existing regardless of the vower's state, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man who has been unfair to himself for four months.

Read them out loud, now

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately after the fact.

Read your vows out loud to each other once, after the wedding.

Get the actual words. From the order of service, from the registrar's wording, from whatever you wrote. If you cannot find them, ask somebody, or take them off the recording without watching the rest of it.

Then, on an ordinary evening in an ordinary room, read them out loud to each other. Sitting down. In normal clothes. With nobody watching.

And do it without ceremony. Do not light anything, do not make an occasion of it, do not dress it up, because the whole point is that this time there is no occasion in the way.

Here is what you will notice, and almost everybody does.

You will actually hear them. Some of the phrases will land in a way they could not possibly have landed on the day, because your entire nervous system was elsewhere. There is usually one clause that goes into a man like a nail, and it is almost never the one he would have predicted.

And you are not remaking the promise. That was made and it stands, and this changes nothing legally or spiritually. You are simply reading, once, the thing you already agreed to, in conditions where you can take it in.

Most couples never do this. There is no tradition for it and nobody suggests it, and so a great many people have made the most significant promise of their lives and have never once heard it properly.

You are able to hear the thing you already promised, and reading it has never once been the same as making it again. Ecclesiastes 5:4 puts the whole weight on the paying rather than on the moment of vowing, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in an ordinary room where two people read something out loud.