I’ve written a lot of different types of nonfiction but this is a new one. Recently my friends asked me to write a reading for their wedding. It might be one of my favorite things I’ve written and I wanted to share it (albeit with their names changed for privacy). Naturally it incorporates history, a photograph, and church architecture…
 

The Measure of Things

Last Christmas, I was walking around Barcelona, using up all of my data because Jack was walking around Paris with a ring in his pocket. I was waiting to hear the news. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

It was during one of these waiting-days that I stumbled on the chapel of St. Lucy in the Gothic District. For what it’s worth, St. Lucy is the patron saint of light and clear thinking. The chapel was built in 1257 and it is one of the oldest surviving churches in the city. Its façade is pockmarked from civil-war shrapnel and its corners are soft from millions of hands touching history. It was dignified in its sturdy, Romanesque construction and had a perfectly symmetrical design, except for a strange carving– a beveled edge on the western corner carved 14 and ½ bricks high. This bevel was a medieval unit of measurement in the old marketplace. It had no name but it represented one.

Measurements aren’t rational things. We pretend they are but at the end of mathematics and reason, measurements are simply a value that two people agree on. This much is permanent. This will be enough. This equals one.

I photographed the bevel, because on that day I saw in stone what I had heard Jack describe in Tabitha: a new unit he had chosen to measure all things of value. What is intellect: one (Tabitha). What is beauty: one (Tabitha). What is love… It was clear to me that he had carved this measurement in stone.

This measurement (which is being ratified today) is like all units. It is irrational and untranslatable. But there is no more-perfect inch nor any improvement that could be made to the meter. There is only our private measure of things; perfect units to build with together from now on.