Create Joyful Reminders of Your Wedding Day
/Husbands and wives navigating the waters of newlywed life: keep daily reminders of your wedding day close by.
During engagement, it’s not hard to have daily reminders that your wedding is growing closer and closer. Countles vendor appointments, marriage prep classes, DIY decorations, and guest lists can become overwhelming. During this season, many brides have so many reminders of their wedding and impending married life that they long for a mental break. But this chaotic season, even if you have a long engagement, is in the long-term so short-lived.
PHOTOGRAPHY: MADELEINE DEIGHAN PHOTOGRAPHY
After the wedding is over, the guests have gone home, and you’ve spent a romantic honeymoon with your beloved, life goes back to “normal.” More accurately, your new normal. There’s no more dress fittings to fit into your schedule or bridal showers to plan. The glitter, excitement, and celebration of your wedding day is now a beautiful moment in your history, but the graces and joy of that day don’t have to fade into the past.
The supernatural joy God showers on his children on their wedding day is not a joy contained to those 24 hours. It is meant to overflow into the everyday-ness of newlywed life and then lifelong marriage. As imperfect human beings, however, we are quick to forget the graces and wonder of the most important moments of our lives.
Even moments like saying your marriage vows, when you first enter into the sacrament which finds its meaning in Christ. It is a sacrament full of graces and the potential to form you and your spouse into saints. It will become the foundation of your family and your strength in difficult trials. Something this profound is a cause for daily joy and celebration, and yet so often we hear the stereotype of the monotony of married life. What if after many years with your spouse, the joy and graces of your wedding day seem to have faded into the past?
It’s no different with our Catholic faith. We are quick to forget our complete dependence on God, to get distracted by innumerable material worries, and to feel the “monotony” of our prayer life or relationship with the Lord. But like a good Father who knows the weaknesses and needs of his children, God has given us a very physical Church, with the Eucharist, confessionals, sacramentals, crucifixes, incense, sacred art, and the priesthood, to name a few things. Encountering the physical aspects of our faith everyday plays a huge part in drawing us closer to the Lord and reorienting us back towards his grace--even if we don’t realize it. Little reminders of God’s presence keep us present to him.
In the same way, little reminders of your wedding can keep you more present to your spouse and the marriage you’re building together. Like the physical mementos of our faith you keep present, create mementos of the joyful day your one-flesh union began, because your sacramental marriage is the beating heart of your home.
Revisit your wedding photos. Because one of the most powerful reminders of your wedding day is the ability to look on those beautiful moments all over again...and again. Take some time to sit with your spouse and flip through your wedding photos on a laptop or in a scrapbook you keep out on the coffee table. Hang your favorite images in frames on your walls where you’re most likely to notice them.
If you had a special rosary wrapped around your bouquet, make that the rosary you and your spouse use to pray together. Play music or hymns you chose for your nuptial Mass or first dance. Preserve your wedding bouquet in a shadowbox you can display in a place of honor. In some way, make your wedding a part of your home, one that you’ll see or use everyday.
God wants you to experience that joy over and over again, and to use that joy as a channel for grace and protection against anything that would wear away at your marriage.
Your wedding is the beginning of a sacrament meant to live on throughout your life and as a reminder of the next, when we celebrate the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb.