Wednesday, 12/4/13
The first reading gives
us the words of Isaiah in seven hundred B.C From God living within him, he had received assurance that
there was life after death, and the only way he could picture the fulfillment
of God’s promise was to picture God
inviting the just to a wedding feast on a mountain high enough to touch the
heavens.
Isaiah lived with
country people who had no restaurants, no theaters, no air conditioning, no
well-stocked stores. For them, the height of happiness could be found only at a
wedding feast on which the family had blown their savings.
Let me tell you
about a Korean country wedding in the spring of 1955. I had an illegal jeep
which the Korean Army was soon to take from me; but at the spring harvest I
still had my buggy.
A wedding had two
banquets back then: one in the girls village; and when the food ran out, the
wedding party would make its way to the boy’s village for their feast.
Having judged the
day when the bride’s village would need to let her go, I bumped the jeep up to
their place, and I waited through the final ritual. It had the
men of the girl’s village tying a rope around the groom’s ankles, then
stringing him up for some playful
spanking in punishment for him taking their beauty away from them.
After getting
him down , and into the front
seat, we waited for the bride to be brought out. Gowned for the wedding, she
was furnished with lipstick for a very small mouth. She was to be a woman of
few words, and none at all on her wedding day. But, she was soon to break that
rule.
I had a shotgun by
my side, and as we sped along between great, newly harvested rice paddies, the
bride called out “Gwong!” She saw a flock of male pheasants, and she hiked up
her gown to lead her new husband and me in a fruitless pursuit.
“Not to worry,” the
groom assured me. “At the wedding feast in my village we will have pheasants
and every wonderful food imaginable.” He had a tricky turn of phrase to
describe that plenty. He said, "Opnun got opsumnida“ or: "The food that isn’t there, isn’t there. “ With
heaven, the happiness that isn’t there, isn’t there.”
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