We Fit Together

Saturday morning, Father Tony O’Donovan and I co-officiated Jenny and Dan’s wedding ceremony, at Wildwood Inn, in Denton, Texas. Here are the remarks I shared with them and their guests:

There was something mysterious about the first time Jenny and Dan met. Here is what Jenny says about that encounter: “When I, actually, first saw Dan and he smiled at me, I felt like I had known him before, and my heart was happy that he had come back to me.” This is what Yogi Berra would call “déjà vu all over again.”

There is, in fact, a Jewish tradition, that likely stems from an earlier Greek tradition, that contends that meeting that special someone is not meeting someone new, but returning to an original partner. The Ancient Rabbis argued, based on specific linguistic choices in the creation stories in Genesis, that the original human was created as one being, both male and female. Then, God put this being to sleep, and separated it into two beings, one male and one female.

Dan tells a story that illustrates this complementary wholeness Jenny and he bring to one another: “Jen and I would often have conversations about the future and I would tell her how important I think math and science are for kids especially in the current digital age. I jokingly told Jen that instead of teaching our kid letters and numbers we should teach them the binary system.” Now, Jenny does, actually, work with kids; she has for her entire career, in one way or another. The binary system, I suspect, did not come up often, in that work. She could not have been blamed for gently pointing this out to Dan. That is not what she did. Here’s what she did do: “One day, I discovered that Jen had created a Pinterest board for me and our future child, complete with science and math books for our future child to read.”

In this Jenny illustrated the proper understanding of the ancient tradition. It does not contend that the two parts of this original being were identical or even symmetrical. That would actually be rather boring, and would contain it very little potential for mutual enrichment. It tells us something very different. When we find that true partner, the one we were separated from, we realize what Jenny did, “I had never felt anything like that before… It just seemed that we fit together, and that he was the one that I had been waiting for, for so long.”