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Pop-Up Wedding

I have a recurring dream where I show up for a wedding, only to discover that I was supposed to be officiating the ceremony. The problem is, I haven’t prepared, not a word of it, and the rest of the dream is me scrambling unsuccessfully to scrape something together at the last minute…

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One of the many things I’ve learned in my work with First Nations communities in western Canada is that even though the content of our personal development experience is the same every month, each new group of participants comes together to create a unique experience for everyone involved. Last week was no exception—especially Thursday night.

5:00pm

Our afternoon session had just wrapped up when I overheard someone say that a couple of the participants wanted to get married. 

Well that’s a first. 

John and Alexia had been engaged for some time, and earlier in the day, Alexia mentioned to a friend that she wanted to have her wedding right there at Ness Lake. “But I want all of you to be here for it,” she said.

Her friend told her it would be hard to get everyone back and suggested they have their wedding while everyone was already there. Alexia agreed and had someone ask our team leader if it could happen. He pointed at me and said I should do it, then he walked out the door with a laugh.

My plan was to catch a half hour of sleep before dinner. Our days are long, so any chance to catch a moment’s rest is golden, but given the content of my recurring dream, I decided to grab my phone and sketch a ceremony outline in case this spontaneous wedding idea actually came to pass. I pulled up the content of the most recent wedding I’d officiated, jotted a few bullet points into my Notes app, and adapted some vows to fit the potential bride and groom. Probably unnecessary, but you never know.

6:00pm

On Thursday nights we have a banquet. The participants do a lot of emotional work, and the camp staff honours this by dressing the dining hall up with strings of lights hung over tables covered with black linens and colourful centrepieces, with the fireplace channel playing on mounted TVs in the background. We let participants know about the banquet ahead of time, encouraging them to bring a nice set of clothes if they’d like, so all day long, the ladies were asking me just how long they would have to do their hair and make-up. Sure enough, the room was filled with people looking their best, laughing and telling stories, all while enjoying a delicious pork roast with sparking punch and all of the usual festive trimmings.

8:00pm

During our evening session, Alexia approached me and said she wanted to have a wedding and was wondering if I could marry them. I asked if she was being serious. She told me she was and that they had been engaged for a while now and were going to get married eventually, but that it would mean a lot for them to do so with the support of their new sober family. 

It’s impossible to explain what happens over the course of these four days together at Ness Lake, but if you want to get a sense of it, you can read the reflections I shared in a previous post based on my first experience in 2022. When people discover the possibility of living a new life in place of the old one that has worn them down to the bone, there’s a power that’s generated, creating wide-open possibilities and a deep sense of community. John and Alexia wanted their relationship with each other to align with their individual commitments to sobriety, and what better way to do that than making bold promises in the presence of the very people who have helped bring you back from the brink.

I let her know that, while the wedding wouldn’t be legal, if it was a ceremony she was after, I would be honoured to lead one for them. She was ecstatic. And John? Well, not so much. He was nervous as all get out, but wasn’t about to ruin his fiancee’s romantic idea, which is about as wise a way to start off a marriage as I can think of.

I grabbed my jacket and stepped outside to check out the location she had in mind: “under the lights hanging on the giant swing.” It was a perfect spot, so I came back and let the bride-to-be know that I would make an announcement that we would have the ceremony right after the session and before we ended the day around the fire.

8:45pm

“And I have one more announcement,” I said after going over my usual Thursday night reminders. “We’re going to do something we’ve never done at Transformations before: We’re going to have a wedding!”

Gasps, cheers, and laughter all rolled into one as the group realized I was being serious and that the already-fun night we’d been having was about to reach new heights. People started grabbing their jackets and slipping on their boots and we filed out of the gymnasium and into the crisp January night air. While a few people stopped for a smoke, I took a minute to look into a few details that I normally would have taken care of weeks if not months in advance.

“Hey John, do you have a best man?” 

“Yep.”

“Perfect. You need to get Alexia’s ring and let him hold on to it.”

The atmosphere was giddy. People were bustling about trying to figure out last minute details.

Someone: “The bride needs a bouquet! We have to find her some flowers!”

But it was the middle of winter. Where were we going to find flowers? I suggested the activity storage room might produce some synthetic flowers, but nothing, so my colleague found some scissors and by no small miracle turned the remnants of the world’s saddest poinsettia into a surprisingly stylish wedding bouquet.

Someone else: “What is she going to walk down the aisle to? We need some wedding music!”

Off they went to find a portable speaker and ask our resident DJ if he could line up some wedding songs.

“Hey Alexia, do you have a maid of honour?” 

“Yep.”

“Perfect. You need to get John’s ring and let her hold on to it.”

It was getting real, things were coming together. People were milling around and I could see a group of guys standing where the ceremony would take place. Have they actually picked wedding parties? From this group of people they’ve only known for four days?!?

Another idea, this time from a woman in her early 50s who had come from the Yukon. She told me that, in her culture, at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony, the community would gather around and wrap the bride and groom in a blanket. 

“That’s beautiful,” I said. “Let’s make it happen. We have some blankets in the gym. Go choose one and I’ll call on you when it’s time and you can come forward and do the honours.”

Off she went, and I turned towards a group of young ladies who had all the signs of being bridesmaids. They wanted to know when the groomsmen would be walking them down the aisle, and I explained to mild protest that they would walk down on their own and then take their arms on the way out. Again, this is something I’d typically go over at a rehearsal, but this night was anything but typical since we were having the rehearsal and the wedding at the very same time.

9:00pm

The straight truth is that, despite the buzz of excitement, I wasn’t sure any of this was a good idea. I’ve officiated somewhere north of 75 weddings over the years and was questioning whether I was going to regret this in the morning. Surely it wasn’t a good idea to throw something so sacred together at the last minute like this.

I shoved these thoughts out of my head and took my place under the soft glow of the arched strand of lights, flanked on my right by John and his groomsmen. Traditionally, the bride would stand to my right, but the guys were already in place and somehow it felt more appropriate to let it be what it was. I asked all of the well-dressed wedding guests to take their places beneath a canopy of tall, snow-covered trees, then called out for whoever had the portable speaker to hit play to begin the ceremony.

The bridesmaids slowly wound their way around a slippery path surrounding the guests and stopped at the front of our makeshift, outdoor chapel. Then came the beautiful bride, Alexia, dressed in her above-the-knee banquet dress and cowboy boots, clasping a perfect bouquet of poinsettia flowers in her hands. She walked in on the arm of someone from our lead team, who she had approached quite matter-of-factly with, “You—you’re going to walk me down the aisle!”

And so he did, guiding her gently to the designated place in front of me where she stood facing her groom, with the eyes of the whole community taking in the whole incredible moment.

And it was incredible. John was holding back tears as Alexia gazed into his eyes with an admiration so deep you could feel it. Until that moment, I was still questioning the wisdom of what we were doing, but as I took a breath in and prepared to begin the ceremony, it became abundantly clear to me that this pop-up wedding the lot of us had cobbled together in the past fifteen minutes was good and right and true.

When the processional song faded out, I began the ceremony with a reading from Richard Wagamese’s book, Embers:

We approach our lives on different trajectories, each of us spinning in our own separate, shining orbits. What gives this life its resonance is when those trajectories cross and we become engaged with each other, for as long or as fleetingly as we do. There’s a shared energy then, and it can feel as though the whole universe is in the process of coming together.

Following the reading, I told the wedding guests that their presence was a sign of their belief in John and Alexia’s ability to uphold the commitments they were about to make to one another. I invited the crowd to respond together if they were willing to support the couple in their new life as a married couple:

“We will,” they responded, and with no shortage of enthusiasm, either.

I read a second passage from Embers, and then one from the Song of Songs, and shared the briefest of messages about the importance of no longer living for yourself alone, but putting the needs of this one other person above all others. 

I read the vows I had prepared and asked first Alexia and then John to affirm them in the presence of their new family and friends.

“I do,” she said.

“I do,” he said.

They exchanged rings, handed to them by their maid of honour and best man respectively, and I invited the two women holding the blanket to come forward and drape it over the couple as a symbol of our support. I learned afterward that the blanket had been gifted to us in honour of residential school survivors, and it was now being used to bless the couple as they began a new, shared life together.

Finally, by the power invested in me by Transformations and in the sight of God and their T73 family, I pronounced John and Alexia husband and wife. 

A chorus of cheers all around and the brightest of smiles spread across our bride’s face while the lights overhead made her eyes glow as she looked up at her groom. And then, before I could get the words out, they shared their first kiss as a married couple to an even louder celebration.

Can you imagine this? Can you picture yourself being there that night, witnessing and participating in the craziness and the beauty of it all? Can you feel the power emanating from, not just two people, but a whole crowd of people who happened to be in just the right place at just the right time?

I stood and watched the bride and groom walk away, followed by the bridesmaids clinging to the arms of the groomsmen to keep from slipping on the icy ground. The word that came to me in that moment was ‘sacred.’ That’s what all of this was—not crazy, sacred.

9:30pm

The wedding party made their exit and walked down toward the fire pit, but not before they stopped on a well-lit pathway for a photo shoot. Everyone’s phones were out, snapping shots and demanding that John dip his new bride for a kiss, which he did without hesitation.

Around the fire, we burned the tears we’d collected in a waste bin full of tissues over the course of the day. Spirits were high as one of our leaders read what had become a nightly recap of the day’s activities as a time to reflect on and honour all of the good work that had been done. But as some of the crowd began to make their way back to their cabins, Alexia suddenly realized she had forgotten something important: “Wait a second—I need to have a dance at my wedding!”

Since we had a gym and a DJ at our disposal, I told her it seemed pretty obvious what we had to do next. There was another flurry of activity and within a few minutes the remaining wedding guests were up in the gym getting ready for the couple’s first dance. 

“But first,” I said, “there has to be a Father-Daughter dance.” 

The music began and the bride took the floor with the same person who had walked her down the aisle, and as tradition dictates, halfway through the song, John stepped in and the bride and groom had their own dance together. The DJ put on another slow song and suddenly there were ten pairs of feet slowly drifting around the dance floor. 

Swept up in the romance of it all, one of my colleagues had an idea and, right in the middle of the dance, brought the bride and groom a couple of Dad’s oatmeal cookies as a substitute for their wedding cake, which they proceeded to cram into each others’ mouths as the rest of us enjoyed yet another unplanned gift.

As the dancers swayed back and forth, I sat down beside the same woman who had arranged to drape the blanket over the couple during the ceremony. “I can’t believe this actually happened,” I said, laughing. “It’s so crazy.”

“No,” she said. “This is the Indigenous way. Our people know how to get sh*t done!”


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