Stephen Jenkinson: Matrimony Is the Mothering of Culture

Tami Simon: [00:00:00] In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Steven Jenkinson. This is the first time I’ve had the honor to interview Steven, and I’m so excited to see all the places we go together. He’s such an unusual and original thinker. Let me tell you a little bit about Steven Jenkinson.

He’s a culture activist, a storyteller, a ceremonialist, and an off the grid farmer advocating for a handmade life and eloquence. He has a master’s degree in Theology from Harvard and a master’s degree in social work. From the University of Toronto, he’s the founder of the Orphan School of Wisdom, and he’s the author of several stunning and surprising books, including The Highly Acclaimed Die Wise [00:01:00] and get ready for this, a new book from Sounds True.

It’s called Matrimony, ritual Culture and the Heart’s Work. Stay with us

Tami Simon: Steven. Welcome.

Stephen Jenkinson: It’s great to be, it’s great to see you. I’ve seen your name, of course, through the process of editing the, the, uh, book and so forth, and it’s great to see that this is what you look like and this is what you sound like, and I’m, I’m very glad of the opportunity to speak with you.

I wanted to start off before we get into the topic of your new book on matrimony with this notion that you’re an advocate for eloquence, and I’m gonna read a quote from you, eloquence is at least as vital to the human body and soul making a go of it, as is food, supply, shelter, and companionship. And I thought to myself, I’ve never heard anybody say anything like that, not even close.

So tell me what you mean. I’ve never met anyone who said [00:02:00] they were an advocate for eloquence.

Uh, well, I just, I, I thought I’d add one to Maslow’s hierarchy, and it seemed, it seemed, um, called for, you know, I mean, I, I’m, one never knows when what’s inside one is born, how it comes to fruition, how it ever really appears.

So I don’t know how long this has been true for me, but longer than I remember. That’s for sure. I think I was read to as a key, as a very young person, and I think I have a sense of the kind of ebb and flow of story, which is an eloquence born proposition really. But I think it came to its full incarnation when I was working in what I came to call the death trade in palliative care.

And in those days and everything I hear, not much has changed in those days. Um, dying people were fairly routinely, [00:03:00] um, be set by a couple of inscrutable dilemmas that never really broke the surface of, of expression. And one of them was death phobia, no surprise. Another one was grief, illiteracy, maybe surprising.

And the thing that bound those two maladies together was the inability to craft a language where the realities of the dying could actually appear. And be available and be considerable. And so that became my job. That was my work in the death trade, was to craft a language where the realities of dying deserved a place at the table.

And in that endeavor, I really came to realize, you know, the poverty’s of the tongue are every bit as confounding as the other, more garden variety poverty tend to be. [00:04:00]

Tami Simon: Tell me a little bit about how you linked our cultural death phobia and our grief illiteracy, how you brought that together through language.

Stephen Jenkinson: Well, I mean, I didn’t do it alone. I mean, I, I had certainly had, I had adversaries, which helps, and I had allies, which helps. And those are different kinds of assistance, but they’re, they’re both very useful. I think what happened was, generally speaking, I was expected in those days to provide a degree of comfort.

And of course if you’re, if you’re being comforted, presumably you would know that you are. And, and the principle criteria for feeling comforted by someone else is that you recognize your own take in on things in the way that they’re coming to you and what they’re talking to you about. And I considered that to be collusion because the, the template was [00:05:00] not everybody’s doing okay and we can do a lot better.

The template was the culture is death phobic fundamentally irretrievably, probably irredeemably in any, in any timeframe I can think of. Death phobic. So I realized that if I was going to be comfort giving, I was likely to be. Betraying at the same time, uh, dying. People didn’t need comfort from me. I mean, they were certainly getting it elsewhere, but they deserve something that they were never gonna ask for.

And that’s something turned out to be, as I said a minute ago, a kind of emotive and psychic language where, where dying became a deity in the room, not a predator and a deity is, is a big deal. A deity in the [00:06:00] room, you know, takes up a lot of room. It’s, it’s a considerable, uh, encounter. And, uh, and our responsibility was to learn its ways, learn its language, its requirements, and learn that it’s not here to do something to you, but it does mean you though.

And so I had to find a way to choreograph that understanding without just saying the things I said to you. You know? And by in a hundred ways that became available over time, I found a, a kind of nuanced engagement with dying. And I realized I, I became sort of dying’s en, excuse me. I took dictation, if you will, from dying, not from the dying people.

And I don’t say that they thanked me, you [00:07:00] know, out of the gate for any of the, that kind of service. But ultimately, surprising number of people began to sort of come around and began to recognize that they had, they had no obligation to, to live out the confounding poverty that they’d been heirs to. This matter

Tami Simon: now, your journey, Stephen, from being what you call yourself, the death guy to the matrimony guy.

I’m sure that would be fodder for some late night comedians who could make the connection. Yeah. Why here in your seventies has it been so important to you to publish a book on matrimony?

Stephen Jenkinson: Uh, this is a guess. What [00:08:00] happened was a number of young people and middle aged people, typically in twos, started to come to me subsequent to the publishing of a book called Come of Age, about elderhood. They, there was a, I mean, food makes hunger. That’s the old adage, right? The appearance, the presence of food is what stirs the longing for it.

And this is true in the kitchen, and it’s true in the psyche as well. And so, uh, somehow, um, this notion that elderhood was a living thing, that it wasn’t a personal identity. It was, it was a kind of spirit labor somehow began to, um, cultivate in a number of people, a kind of longing, I would call it. I had a school, the Orphan Wisdom School at the time, and, uh, a number of people [00:09:00] came through the school to me to ask me very hesitantly and very awkwardly, if I would marry them now.

I’d never done it, the likes of it ever, or anything close to it. So this was, it was, it was a strange request, but I mean, not to be disingenuous about it. I, I wasn’t, I wasn’t shocked. I was, I was keen to find out, not so much what was it about me that they found compelling in the matter, but what were they heading away from in order to come in my direction?

That’s what I began to, to nose a roundabout. What is it you’re after? Uh, ceremonially speaking. And mostly what they had to answer me was all the things they were trying to avoid, convention tradition, uh, the emptiness of the contemporary event, [00:10:00] uh, the, the rote quality of the thing, the, um, the sort of unbearable, um, brevity of so many of them.

And of course the rehearsals and on and on and on. I said, what would you want instead? And authenticity, of course, was high on the list and a number of personal was a big one, meaningful. But the one that kept coming up over and over again was real. They wanted something that was real. And it felt me at that moment to say, you understand, don’t you?

That real is not a synonym for good or special or all the other things that you imagine you’d be in for if you got it real is the whole damn thing. Real is chaos and carnage as well as [00:11:00] a kind of high style iq. And if you want me to do this, I’m going to be matrimony spirit lawyer, not your advocate. I’m gonna see to it.

The spirit of matrimony is in the house to the best of my ability. And we’re gonna take a year or more to ready ourselves for that encounter. I’ll be over here. You let me know if you still, if you’re still in and nobody walked away. Having said that though, I’ll tell you a very brief vignette, give you an idea of the kind of adversity that this apparently innocuous notion tended to stir up.

So the, the couple I’m thinking of now, uh, had made this request, I said back to them, what I need you to do is assemble your, your bridal party, your the wedding party, the, the people that you, [00:12:00] you want to stand with you formally and informally. And the rest, I don’t care how many lots is better. Okay? Lots.

And you’ll know why in due course. So they got ’em together. I walked in the door. They were a little let down because, uh, I didn’t look that exotic. Not then, not now. And they were hoping for some exoticism to go along with this notion that this was something actually to be talked about. And for 10 minutes or so, I told them what we’re up to and what we’re in for in terms of the year long preparation that that was in front of us.

And I stopped and I said, now you need to decide. And I think most of you already have based on what I’ve told you, whether you’re in or whether you’re out. Okay? If you’re out and you know it now, but if you’re out, you need to leave Now. If I told you more, it would just make it more difficult to do [00:13:00] what you’re probably already going to do, which is sooner or later leave this.

Nobody needs that. So leave with our blessing and wish us good luck. No hard feelings whatsoever. And if you stay, I’m gonna treat you like you’re in. And I stopped. And honestly, a third of the people got up and walked out. Don’t forget who these people are to the two, the, to the betrothed. They’re, they’re the closest of friends, the, the most enduring kinds of friendships and relationships they had suffered, and some of them they never spoke to again.

And so the door closed behind the last person. And of course, the two thirds of the people are left are looking at each other, wondering, did they, did they, did those people somehow figure something out that they don’t understand? Are they, are they somehow on the outside of something looking in, sitting here like bumpkins?[00:14:00]

And somebody very well intended got up to move the chairs around to disguise the fact that we’d lost one third of the quorum before we’ve even begun. And I said, please, no, no, no. Sit down. And they did, and I said, I need you to remember this throughout the long process that’s before us. If we get there at the end, you need to remember that this never looked like a good idea.

This looked really hard to well-intentioned people who knew you well. And that was the kind of impoverished beginning to the affair, and it happened over and over again. And it was remarkable simply to find out the following, which I found it completed by accident, that nobody goes to a wedding to change the world.

Nobody. That is, it turns out but me.

Tami Simon: What’s interesting to me is normally when I hear someone in the [00:15:00] role of the officiant, they’re only working with the two people who are getting married. They’re not saying, and we’re gonna bring. Your people into this process. So that in and of itself is a much different way of looking at the ceremony.

Stephen Jenkinson: Well, it is. I grant you that too. I was taking dictation here. I wasn’t imagining really anything. I mean, to my mind, what I was up to and up against was something like this. You’ve been on the beach, you find something on the beach just combing around, idly, right? You find something in the sand, you, you’re not sure what it is.

You can tell it’s a piece of something. But beyond that, it’s kind of hard to, it’s hard to reckon. But with enough imagination, you might be able to infer something of the original intactness. Of this shard. [00:16:00] Of this remnant. Remnant, or shard is my best understanding of all the little. Details that accrue to the conventional wedding, the origin of which virtually all the practitioners know next to nothing about the ultimate purpose of these things.

Their, their origin, where they come from, what they’re about, what the, the greater whole, that their pieces of all of this is not even hinted at in the normal course of events. So I simply paid attention to those things. I, I’ll give you a little example. So typically, if you just focus on the seating arrangement of most of the weddings you’ve been to, typically it’s eyes front, everybody facing the same direction, the principals and their, their cohort, if you will, at the front of the room.

It’s very much a spectacle seating arrangement or a [00:17:00] performance seating arrangement. Nobody can see anyone. Except the two people at the front and the officiant. I thought to myself, you know, that aisle thing, I don’t think that was the original orientation. The aisle was the axis. All right. But I think the seating regimen has been skewed by the confusion between ritual and performance.

We were never an audience. Once upon a time we were witnesses and the witnesses didn’t face into the, the void at the front of the room. The witnesses were facing each other, and that aisle was a kind of psychic or spirit, no man’s land that the transaction happened there between people not in front of them.

To take a little example, [00:18:00] that was my intuitive take on something had happened. We’d lost track of why we’d lost track of who we were to each other and more than content to be face front and to have it over with as quickly as possible. So I changed the focus. And in changing the focus, oh my God, the dynamic changed entirely.

Tami Simon: When you said you were taking dictation, who or what were you taking dictation from? What archetype or spirit or form? Well,

Stephen Jenkinson: they didn’t, um, they didn’t leave their calling card, you know, so this is a bit of guesswork, but, um,

I mean, it would be disingenuous if I told you I was doing these things, ly speaking basically for the first time. That wouldn’t be true. I’ve been graced with and burdened by a kind of life since, probably since [00:19:00] adolescence, really, where I had, uh. I had a kind of ongoing claim laid upon me or a kind of sensibility that all was not as it appeared, and that there were principalities and powers at work and, and a loft and adrift and, and the rest, and, and the rest of the story deserves some inclusion.

So this is my sort of vernacular way of saying, uh, I wasn’t getting instruction. I was getting a very nuanced kind of, um, assignment. I still had to do all the translating. The assignment was a kind of OneNote Symphony. It was something like, remember this thing that you’ve never seen? That’s basically what it was.

Remember this thing [00:20:00] that you’ve never seen.

Tami Simon: very interesting that you used the words graced and burdened. Uh, that’s something I can relate to. And, uh, I think sometimes from the outside it’s hard for people to appreciate that they, they want you to focus on the grace part or, uh, the idea that it’s, uh, graced and burdened.

I wonder if you can say more than that as a thread that’s woven through your life.

Stephen Jenkinson: Well, um, I mean, take your cue from the fact that you’re an incarnate. Being incarnate literally means in fleshed, okay. So, as a consequence of being a flesh and bones type, like me, you’re obliged to, to endure, uh, quite a wide range of stuff.

Some of them, some of those things are pleasurable. Some of [00:21:00] those things are acutely agonizing and the vast majority of them sort of wash back and forth between those two extremes, right? This is a kind of a beautiful repertoire that we’re obliged, I think, to learn over time, not to get used to so much as they become skilled at.

To the point where in the death trade days, I refer to reef as a skill, not an affliction, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a thrill. When I say skill, I mean, I mean, it needs to be learned that it’s not intuitively available for most people. Most people have to one foot in front of the other, figure out the difference between despair and depression on the one side and a kind of eloquent.

Nuanced, [00:22:00] uh, sling and sling, an arrow kind of proposition called being in the world and being alert. I mean, if you think about the etymology of the word awake, for example, it’s doesn’t mean what we use it to mean. Even the kind of the spiritually inclined people tend to misuse the term, the word literally means of or pertaining to the wake in two senses of that word.

One of them, of course is the, the event after death, and the other one is that kind of web of consequence that that eddie’s out behind you as you make your way through water or through life, right? So, so all of those consequences, most of which you never intended or even imagined those things together having become alert to them.

Awakens you literally explicitly, and the sound [00:23:00] upon awakening authentically. I don’t think it’s Amen. I don’t think it’s, hallelujah. I don’t think it’s, I finally got it figured out. I think it’s a sob. I think that’s the sound upon awakening for most people. And so, so the burden that comes along with the remarkable opportunity that’s now afforded you to proceed as a person fully, more or less fully informed as to the likelihoods and to the and and to the inevitabilities.

Tami Simon: In talking about matrimony, you said something to the effect of, I am there. Officiating to change the world. That’s why I’m participating in this ceremony. And I’m not sure anyone else is coming for that reason, but that’s why I’m there. And I have some guesses as to why I believe [00:24:00] you have a conviction that matrimony done in a holy and deeply reverential way can help change the world.

But I want to hear it from you.

Stephen Jenkinson: There’s a very long, I mean, it’s a 250 page book answer to that question. That’s, that’s the long version, the shorter version to go something like this. Uh, what’s happened? Something’s happened. Something’s happened to the event. I mean, intuitively, most people listening react instantly when I say that, some part of them goes, yeah, shit has, it hasn’t always been as truncated has it, as it seems to have been.

It hasn’t been so. Inward turned so tropic, so, so self-absorbed. So sort of Peaky experience, like all of that stuff has it. And the answer is, of course it has it, [00:25:00] something happened. A, a number of things happened. One of them was in a more contemporary sense of the term, love has been privatized. Okay. And I’m submitting to you that once upon a time, what we now call romantic love, which is a fairly modern event in the advent of humankind, I think.

But somewhere along the way, romantic love turned away from the matting crowd turned away from the marketplace, turned away from, from the ordinary ness of the day, and, and coveted some, some notion of specialness, of set apartness and so on. The direct consequence of that from then until now has been a slow atrophy of the commons.

And North American particular is a bastard, unclaimed bastard child of that, that [00:26:00] withering where the commons is, makes very little claim upon us and upon our so-called inner life and the work we imagine we’re doing there. And, uh, I undertook the matrimony that I, in the way that I did to see whether or not it was possible to revive the notion that principally matrimony is for the community.

It’s for the village. Two at a time.

Tami Simon: Now you make a distinction between marriage, a wedding. Matrimony. Right? And in the book you say how they each have different root words, they’re different. And I thought this is all very important. I never understood there was a difference coming to it. I was like, matrimony, I wonder why Steven’s using that word.

He must mean marriage. Okay, great. And then we’re talking ceremony ritual. We’re talking wedding, and [00:27:00] these, uh, distinctions were not apparent to me. And yet you lean heavily into matrimony as the holy phenomenon. So maybe we’ll just go there before I, uh, keep going here with my question. But first the distinction between these three terms.

Stephen Jenkinson: Okay. The, the easiest one is wedding. That’s the discreet before, during, and after event that everybody can acknowledge that most people have been to. Many of us are a product of, uh, either, uh, uh, intentionally or otherwise.

Marriage is the basic, uh, sort of social legal living out of what allegedly was put into motion at the wedding. Matrimony employs both of those things [00:28:00] to claim for the village a working portion.

Okay, there, I’ll stop there. Okay. And why matrimony in particular, which I, of course, I didn’t invent the term. Right. Uh, and it is very interesting that people imagine what the word matrimony that we’re talking about, grooms and brides. But of course, the word says nothing about grooms and brides.

Tami Simon: Well, I’m happy you’re going there.

’cause that was my next question, which was, I’m gonna come forward as a queer person, I never thought to myself, I wanna look backwards and see the history because I was like, I don’t relate to this history. I don’t relate to the whole bride groom notion. Uh, a father figure is going to give me away as an economic [00:29:00] property to, uh, I mean, I was just like, forget it.

I’m out. And my, uh, partner and I have been together now for 24 years, never have had a wedding. And I would say we’re in a type of holy matrimony that is an offering to other people. Our love is an offering to others. It’s a gift to others. That’s how I hold it inside of myself without ever having a wedding.

Any kind, and I’m curious how you view that in terms of matrimony being something that can hold people even without a wedding.

Stephen Jenkinson: I’m not persuaded personally that the wedding proper even it’s in, in its debilitated form and I, I acknowledge strata straight up. It’s, it’s [00:30:00] scarcely compelling. It’s off-putting and worse. It truly, I would say this though, that love either walks through that door or it doesn’t.

People can make different associations or estimations about what the. Consequences or calamities or utilities of doing so or not doing so are, but I think, I think it behooves us to recognize something about ritual that goes like this. You either have a so-called celebration of love, which is fine. Of course it’s fine.

And wouldn’t it be something if there’s more of it all round? Yes. But that’s not what matrimony is a celebration of love is. And that’s what the, the invitation will say that it is fine. [00:31:00] What isn’t it? It’s not a ritual. Why not? Because, uh, a celebration of love is an imp premature visited upon something that already exists, called the deal between two people.

That the way it is between two people, including the feelings and the anticipations. And, and the hopes and the dreams and all the rest.

What matrimony the, the event of matrimony, because it’s a ritual.

It’s calling, it’s a conjuring of something, not an imp, premature upon something that already is. So it’s contending with the possibility of something that is not yet so may be becoming. So it’s, uh, it’s alchemical in its depth, it’s alchemical, [00:32:00] and this is why it was undertaken for so long. And of course, we’re ceremonially illiterate here in the, in the golden days of the western world.

So it’s not surprising that it would, it would seem to be, uh, an option, right? So. Again, let’s, let’s take, we didn’t even talk about the word matrimony, but I’m gonna go move ahead a little bit and talk about two words that, that kind of show up in the event of, one is the word promise. Is that what’s going on there?

Well, if you think about even the most trite, uh, verbiage that comes from the front of the room in these events, nobody ever uses the word promise to describe them. It’s very interesting because if you attend to what people have in mind for themselves, really, you’d probably hear something like this.

So [00:33:00] can you imagine two people are at the front of the room and the person at the front the efficient says, you know. And a love, honor and cherish and whatever the stuff is, including the self penned vows. And can you imagine the respondent going some, something like this? Well, you know, I’ve thought about this a lot.

It’s a big deal, right? And, uh, and clearly, I mean, well, I hope, I hope that’s obvious and available to everyone and, uh, I, I’ll do my best, but Jesus, you never know, right? It’s, it’s a tricky thing. And, and I’ve never really done this before, at least not with this person. So we’re kind of, it’s kind of a crapshoot.

So if, uh, if you just mind, I’ll do it a kind of a pinky square version of what we’re talking about and let’s see what happens. But I mean, well, can you imagine that that flying, can you imagine the people in the room going, oh, well, at least he’s honest, or she’s honest. Very unlikely. [00:34:00] Because that’s all promise related stuff.

Because, ’cause the word promise is about the future. It’s about what’s going to be, what may be, what may not be right, and it requires the future to appear. But we don’t use the word promise, the specific word that’s used. And oftentimes it’s the only time in our public life that the word ever appears is vow.

And immediately you can feel the gravitational field shift with this word vow. It has a different sensibility about it. It’s, it’s not about the future. That’s why. So sometimes even the straight ahead ceremony gets it right. And I’m, the, the, the rightness I’m thinking about is there’s a moment where the person at the front of the room will say something in the order of, um, do you take, do you [00:35:00] commit to so on?

Pay attention to the, to the tense of the word. It’s not talking about the future, it’s talking about. Now do you, as a result of saying this, are you making it so is it coming to pass by virtue of occupying this place and saying these things? Well, we don’t believe in the power of the spoken word very much in our public life, sadly.

So anything goes right and the page is turned in the next news cycle anyway, so it doesn’t really matter and so forth, such as our poverty. But there was a time when what you uttered your old, for example, were you in the world, your standing was, was hovering there, you see? And uh, and that meant something.

So these are not those days, [00:36:00] but in some fashion I was reminded of all this stuff and uh, I proceeded like many a thing was at stake. In the time that, uh, we agreed to get after something.

Tami Simon: you said that there’s an alchemy that’s possible in ceremony when, when the ceremony is done with, this is my language now, this kind of heart and intention and wholeness. And I’ve heard you say that ritual is a type of Congress with the divine. So I really liked that.

And I’d love to know when you think of the ceremony and in order for the alchemy to occur, these are the ingredients. This is it. This is the recipe, this has to happen, these other things. Okay, maybe, but this is minimum viable. For alchemy?[00:37:00]

Stephen Jenkinson: Well, I don’t know that recipe serves as well to think it in those terms, but I, I take the spirit of the question. Um, do you know, in my jurisdiction until fairly recently, it was a legal requirement for the officiant to say some version of, and you’re gonna recognize this instantly, the following. If anyone here knows any reason why this should not proceed, speak now or forever hold your peace, what’s going on there?

Well, partly it comes from the days when we didn’t have, you know, excellent record keeping. So bigamy was always a possibility. There’s certainly that, that’s the prosaic part, but there’s a poetic mythic. Turbulent part. That’s to [00:38:00] play in that, in that, think about how people react typically. Now, if that even gets set, it’s all, and that normally the response is goaz some wise crack from the peanut gallery.

Maybe the whole thing is to let the steam out of that moment, to let the buildup, the kind of psychic alternative to the special day status of what’s going on. Just let it off gas and disappear. The same thing happens with the dead. I’ve never been, well, I, I, in all honesty, I don’t go to many, but I’ve never heard tale of a wedding in which the dead were formally addressed in the present tense, first person.

Some people might remember, remember grandma who didn’t live long enough to, but I’m talking about ancestry now. I’m not talking about one [00:39:00] generation removed. Those people never had a seat at the table. If there’s such a thing as ongoing presence of ancestral dead, do you think there might be some consequence in omitting them from the guest list?

So what do you suppose any reason why they should not proceed could possibly include? And surely the answer, the answer must include the following. You’re damn right. There’s good reason. This just shouldn’t, this shouldn’t proceed. There’s a, I’ve just remembered now a, a moment in one of the ceremonies we did, the way I concocted the thing is that most of the speeches were not given as part of the, the drunk fest in the.

In the aftermath of the wedding, most of the speeches were during the wedding. So the wedding was often seven, eight hours or longer, and all the invited guests turned [00:40:00] into orators. I mean, in spite of themselves, typically, and oftentimes reluctantly. But they did. And in this one, I’m remembering in particular, the ex girlfriend, if I’ve got this right, I think it was the ex-girlfriend of this groom to be, who was sitting there, hadn’t said a word and properly so they were going to speak last, but this woman from across the aisle, remember the, the no man’s land in between.

She got up and she spoke to him almost finger wagging, and she said something in the order of, I know you. I know what you’re like. I know what you’re like when you’re not at your best, and I know what you’re like with women. Well, I’m telling you just then. The whole place kind of collectively sucked in its breath because no one knew what was coming, and this certainly was not on the, uh, invitation.

Was it some notion that you [00:41:00] would revive some premarital moment in the betrothed life that didn’t include the person opposite them that was about the rest of their lives? That’s real and surely to God amongst grownups that belongs because that’s part of the, that’s part of what’s going on. That’s part of what’s, what’s coming.

That’s part of what’s not dispelled. How, for example, not my term, again, you, you’re familiar with the term. I, I think it’s biblical and the two shall become one, which of course a lot of sort of psychological practitioners look into scance at the notion of the two becoming one. It has, it has its problems.

That’s, that’s a true thing. But if there’s any notion that something’s supposed to end as a consequence of you saying, yes, that’s what I’m [00:42:00] proposing. Something is supposed to end when you say, I do. What’s that? Something? And the answer is, every possibility that you entertained, not just romantic possibility, virtually every other sort of meaning of life possibility that you entertained in principle is unlikely to proceed or to occur.

Now by virtue of saying yes to somebody, you’re saying, I guess not to a lot of other somebodies and all those possibilities that that live, live there. And that’s why we use the word bless. And it’s important to know that etymologically, the word bless is related in the old Anglo-Saxon, uh, Northern Germanic association with the verb to bloody.

So blessing [00:43:00] is seeing two endings. That’s what it means to seek someone’s blessing, is to seek their witness and their, their commitment to enacting the ending that you’re proposing to put into effect. Now by virtue of saying yes to this person like this, now

Tami Simon: it’s a very silly, lemme just clarify

a couple things here, Steven, ’cause I just wanna clarify.

Alright, so this notion,

uh, does anybody have a reason why this wedding shouldn’t continue? What you’re proposing here and what happened in this eight hour? Wedding is that there was a dialogue around that. In this case, the ex-girlfriend said whatever she said, and the groom then had some comments like, we’re gonna process all the reasons why this might be a problematic union before the two [00:44:00] become one.

Is that what you’re saying? This is gonna become a, a group discussion?

Stephen Jenkinson: No.

Not at all. Um, here’s, here’s the thing. I’ve, I’ve assembled these people in a field or a hall, wherever we are. The, my presumption is not that they become ceremonial, a droid as a consequence of gathering, of being willing to be there and me sitting with him.

That’s not what it means. So I’m up against it. Before we begin, I’m contending with this ceremonial illiteracy that I referred to earlier before we begin. So I’m not presuming. Okay, good. So all’s well, it starts well, it doesn’t start well. And the poverty’s that are cultural, principally not personal, cultural manifest early and frequently.

I mean, people will personalize the manifestation, but really if you [00:45:00] listen carefully, it’s the cultural poverty that’s manifested most emphatically in ceremony time translation. Most people don’t know what to do, and so we defer or we default to the kind of 15 minute walkthrough or to the preference to do nothing of the kind, to not replicate that in any way, not get close to it in any way and so on.

As to what? What’s a witness’s job? I mean, that’s a term, again, I didn’t invent it. It’s a very useful term to apply to the people you’re asking me about now. What’s their gig? Well, one of them, you know, there, there’s a witness that’s a passive thing, like to a car wreck in front of you. And then there’s a witness That’s an active thing.

That’s the one we use the term bear witness. To refer to bear witness means to carry it over time, to carry the facts. [00:46:00] The fact that you were there, the fact that you can’t not, not have been there now, that it’s a real thing that you are in on, that the people in question are gonna have a, a deeply challenging time over the years to remember any of it with any accuracy, nevermind to live up to what they said.

And they’re gonna need a tremendous amount of help just to be mindful of the deal struck that day, that begins to whisper something about the obligations. The, the work, the code of work that being a witness asks of you. So you really should attended these things with great circumspection. Asking yourself whether you’re willing to walk that long walk with these people when they cease to turn to you, when they [00:47:00] proceed as moderns tend to do so.

Self-efficient, so reassured of themselves, at least overtly.

Tami Simon: Okay. That’s very helpful. Uh, in terms of the role of the, the people who are gathered. Now, you said another thing about the ancestors and how often maybe someone will say, I’m sorry grandma couldn’t be here to see this, but that we don’t explicitly name and.

Bring forward, invoke the presence, welcome the presence of our ancestors. Are you suggesting that that would be something that would help the alchemy of the ritual?

Stephen Jenkinson: Sure, but not only help the alchemy of the ritual, but help the invitees as well. I mean, there’s an old adage in the ritual game. It goes like this, give them a seat.[00:48:00]

They’re likely to take the seat. Don’t give them the seat. They’re likely to take the hall, not out of retribution, but out of a sense of an exaggerated sense of having been banished, having been forgotten, having been cast aside or left aside. Which I mean is, if that doesn’t describe the modern era, I don’t know what does.

I mean where self-sufficiency is the God. And the notion that the dead could ever need anything from us virtually never breaks the surface. So it’s a one-way street, isn’t it? We even in your question, it was a one-way street. You invoke them to help the ceremony, but the real practitioners would know that you’re pleading with them to appear for their sakes

Tami Simon: too.

Help me understand [00:49:00] how it’s, for their sake, how it enriches benefits, gives them something that’s for their sake. Well, who, who

Stephen Jenkinson: are we to them? I mean, it’s one question, who are they to us? But who are we to them needs at least as much exercise. And I dare say most modern people that I know, sophisticated, modern people, would kind of freeze at the answer.

So, I mean, maybe this is the best way I could, uh, give you a, a, a sense of it as I, as I’ve experienced it. So I was teaching in, in England, I think it was maybe the first time, this is a long time ago now. And as you can tell by my look, probably ancestrally, I was in England for 20 minutes at least. And so at some point in the proceedings, I don’t know what got into me to say it, but I stopped an apropos of nothing in particular.

I [00:50:00] said, I leaned on the pulpit. Pulpit, I’m not sure that’s what it was, but let’s say pulpit. And I said to them, do you ever think of us and the poor English, being English, looked at each other and then looked down like, is he really asking this or is it just an effect? And I no, I, I let them know I’m asking you now, and I’m not likely to proceed until you answer.

Do you ever think of us. We who are what you became when you left here. And there was a long pause. And finally a number of people agree allowed that they don’t like virtually ever. I said, okay, now ask me, ask you what? Ask me if I ever think of you. And finally, somebody, did God bless him? And I said all the time.

And there was [00:51:00] weeping in the hall from both sides of that answer. And I could feel the, I mean, I feel a little bit of it now when I think about it. So if this is true between the living, do you think this should be extinguished? Because one of us parties to this, to this, uh, nostalgia dies. Like I said earlier, if there’s any reality to what we would call the dead.

If there’s any enduring presence, then I, I, I’m going with the notion that it’s probably a reciprocal presence with reciprocal needs and obligations and opportunities, and I think we are their latest, greatest chance to get it right. I think that’s who we are to them, and inclusion in our peak moments might be the least of the things that we could afford them.

Tami Simon: I understand that young people came to you teaching in the Orphan School of [00:52:00] Wisdom and they’re saying, please help us make our ceremony real and deep and meaningful and not this performative thing.

I get it. I get that. Very many people came to you and said, please help us. And you took some people through ceremonies over the years, but I’m still trying to name, this is the thing, your centering in your life at your age of holy matrimony as being so important to our culture and our time. And this is my language now to love and the power that love has in our communities and in our world, and something you’re trying to liberate.

Its healing waves. This is me speaking once again. There’s something in it that you would focus on [00:53:00] this topic now that I still haven’t quite heard you say that I want to hear you say that I’m groping towards.

Stephen Jenkinson: Why now? Why matrimony now?

So matrimony does not have the word bride in it or bride equivalent doesn’t have the word groom in it either, for that matter. It doesn’t have the word woman in it. It matrimony doesn’t. It has the word mother in it of all things. Now, why is an event that’s designed to find a way to join two disparate humans in some kind of ongoing maybe making thing?

Why does it have the word mother at its center of all things? [00:54:00] The mony part. The suffix means something like the, the tracks or traces by which you can recognize that a certain something is that something and not anything else. It’s kind of means something like repertoire a mother’s repertoire. That’s what matrimony the word literally means, a mothering repertoire.

So it’s, it should be clear immediately then to anybody whose mind is, who’s inquisitive on the matter, that this is not a question of procreation, principally that the mothering in question here is a question of, uh, culture mothering. It’s mothering culture. That’s what matrimony is. It’s the seeing to it.

The, [00:55:00] the fundamental of its working parts. Okay? Now, to set it in some kind of contrast, there’s an English word patrimony that virtually nobody uses anymore. I’ve never heard, I don’t think anybody use it. It’s important, I think, in this moment to acknowledge that I’ve never heard anybody invite anyone into the holy state of patrimony in any comparable way to the quote, holy state of matrimony.

There’s no, there’s no parallel, there’s no coefficient. So what’s going on there? And the answer is, ancestrally. Patrimony preceded matrimony in, its, in its workings and its doings and so forth. And to make a, an enormously elaborate and eloquent thing sort of simply said for the moment, I would simply say to you, you could think of it this way.

The repertoire of fathering culture. [00:56:00] Patrimony is the repertoire of building the house of culture. The bricks and mortar of working culture and matrimony is the willingness to move into that house and craft from it. Hearth, health, heart, heal home. That’s why I did it.

Stephen Jenkinson: I’ll tell you this, since I was there, I was on the front lines of trying to conjure this thing that I’ve been trying to describe to you now, and I can tell you with no exaggeration at all, that for every person that seemed just curious, that was wi being, that was willing to be drawn, as you’ve just described, even in a cursory way, there was probably two or three people, at least for every one [00:57:00] of those who were vague in their disenchantment or outright hostile you, the adversity that we let ourselves in for and these undertakings.

I have to say deeply surprised me. I wasn’t really ready for it. And I, I say in the book, I realized finally where I miscalculated, and it was a, it was a steep miscalculation, which, uh, if I had have done it differently, it may not have gone as it did, but the miscalculation did come down to this. You remember the aisle, remember the ch changing of the seating arrangements so that people were facing each other?

Those people were the, the, the get the family and friends of the two, pe two, two folks in question. I proceeded like these were [00:58:00] like, these were the tribal days. So it conjured in some, as a memory of it in the seating. And I thought if, if enough material change, orchestration change. Architectural change was brought to bear upon the proceedings.

There’d be room enough to think, a different thought to reconsider, and this was my miscalculation. It turns out that there weren’t two tribes after all. I thought there were. I thought the seating arrangement reflected that, but in actual fact, these two alleged tribes were actually subsets of basically the same tribe.

Meaning these people were dominant culture North American folks for the most part, and they were, I suppose, after their fashion confounded in a way, maybe not dissimilar from the way you’ve just [00:59:00] articulated your own uncertainty about what I’m talking about here now. So, so I miss that. You see, and in missing it, I counted on something being there that wasn’t really there.

It turned out that the second tribe, if you will, were the few people who were in on the architectural renovation of the thing with me. ’cause I didn’t do this alone. I, I deputized, if you will, a number of other people, typically older folks o over the course of those preparatory years. And, uh, and heavily employed them at the time of the ceremony proper.

That was the other tribe, which was, you know, half a dozen people. So there could be invited guests in the, in the couple of hundreds and three or four or five or six people. It’s not, it’s not a fair fight. Obviously not, and it wasn’t. So, yeah, of course there’s confounding because the thing I’m talking about [01:00:00] people haven’t seen in, as I’ve seen it, as I’ve experienced what I’m describing to you, people haven’t seen this thing and.

Okay, the, maybe the best way I could respond would be this. A mother slid up to me during the course of this thing, a mother of the bride, I think the poss the bride yet to be, and she said to me in a way that was far from kind, she said, is this a real wedding?

Now this was not as much inquiry as it was accusation. I think that’s kind of obvious. And had I been not so up against it at the time, I would’ve answered in a much more judicious way. I could have said to her, for example, understood. It’s very unfamiliar, isn’t it? And nothing [01:01:00] looks like what you thought it looked like, and you know what a real wedding is and you know, this is not it.

Fair enough. Or I could have said. Right. It’s an important question to wonder about. Tell me this, in those other weddings that you’re thinking of now, did you ever go to the front of the room and ask the celebrant what you’ve just asked me? But I didn’t, and I’m not proud of it for not having done. So what I said to her was, are you a real mother?

By which I meant at the time, do you honestly think that given the fact that you know, that your daughter asked me to do this for her, and that I’m doing my damnedest to see if I can pull it off, that what we might need from her mom at a moment like this is something closer to a kind of amen that doesn’t have necessarily a lot of understanding in it right now, [01:02:00] but that’s what happened.

So it, it, it’s, it, it, you know, cultural renovation. Or reconciliation is an exceeding the rough ride because you don’t begin with your saddlebags full, you don’t begin with affirmations and instincts for otherwise and all of that stuff. You begin with the poverty. That’s what you bump up against virtually immediately.

what I keep going back to and that I’m trying to see if my sense is connecting with your passion and conviction about helping people re-envision matrimony, is that as human beings, when we love and commit ourselves and take vows with another person, there’s something in that that asks the most of us in terms of what we give.

Tami Simon: And that [01:03:00] giving isn’t just to them, it’s to all of creation. And that’s part of what you’re pointing to in this book that I find so inspiring and I wanna see if I’m understanding that correctly and kinda weaving in with you in a way that makes sense.

Stephen Jenkinson: Again, I would say that that’s, that would be great.

You know, I, I haven’t seen a lot of what you’ve described, but can I imagine it? Absolutely. I can imagine it. Sure. And could I imagine that, uh, maybe one of the outcomes of people having a look at this book and thinking about these things prior to their own wedding events, producing something like what you’re describing or, or an instinct for it, or a, a proneness to it or a softening of the heart somewhere inside with that in mind?

Yeah, I, I mean, obviously one writes these things down in hopes that, that there’s, um, that things [01:04:00] can be mobilized on behalf of some kind of better day, uh, truly. But the other half of the story is I did see what I saw. And so do I feel giddy about the likelihoods? No, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t feel giddy about the likelihoods.

I’m, I’m pleased with the notion of the possibilities, certainly, and I think I’ve contributed in some way, made some, some offering in that direction in the book and, and in doing the events that I did and, and talking about it in the interviews that I’ve done re more recently and so on, and I’m happy to do it, you know.

But yeah, it’s, uh, if this were an easy thing, there’d be no need for this book and you wouldn’t have probably agreed to take it on. If this were available and readily accessible and instinctually pleasing a notion, I wouldn’t have had the adversity that I [01:05:00] experienced pretty routinely in trying to do it otherwise.

So simply put with, no, it’s not a curse. I’m just acknowledging that. We’re definitely up against some real cultural limitations, some learned poverty that we’ve grown deeply accustomed to, and in a strange way, almost, I was gonna say treasure, but at least value.

Tami Simon: Okay. Sober. Sober. Take very sober on, uh, where we are.

Here’s the note. I’d love to end on. Steven. I watched this short film, murmurings of the Land. Oh yeah. That was about you and your work. Very beautifully done with beautiful music. And towards the beginning, you say in a section on prayer that I’ve never heard a better prayer than this. And you, you applaud this prayer for its simplicity and [01:06:00] directness, and I’m gonna say it, and then maybe you can comment on it because it really moved me.

And the prayer. God help me. My boat is so small and your sea so immense. Yeah, it’s a

Stephen Jenkinson: doozy.

Well, I, I tell you why I, it moves me. So, uh, along with you, perhaps maybe a crossover of similar reasons,

something about the spirit of it that is so unexpectedly generous. I mean, in the literal sense of the term. I don’t mean giving, I mean generative productive in some way. The person who’s praying this prayer, if you examine it with any, even a cursory glance, you can see they’re not complaining. They’re not [01:07:00] bitching.

They’re not moaning. They’re not even say, they’re not even saying, can the deal be otherwise? They’re not even saying architecturally. It’s not fair. None of that’s in there. There’s no grudge. There’s grief, and there’s a world of difference between those two things. So instead of that, the prayer is saying something like this, here’s the best of my ability.

It seems to be how it is. My boat, my undertakings, my self determinations, my my best. The best part of me remains and will remain so small,

and the place in which I appear, the sea will forever be so immense. [01:08:00] And then we remember how the prayer begins. God help me. It doesn’t say what the help should look like. It doesn’t prearrange the deal, it submits and asks anyhow. And there’s just something, um, I guess I would call it deeply restoring about that kind of that beautiful instinct to credit the architecture of life with real credible purpose on the one side and to credit our struggle in it.

At the same time, imagining that they both somehow belong and that the make’s mark is on both of them.

Tami Simon: Steven Jenkinson culture [01:09:00] activist. Generous Truth Telling Soul, author of the New Sounds True Book, matrimony ritual Culture, and the Heart’s Work. Thank you so much for being our guest here on Insights at the Edge and for your new book and for your life’s work.

Thank you. Thanks for the invitation.