Longtime scholar, storyteller, and ceremonialist Stephen Jenkinson has tracked that failure, along with the personal poverties that have followed, and has set about mending the brokenness, the meaning and connection, one wedding ceremony at a time. “Matrimony is the place where culture leans on love for its portion, its tithe,” explains Jenkinson. “It is the mothering of culture, and ritual is its vehicle, and patrimony its precursor.” Privatizing love, turning matrimony into a social institution barren of all substance, and flattening rituals into benign, generic celebrations of life erodes our skills as citizen witnesses to a troubled time. The way forward, then, is to learn and reclaim our cultural ceremonies and their meaning.
