A solitary chapel in a snow-covered landscape
The audience has been waiting. She was late. It’s a bride’s right to be late, is it not? It is her day, after all. She is the princess — no the queen of the day — a glorious promise of fertile redemption, dressed in white.
It was winter cold, the earth dressed in glorious white, the little chapel standing solitary on the Drakensberg hills.
The fleeting, dreaming sound of an oboe fills the air, suddenly. A gasp fills the room as the door opens. The audience turns their heads, staring helplessly at the unquenchably beautiful sight that fills the ancient, rugged wooden doors.
He also turns his head. Looking down the nave, past the faces of the many, them all naturally blurring in the heat, he can see only her. From the day he first saw her, met her, he could see only her, imagine only her.
By now the crowd raised to their feet, appreciating the scarcity of the moment, touching the stings of the very heart of what it means to be human: new life, redemption, beautiful renewal. The hope of all who fills the small room.
As the percussion raises to subtly enhanced heights she takes her first step forward into the chapel. It is the first step of many, entering a new life of promise, a new beginning born from sorrow and beautiful hope.
She walks to the tune of the music. Regal. Determined. Toward her man. They were born to be together. Their eyes are smelted on each other, forever. A gaze that will not surrender. A look of appreciative bliss.
As he reaches out his hand to receive her, she grasps him firmly, securing her grip, her eyes not leaving his.
No one in this room will fully know the road they had walked, the valleys and hills they had to transverse to be in this spectacular moment. They only know, the bride and groom, that the birth of this beautiful promise was conceived out of an unimaginable dream — one that the two of them only knew — and shared in a sacred bond of secrecy.
Today, this day, on a snow-white mountainous hill, is the culmination of their dreams, their journey, their ongoing and their forever togetherness. It is a spectacular thing, an intensely beautiful bonding, an intimate foreverness.
As her hand slips into his, they turn toward the altar, and both say, “I do.”
The beginning…
