Wedding Under the Dinosaurs

I have just returned from a brief visit in downtown Atlanta for our grandson’s wedding. As we thundered down I-85 amid four lanes of 80 mph traffic, I began to feel as if we were entering the maw of the proverbial beast. As we passed under the serpentine arches of “spaghetti junction,” I began to feel the presence of imminent catastrophic injury at every second. Though we had lived there for ten years, we relied on a GPS signal to guide us to our hotel in the crowded towers of mid-town, an area now unintelligible to us. All was concrete, glass, and steel. The hotel itself was sequestered within a tower of elevators, parking garages, shops, and offices.

A bus took us from the hotel to the wedding venue in the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. While the ceremonies were in spaces adjacent to the exhibits, the reception and dinner took place under a replica skeleton of a 45-foot tall giganotosaurus dug up in Argentina  and its tank-like companion stegosauros. Amidst the classic beauty of the wedding of two loving people images of the towering skyscrapers began to meld with the bones of giants from 100 million years ago. Because the bride’s family was from Shri Lanka, we were led through a Buddhist traditional ceremony that began with the honoring of seven generations of ancestors, in whose long line the couple now entered to live out their role in the drama of human succession. All this was taking place in the shadow of the dinosaurs, who ruled the earth for some 100 million years. And outside the doors were our towers and roads, autos and cell phones, rockets and computers, the tokens of our blick-in-time supremacy. 

The next day, as we rejoined the ceaseless torrent of cars to wind our way out of the urban machine that had contained us, I realized that all this monumental babel had become oppressive to me. Was it becoming also too much for the earth to bear? Over the past 25 years my mind and metabolism have become attuned to the language of the trees, the streams, and the relatively relaxed pace of the face-to-face community of our small town. It has become my benchmark of a human scale of life as well as of an ecological norm. In the midst of the sledgehammer blows to our Constitutional order, the attacks on minorities and migrants, and the constant waterfall of lies, the collapse of our inherited ecological order loomed over me like the dinosaur at the wedding. The dinosaurs did not cause the elimination of the order that sustained them. But we have crawled all over this planet like ants on a dying bug, sucking its life out in our insatiable hunger for more. Many of us know we have to make fundamental changes in our relation to earth, but we are trapped in a culture, economy, and technology that is unable to reverse course. We wait upon the meteor of our destruction.

And yet. And yet two young people from two very different cultural traditions and strands of DNA came together in love, joy, and hope to begin again, to find a way among the bones and steel, the flash of screens and engines, to make new life. My prayer for them is also a prayer for us all and for our earth.