Recently I attended a wedding in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. The bride was the daughter of an old family friend. The beautiful young woman, radiant in her white wedding dress, used to be a curly-haired toddler with a Minnie Mouse doll always in her arms. The first time I met her, all those years ago, she was stumbling around in diapers. And now here she was all grown up, being given away by her beaming father to a strapping young man in a rented tuxedo.

At the reception after the wedding there was a short video presentation of memories from the newlyweds’ respective childhoods. Among these were a couple of old photos of me, scenes from afternoons decades past playing with the now-grown-up bride and her siblings and cousins at various family barbecues and Christmas parties. There were photos of people making silly faces for the camera. There were photos of grandparents smiling with delight as they held their grandchildren up for the lens. There was so much laughter then. People were happy, even though I remember distinctly that, in many ways, life was very hard.

As I watched the video, I thought of all the planning that went into every occasion in those days. People worked to prepare food for two dozen people, to buy the raw ingredients at the grocery store, to stock the store shelves, too, and to raise the food in the first place. I showed up and ate and relaxed and made merry, but behind the enjoyment of the hour there were countless man-hours of toil. And then there were the hardships that come into every lifetime: the funerals, the heartbreaks, the pains of the body and the soul.

After the video played, the lights came back on and the newly married couple left their special table at the front of the ballroom to walk over to their respective parents. The MC announced that the bride and groom would each be giving their mothers a sack of rice weighing as much as their babies did when they were first born. As each mother received the bag of rice into her arms, her face assumed a look I don’t think I have ever seen before. One could see them returning in their minds to the day they first held their baby. But between that day and the wedding day came thousands and thousands of other days, filled with cooking, cleaning, feeding, worrying, sacrifice after sacrifice for the adults that their children would one day become. The sack of rice each woman held became almost invisible, as I gazed from my table at their strangely beautiful faces. These two women had performed a lifetime of daily miracles. They had taken the material things of the world—rice, clothes, soap, diapers, all the things that are needed to raise a human being—and converted them into twenty-plus years of peace, happiness, learning, and love for their child. We often say, rightly, that life is a miracle. But this does not apply just to conception and birth. Every moment is miraculous. Every mother does something that no magician could ever dream of accomplishing: turning the material into the immaterial, turning nourishment and bath times and bandages and the occasional dose of cold medicine into a human person, an eternal being.

How indispensable rice is. Without it we die. And yet, how like nothing it is, too. Compared with the soul, the things of the body seem shabby and pale. The two women, two mothers, each held a bag of rice in arms that once had held little babies of the same weight. Decades and countless other bags of rice later, their arms gave away what their hearts had loved. The reward for their sacrifice was the parting of their child from the home in which they had received all they needed so that they could now make a home of their own.

But there is so much more. We—all of us—have been given life by a mother, given of her own body, nursed on her own milk. The body, God willing, grows up healthy, but all of it is for the sake of the soul that flies free of the material world. Only a mother can look at her child and know this most mysterious of human experiences. The rest of us can simply gaze in awe.