Matrimony in Real Time
Stephen Jenkinson
March 21-22, 2026
Victoria, BC, Canada
Ten seats remain
It’s a hundred years since Eliot unleashed The Waste Land on the western imagination. You might remember “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land …” He followed with The Hollow Men three years later. You might remember “That’s the way the world ends/ Not with a bang, but a whimper.” It was, altogether, a stunning, stilling post-war, front-line bit of reportage. In a phrase, the west blanched, blinked, went desperately, disconcertedly on, hoping in a roaring twenties sort of way that it wasn’t as bad as all that.
The deferral of the spirit work by one generation begets the fate/spirit hangover complex of the next generation: so it seems to me. So it seems to be.
In Matrimony, I summoned up the memory of a ceremonially alert, conscious, generationally tasked culture, awakened to its turbulence, enlivened by the stirring of the young towards each other, rooted in radical hospitality prompted by the advent of the stranger in its midst.
This is more than a hint about something that might be done. This is a way of doing something.
This session will be my translation of the beguiled heart’s work into the citizen’s spirit work, for the sake of a time unnerved by its troubles.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
Stephen Jenkinson has invited Karen Paule, one of the Grandmothers of Ceremony from the Orphan Wisdom wedding days and Sean Aiken, whose wedding Stephen conducted, as his honoured guests for this event.
