Do You, Jodi, Take This Bridge To Be Your Lawfully Wedded Spouse…

Last July, Australian Jodi Rose married Le Pont du Diable Bridge in Céret, southern France.  The bride wore a flowing gown and veil of white lace and carried a bouquet of pink and white cabbage roses.  The groom…. Well, he’s a bridge.

Attracted to the strong, silent type, Jodi pursued the 600-year-old span for matrimonial bliss because, as she said,

He makes me feel connected to the earth and draws me to rest from my endless nomadic wanderings.”

The blushing bride explained,

“He is fixed, stable, rooted to the ground, while I am nomadic, transient, ever on the road.  He gives me a safe haven, brings me back to ground myself, and then lets me go again to follow my own path, without trying to keep me tied down or in thrall to his needs or desires. I am devoted to him.”

The happy couple met when Jodi was visiting dozens of bridges all over the world for her Singing Bridges musical project.  He was not like the other bridges—and Jodi immediately sensed a connection.

But the new husband may have a hard time keeping his bride under control.  Unwilling to be tied down, Rose wrote on her website,

“He understands that I love other bridges – and men – ours is a love that embraces the vagaries of life, as materialised in the swirling currents of the river that flows beneath his magnificent body.”

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HOW COULD WE HAVE GOTTEN TO THIS POINT where romance is so ridiculed, where a wedding is a farcical event which can take place underwater,

where Wonderwoman can wed her comic book hero,

where a woman can wed a warehouse

or a 14^th century stone bridge?

Perhaps our society’s willingness to forsake the traditional definition of marriage and to benevolently accept new styles of relationships—two men or two women—has, as the doomsday prophets warned, had deleterious results.  If two men can marry, then why not a man and a child?  A boy and his dog? Why not three people?  Why not a woman and a bridge?

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Marriage, teaches the Catholic Church, is “a covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.”

Not to be entered into lightly, a sacramental marriage is a lifelong commitment of two adults who together will raise up a family in the love of Christ.  Other types of relationships, whether or not love is a part of them, simply cannot be “marriage.”

Paul Stookey, folk singer/songwriter who wrote the most poignant of the ballads sung by ‘60s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, had the right idea when he penned The Wedding Song.

Let’s keep talking.  Visit my earlier post on a great little book by William May, Getting the Marriage Conversation Right:  A Guide for Effective Dialogue.