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This gloss of chuppah reminds me of the Jewish holiday, Sukkhot, during which people build impermanent, outside enclosures near their homes or temples with open or latticed roofs (roof must be open to sky), decorate them, and eat, visit, and sometimes sleep in them for a few days.  I remember the rabbi at our old synagogue speaking about how Sukkhot teaches that it's not buildings that protect/shelter us, but communities. Okey dokey, but it's true, as you suggest, Anne, that communities, like individuals, houses, marriages, can also be trouble, or evil, or go wrong.

My current way of approaching this thicket is to try to orient myself to scale in such a way as to break down its mattering whether things come in from the outside or go out from the inside.  This is my post-tragic outlook!
I think it also is behind my interest in breaking, or what Bharath called rupture.

In connection with scale, I think of the ending of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence:"

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide
Above the world is stretched the sky
No higher than the soul is high

The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand
The soul can split the sky in two
And let the face of God shine through

But East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart
And he whose soul is flat, the sky
Will cave in on him by and by

I believe that world moves towards growth.  At the same time, I recognize that for many people life in the world is devastating and I have myself been burned by this devastation of other people, though not nearly as much as many others have been burned.  I guess what I am groping for is a way to think about this tension without pressure towards reconciliation in any familiar terms.

At the memorial service I wrote for my mother several years ago, I read Adrienne Rich's "Tattered Kaddish," which seems to be an attempt of Rich's to hold this tension:

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field
messenger from earthmire gleaning
transcripts of fog
in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month
speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel
on ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though its windows blew shut
on the breathing room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason
to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

1989

One more:

I am currently reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi, and so as not to spoil the story (which is amazing) for anyone who hasn't read it, I won't say what it is about, but there is this passage that connects without spilling the beans:

"For the first time I noticed -- as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next -- that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting.  I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still.  My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized.  And I could accept this.  It was all right.  (It was daylight that brought my protest: "No! No! No! My suffering does matter.  I want to live!  I can't help but mix my life with that of the universe.  Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness -- how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view I have of things?  This peephole is all I've got!) I mumbled words of Muslim prayer and went back to sleep" (p. 177).