Holding Onto the Rope
The Wider Quiet
A small wedding symbol that came to mean more over time.
There is a small piece of white rope in our home that has followed Paul and me through our entire married life.
It isn’t decorative. It isn’t expensive. And to anyone else, it would probably look like the sort of thing that belongs in a junk drawer rather than a place of honor.
But it has stayed with us all these years, no matter where home has been.
The rope is made of three strands, fused together at both ends. It has yellowed with age, as old white things tend to do, but it is still intact. Still strong. Still holding.
And somehow, so are we.
When we were married, we decided on an ecumenical ceremony. Because our families came from different religious traditions, and because the church itself was familiar to nearly everyone attending, we were married in the Catholic church my parents belonged to, but without a full Mass or communion. It seemed like the simplest way to keep the peace and make everyone feel comfortable.
That part, thankfully, worked.
Because it was a Catholic church, there was always going to be a priest officiating. But to balance things out, we also asked a Protestant minister to take part in the ceremony.
I’m not entirely sure the priest was thrilled with that arrangement, but he complied. Whether out of generosity, diplomacy, or perhaps a well-timed donation from my parents, I’ll never know.
During the rehearsal, the priest asked the minister what vestments he planned to wear.
The minister, who was practical and unbothered by such things, simply said he’d be wearing a nice suit.
The priest seemed surprised by this and offered to lend him vestments from the church, but the minister politely declined.
So, on our wedding day, a warm June Sunday afternoon, there we all were in our proper places: the priest in his vestments, the minister in his nice suit, and Paul and me at the altar in all our wedding finery.
The priest spoke first and did what priests do. He talked about the sanctity of marriage, the blessings of children, and how God would watch over us. It was thoughtful and kind and exactly what you would expect at a church wedding.
It was lovely.
But it was the minister’s part that stayed with me.
When it was his turn to speak, he began by saying that he had gone to several hardware stores earlier that day looking for a very specific kind of rope — one made of three intertwined strands. After a few tries, he said he had finally found the right one.
Then, from the pocket of his nice suit, he pulled out a small piece of white rope, no more than five inches long.
He looked at Paul and me and explained that the three strands represented husband, wife, and God. Then he lit a match and carefully sealed both ends so the strands would remain permanently fused together.
He said that a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.
Then he gave the rope to us with his blessing.
I never forgot that moment.
At the time, I don’t think I fully understood why it affected me so deeply. Perhaps because even then, it felt like more than a wedding illustration or a borrowed bit of ceremony. It felt like something we were being handed to carry.
Years later, I learned that the phrase the minister used came from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes 4:12. I’m not especially religious, and I didn’t know the phrase back then. But somehow that hardly seemed to matter.
Because over time, the rope stopped being about a wedding ceremony or theology and became something else entirely.
It became a symbol of what it means to stay.
To endure. To keep holding when life asks more of you than you expected.
And life does ask.
It asks through ordinary years and difficult ones. Through uncertainty, reinvention, disappointment, grief, change, moves, risks, and the thousand small adjustments that make up a life shared over time.
Marriage, at least as I have come to understand it, is not held together by the beauty of the ceremony or the eloquence of the vows. Those things matter, of course. But they are only the beginning.
What holds over time is something quieter.
A willingness to remain. A decision made again and again, to keep pulling in the same direction.
To hold onto the rope, especially when the ground shifts beneath you.
That small piece of rope still has its place in our home. Most of the time it simply rests there, easy to overlook unless you know its story. But there have been years when it has felt less like a keepsake and more like a lifeline.
And although it has yellowed with age, the strands are still firmly fused together.
Still strong. Still holding.
For me, at least, that has come to mean something simple and lasting:
Whatever else life may ask of us, we can endure it together.
This piece is part of The Wider Quiet.
Carol.