You can listen to an audio version of this essay on this week’s Ordinary Mediation.
Every wedding ceremony I’ve had the pleasure of attending has had one thing in common with the rest.
No, I’m not talking about rings or vows or kisses or expensive clothes people only wear once. I’m talking about feedback. And not the kind some estranged aunt gives when commenting on how cheap the flowers look. I mean the kind that comes from audio-related technical difficulties, mainly abrupt, loud squeals during an otherwise intimate moment. If not feedback, then at least a minister who realizes only after a few crucial sentences into their welcome speech that they forgot to turn their microphone’s battery pack on, or an acoustic guitar that keeps cutting out for some bizarre reason even the hired sound engineer can’t seem to figure out. It seems universal.
That wasn’t going to happen to us.
Knowing this, I had one request for the ceremony where I would marry my soon-to-be-wife, Kelly: that there be no amplification. Zero. My thought was that these vows were between Kelly, me, and God. If those who attended got to listen in, too, great! It would already be a stressful day leading up to it. Why leave room for what I’d found, in my experience, to be an inevitable distraction? Besides, I assumed it would probably be a small wedding anyway.
A few hundred RSVPs later, I wondered if I had made a huge mistake.
Our ceremony was in a sprawling park outside San Diego where Kelly had grown up going to church picnics. Rows of folding chairs were arranged in the round. In the center stood my bride, myself, our closest friends, the minister, and some musicians.
Perhaps to some people’s surprise, as the sun shone down on our little ritual, you could hear a pin drop between the minister’s words. It was even quieter when our friend sang one of our favorite songs. The level of silence when we exchanged the vows we’d written each other was holy. Even the birds held their beaks.
It was quiet because we were quiet. Everyone was literally on the edge of their seats leaning in to listen to the sound of small stones casting widening ripples into a great stillness.
Unamplified conversations require people lean in to listen.
The template we decided to break at our wedding is one each of us can break whenever we encounter feedback. And perhaps there’s no greater time than the Holidays, when the volume everywhere seems to push past the sound barrier.
We rarely hear this given our distracted and noisy culture, but communication is often most influential on the micro level, focused on the few versus the many, when the goal is specificity rather than scalability — when the allure to perform and manufacture isn’t competing with our more human ambitions like the desire to learn, understand, contemplate, or imagine.
We can lust after the megaphone or we can lean into a quiet revolution.