Thanks to my 93-year-old grandma I was among the millions up in the middle of the night watching the royal wedding of Prince William and the incredible Kate Middleton.

Grandma lives with my parents and I’m caring for her while they’re away this weekend. She was juiced to watch the show live and wanted me to wake her for it. I botched the plan by not knowing how to set my cel phone’s alarm, but my hunched over old grandma came through for us. I awoke at 3 a.m. when a hard-of-hearing old lady threw open my bedroom door and whispered, “JENNY!” at the top of her lungs.

I bolted out of bed and saw her standing there in her powdered blue pajamas. I followed her walker, clunk, clunk, down the hall and sank into the easy chair in her room. The volume on the TV was blaring for any time of day, but it was excruciating at that time of night. I suggested she put in her hearing aids. “WHAT?” “YOUR HEARING AIDS!” “OH, THANKS!” she hollored, and stabbed at the television with the remote to lower the sound.

There we were. Old lady. Young mother. Half asleep. By now she in her fuzzy lime robe and me in my cotton pink one. Both of us wore wistful smiles. Could it be that even an old woman still longs to feel like a princess?

The evening earlier while soaking at the hot springs I debated with my Dad and a new friend whether the marriage would last. We concluded Kates’s got the chutzpah but wondered if it would be enough to survive the papparazi. It just couldn’t go unnoticed that William stood at the altar beside his bride, the same place where as a boy he buried his mother.

Kate next to him looked beautiful. Yet I found the sermon’s message of spiritual beauty to be particularly stunning. The aged guy in the goofy hat spoke eloquently on the subject. The love he describes makes his opening line possible, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” He pressed on to talk about how two people in love help one another become their deepest and truest selves. My guess is few relationships reach this depth.

“Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed.”

If I were queen for a day, I would wish for love. Love begets princesses far beyond the spires of Westminster Abbey.

–Jennifer Sandmann

 

 

Advertisement