Could I find a way of transforming this often rote and mechanical phenomenon into a profound and memorable experience, not only for the bride and groom, but also for their family and friends? Could weddings still be made to express the power of that ancient rite of passage whereby a woman and a man leave their birth families to join their two destinies of the great journey of life, while still retaining their precious individualities? Could I assist them in making holy this major step of entering together the larger community on a new level of mature membership as families, parents and even as guardians of the future? How would I best be able to serve in the face of so many individualistic, privatized and often isolating messages from popular media as well as the standardized and often untrue experiences of love, romance, marriage we are all barraged with in contemporary Western culture?

I experimented at the outset with creating the sacred reality of this special event by involving not only the couple but all of the participants in that profoundly social and communal celebration that weddings have always represented among traditional peoples of all kinds. Antonine de Saint-Exupery reminds us of this in The Little Prince by the lovely insight that "love is not about two people looking into each other's eyes but rather spending their lives looking off into the same direction together." In this spirit, love and marriage are seen not as a flight from the world into a kind of romanticized privatism, but rather a deeper step into the world and the community. Accordingly, all the wedding guests are invited to join me in the act of marrying the bride and groom to each other and to focus their spiritual heart energy on uniting these two people to each other. In this way they begin to step out of the typical passive spectuator mode of wedding participant and enter into the community consciousness of engagement and commitment.

Thus for an instant the whole wedding community is lifted above the ordinariness of their daily lives to enter the tribal realm of the mythic. I was first struck by this when couples and their guests would share with me how they felt momentarily freed from the often separating experience of the urban beehive of apartment life or from what some even referred to as their "little boxes" of suburbia. I began to realize how by the grace of the sacred ritual, they were transformed into a holy community receiving these two members as a new family unit, now united and accountable not only to each other but to this very same community and to the greater common good.

I soon became aware that in the sacred act of bringing together these two souls in the bond of marriage, all present are momentarily transformed in that intimate experience of true community that all our hearts long for. Again and again, I would hear from brides and grooms and their loved ones how they "felt changed" from the flatness of daily existence as they were gathered up into an experience of the sacred and the celebration that transfixes their hearts. Invited guests said they "no longer felt like mere onlookers." As I listened to their words, I came to recognize that they were experiencing the power of tribal intimacy and perhaps even that of the "beloved community," which was Martin Luther King's dream, an experience so often lost in our high-tech world.