We're really thankful to our dear friend, Adam Brandt, for speaking at our wedding ceremony. We met during our freshman year of college, and my life changed drastically because of him. He helped me take that jump from an angsty and confused teenager to a thoughtful and always-questioning adult. Here is his speech.I met Natalie almost exactly nine years ago. It was the last week of September, our first week of college, and summer was winding down in the warm Santa Barbara sunshine. We gathered over the years a group of friends that seemed to share a simple idealism. Natalie shared this as trait as well, although not in a simple way. She created and learned and argued with idealism. (Boy did Natalie and I argue! But not in a bad way. I promise.) And by idealism I don’t mean anything overly dramatic. By idealism I simply mean the conviction that, first, the world can be a better place, and, second, that our actions can make it so. And as I have gotten to know Ben over the last three years, it is clear that he shares this conviction.
But we have gotten older and idealism isn’t found quite so easily anymore. It hides in nooks or silent places. It is overshadowed by a world that has gotten so much bigger. Bigger because we begin to understand what it means to be just one person out of billions. Or it becomes cramped by a world that can seem so much smaller than it once did. Smaller because the easy joy of the undiscovered, and the promise of tomorrow, fade as the undiscovered is gradually uncovered and tomorrows don’t seem as numerous as before.
People react differently to this process. (Do we call it getting older? Do we dare use the M-word? Are we all becoming, heaven forbid, mature?). Some try to make the best of what they see as a hard situation, or they seek joy in old ways that might not fit quite right anymore. Natalie and Ben are responding joyfully, wisely, and honestly. They are concentrating, with their limited time, on the things that are truly important. They are choosing as their project, as the target for their ambitions and idealism and hope, something that would have once seemed mundane (at least compared to some problems in the world), but now seems so large and important: turning love, a thing by turns consuming, or ecstatic, or sometimes fickle, into something secure, and warm, and lasting - a family. Though treated as less important here and now than in other places or in other times, family remains profound for exactly two reasons: it is the thing from which we all came, and thus ties us irrevocably, binds us and roots us to our past, and, in a world where we all have to go at some point, it is the only way in which we truly survive. It is the primary way in which we make solid our hope for a better world and the way that we pass along the very best of all the things that made us what we are.
For these reasons, among many others, there is no higher purpose, no project more worthy of Natalie and Ben’s idealism, than their marriage.
-Adam Brandt
September, 30, 2007
