Here Comes the Bride

I have always been uncomfortable with prayer/chapel veils for Catholic women. Growing up in Catholic school, only the Home School Association families at our First Friday masses wore them, so naturally I thought them odd, awkward, and out of place, just like those kids. (Ah, the "innocence" of childhood thought!) It wasn't until this June, when I attended GIVEN, that I began to understand what the veil really meant, and the beautiful power it imparts.

Several young women at the conference wore their veils during mass, and of course my initial gut reaction was, well now we know who the super Catholic women are - an absurd thought in an environment of all super (awesome) Catholic women, myself included. On the last day, I sat at brunch with a woman who had decided over the course of the week to change her action plan to making and selling affordable prayer veils. She hadn't grown up wearing a veil, but rather it was a conscious choice she had recently made, and it had transformed her prayer life, she said. The veil signaled to her a vital shift in where she was and what she was doing. She was draped in the presence of God. She said to try it out, I might like it more than I thought I would.

Since June, I have thought about the veil quite often, though never getting the nerve yet to wear one. Last night, during taize prayer, I sat in silence pondering a statue of the Blessed Virgin, Queen of Heaven. As I stared, I imagined I had a veil on my head, and I was struck by the feeling of intimacy that it evoked. It was similar to that feeling of comfort when I put my hood up on a day I'm not ready to face the world, or when it's cold. The hood isolates me in a cocoon of warmth and privacy. The veil - my imagined veil - took that feeling to a whole new level, because I was not alone in my warmth, but with God. I was the bride, awaiting the Bridegroom.

Culturally, weddings are a big deal, mostly for the party. The costs have gone through the roof with lavish plans and excessive decorations. Wise relatives will gently remind the woman that she is becoming a wife, not just a bride. Bride, they say, lasts for one day, while wife lasts a lifetime. And while that is a helpful reminder in the midst of discussing flowers and cakes and open bars, it also diminishes the importance of being a bride, a role that does last a lifetime.

I have been planning my wedding since I was five. I have pre-Pinterest inspiration scrapbooks and detailed execution plans. I have always been able to picture myself as a wife, internalizing the gentle reminders of the wise relatives. Yet, in all my planning and preparing, I have always struggled to actually picture myself as a bride. The one aspect I have never been able to plan is my wedding dress. Unsurprisingly, I never liked the idea of wearing a veil on my wedding day, either. They seemed old-fashioned and unnecessary to me, and ultra-feminine in a way with which I was, for whatever reason, uncomfortable. But the wedding veil and the chapel veil are two representations of the same truth: all women are brides. Religious sisters wear a veil because they are married to Christ; they are his brides each and every day. At mass, we come to the wedding feast - our wedding feast, as we are united with Christ our Bridegroom in the Eucharist. On her wedding day, a woman wears a veil not in deference to her husband, but in recognition of her role to grow intimately with this man and to bring him to Heaven.

A bride is always on the brink of anticipation, of pure joy, of a transformative moment, of intimacy. In order to get through 50 years of being a wife, a woman probably needs to reinvigorate herself occasionally with the energy of being a bride. The same goes for her relationship with Christ. A lifetime with someone - even the Lord - is bound to have its moments of quiet stability and even questioning and doubt. By wearing a veil, a woman has a very concrete way to remind herself of her intimate and joyful relationship with Him. By wearing a veil, a woman makes manifest in the world the reminder that we should all still be on the brink of anticipation every day to be with the Lord in Heaven. That is where our true marriage and calling lies.

As a culture, we need to restore the beauty and importance of the bride. We need to remove terms like Bridezilla from our vocabulary, and remove the pressures and stresses that can lead to that term being true. We need to teach our little girls what being a bride really means - that bride is a calling in itself beyond wife, beyond mother. In our time of instant gratification, we need to restore a sense of waiting, of anticipation.

The liturgical year gives us Advent to restore and reinvigorate us for the year ahead, where we will surely face crises and dull moments, and need to recall a time of anticipatory energy. This season, the Church as a whole puts on a veil and waits as a bride for her Bridegroom, draped in the intimacy of anticipation.

What can we give? What can we do, as individuals and as a culture, to restore anticipation, to restore bridehood in our lives and in our communities? As for me, I think it is time to finally get a veil.