Weddings are, like, the biggest deal ever. Also, not a big deal at all. Part 1

Last week, 'a Monday, a good friend of mine asked me if I, or anyone I knew, was ordained and could perform a wedding. I told her about my dad, who is ordained seeing as how he is/was a missionary and Rev. is a useful door-opening title for missionaries, and about our mutual long-time acquaintance Ben, who is a youth pastor in town, and I forgot to mention my friend Maux who got ordained one time just to perform a wedding on a beach for some friends of hers, which is as good a reason for ordination as I know.

At the same time, I also asked my friend why she was asking, and she said that she was getting married that next weekend, if she could pull it off, seeing as how her affianced was going to be shipped out to Iraq at the end of June for 15 months, and she knew, I mean, knew, and the families were happy with the idea, and even suggested the this-weekend nuptials.

But it came out that she wasn't really asking me so much about anyone I knew, per se, rather me, specifically, re: ordained persons, and how even though Kansas doesn't require somebody official to say you are married, you can do it yourself, that the two of them would like me to do it, if I could. I was honored, quite so, as you might expect, and so I looked up my options on the internets, and decided to do it.

I decided to go with the more universalist option I found over a slightly more theologically distinct option, since the theologically distinct option costs, like, fifty bucks, and the universalists are free. All I had to do to be a Rev. in that church was believe in 1) religious freedom for all faiths, and 2) doing the right thing, and even though I'm a lot more specific than that when it comes to my own theology and praxis, I was willing to just roll with it for the sake of a friend, and signed up for a grade A, legal, internet ordination.

The bride and groom aren't really religious types anyway, and are pretty laid back, so they asked me to do a laid-back service, which they thought I could pull off. I think I did. Come Saturday morning, I officiated, gave a short homily as it were, oversaw vows, gave charges, and they even let me pray for them, and we signed papers, and had a substantial breakfast/lunch afterwards, and fielded the kinds of general, skeptical/reverent questions from the family that I can assume ministers always field at these sorts of events (and, I suppose, at all kinds of events in folk cultural religianity here in the US.). We did the whole ceremony in a park, with an arch and balloons provided by Austin, and we played on the playground afterwards. It was beautiful and simple and so right, and so was the weather.

The homily I gave was tailored to the couple, obviously, but the main point I tried to make was to ask why we were there at a wedding at all, considering we didn't have to be. And the two main reasons I gave were that marriage is, like, a really big deal, and not a big deal at all.

Heck, those are the two reasons I even officiated the wedding in the first place: I thought it was a really big deal, and I wanted to be there, and be supportive, and I also thought it wasn't a big deal at all, it's so right, so let's just do the thing.

Now, I've got more thoughts on the issue than would fit in the fifteen minute time limit for the whole ceremony (self-imposed) or were appropriate for that venue, so I compressed it, and tailored it, as you'd expect. But I'd like to expand on them a little more, more than I did there at least, and this seems like a better venue for general thoughts.

A lot of what I said then had to do with the fact that the bride and groom are going to be apart for most of the next 18 months, barring a single furlow. So, if you'll forgive me, and I do apologize, what I'm going to say here will be more universal than what I said on Saturday, and like all universals, it'll be less meaningful than a particular would be. Certainly less meaningful than being up there with a good friend and seeing her very real sparkling eyes and smile as she married the man she wants to meld the rest of her life with. But we'll have to deal. So, here's my take on weddings, then. Culled and edited and expanded on, I remind you, from something I wrote for two particular and wonderful people, and while, aiming for the universal, still completely from within my context, as everything I write is:

Marriage . . . Big Deal? Not a Big Deal? Yes, Both.

When you go celebrate a wedding for someone, right off you've got to ask yourself why. I mean, those two people standing up there, walking down the aisle, or appearing from the pastor's special secret door that far too many churches have for some reason, or coming in from the side, and/or lighting candles, and/or sliding down a zipcord, and/or jumping out of cakes, or just standing up and walking over from the tree, or whatever, those people didn't have to have a wedding.

They could have easily gotten together on their own, in secret, and gotten married. Kansas law permits it, for example; you don't even need an ordained me up there overseeing the whole thing like I did this last Saturday. It's all very catholic now. Or heck, they could just decide their love is enough, and who needs a marriage, it's just a piece of paper, and they could make promises to each other in secret and get on with their lives. But instead, they decide to bring you and all these other people in on it, to let you in on the secret, and more importantly to get you all to help keep and maintain the secret of their love for each other. And so you show up to affirm that. To be like, "Right on. You're taking a huge step, and we want to affirm that." So that's part of why you're there: you get to be a secret keeper.

But there's more to the big deal-ness of weddings than just the presence of the audience, a large part of it is because those two people up there, and this is really big, I think, have transcended their natural human tendency to be selfish and self-centered, and any time that happens, it is a cause for celebration. So, especially with two people you know and love. It's not everyday humdrum to give yourself up. It certainly wasn't with the wedding I did this weekend. Those two people were giving up, at the very least, 18 months of potential freedom to vow to love each other. They bound themselves to each other even in absence. That's amazing.

But for any wedding, the two people choose to give themselves up for each other, to give up their independent lives and their independent hopes and dreams to form this new project, this micro-community within a larger community that we've termed marriage, to morph their independence into interdependence, into shared lives and shared hopes and shared dreams. That's exciting. And if you look around you, it's not the norm for something like this to happen. Not in our culture. Not anymore, at the very least. Maybe not ever. People tend towards selfishness, especially in relationships.

And, to be honest, even though most marriages start out with all these ideals at the wedding, many times, they lose all the luster, and people get selfish again. The marriage couldn't overcome it. But it's that hope for a better world that drives us as humans back to the marriage project again and again. Maybe this one will work. Maybe they'll make it. Maybe people can be selfless. Weddings are the hope that people can be more than animals, people can be human. So if we can agree, I'm talking here about the potential of a marriage, not every marriage that comes along. And what else is a wedding than a celebration of the potential of a marriage?

Besides that, though, there are all kinds of reasons that we always give for a wedding being a big deal. It's such a huge commitment. It's a choice for forever. It's excluding other sexual partners. You're merging finances. You're leaving a family to create a family. Etc, etc, amen.

But we all know marriage is a big to-do, that's why most people spend so much on the ceremony, and people freak out about it, and there's this massive industry with magazines filled mostly pictures of depressed women in dresses (I always read those for the articles, if ya believe it), and parents tell their kids things like, "Well, when you grow up and get married and have kids you can . . ." when they want to justify their parenting decisions, and people are always trying to find a person to marry so they aren't lonely anymore, and little girls play wedding, where the older one gets to be the groom because she can do the threshold-carrying.

But I also want to talk about why it's not a big deal; it's the completely natural thing for people to do. Because I don't hear enough of that, how this is the right and normal thing for emotionally mature people to do when they fall in love -- to get married, to become this new person with another person, and to move on through life together.

First off, there's totally precedent. Looking back through history, we see this desire for two people to commit to each other playing out. Yeah, sometimes it was political, sometimes it was stupidly over-dramatically fakey-romantic, sometimes it was just convenient. But it's pervasive -- people coming together, giving up what they had on their own to go form this new marriage project. I mean, almost every culture has a specific wedding ceremony it practices. Cultures get people together. Look at how much we teach our young kids about it. And hey, it's even expected in a lot of our subcultures.

Marriage is even one of the primary metaphors God's relationship with his people in Christianity, our culture's folk religion. So when God his-very-self is trying to explain how much he loves everybody and wants us to know him and him to know us, he explains it using our terminology; he explains it being like a marriage. There was even a really strong parallel this weekend, with the whole Iraq deployment business, where that groom is like Jesus in , going off, and leaving the bride waiting for him to come back, and everyone's looking forward to that day, but no one knows how it's going to play out.

So, yeah, it's not a big deal because there's something very historically and culturally normative going on here.

But there's more than that. Another reason marriage is so normal is that people get lonely. And it's good for people to form deep, committed relationships they can rely on when they're lonely. Not even necessarily romantic relationships, singles take note. But when people are so in tune with each other, and so in love with each other, a wedding is just the natural outflow of that relationship.

But it is hard to stay committed to someone. People get selfish. So, like so many events in a healthy culture, we set it apart with a ceremony or a ritual, and in this case we bring along some friends and family to say, "Hey! You guys! Stay together! You can make it." Maybe even just to give the other people hope in a better world, right?

Another reason people so naturally get married is because it's a good, healthy place to raise kids. And kids are the future of humanity; if we want to keep it going, we need to have, at least, a few of them here and there. And it's hard to raise healthy kids on your own, without another person. And it's hard to be an emotionally healthy kid without a mom and a dad both, to learn how to relate to different genders. Not saying that you can't make it with a single parent, but it's harder. And it's a lot easier if your parents get along. On Saturday, I reminded everyone that we had the parents of the bride and groom there, and so I cut the kids talk off there, to try to avoid you know (wink), controversial subjects. But if you're going to have kids, a committed, loving relationship is a very good place to do it. I'm just sayin'.

One last reason I gave, and the last I'll give here, that it's so natural to have weddings is that people get horny. And there is no better place, in my opinion, to live out that natural and human desire for sex than in a committed relationship. I'd even go so far as to say it's best with a committed relationship where you've had some sort of ritual and people around to affirm your sexuality. In that kind of relationship context, sex can mostly easily become about maintaining this other person, not just consuming them like entertainment or just to get your own kicks. In other words, sex is better as a team event than masturbating with someone else's body.

Also, in my experience, there's something almost mystical about sex when you know you can completely be yourself, and this other person can completely be themselves, not worrying about what's next in the relationship, just being together, and you can trust each other, and you can let sex become, not this super-duper magical thing up on a pedestal, like a once-a-year trip to Disney World or whatever, but a wonderful, natural, normal everyday pleasure. With high points and low points, like eating, or sleeping, even, that is communal, though -- it symbolically and literally melds you into one person. Of course, with the two people I married, they're going to get some of that that once-a-year Disney World experience inside a committed relationship for this first bit here, so, congrats for that to them-- best of both worlds . . .

I don't know if what I'm saying here disparages 'sex without a preceding wedding'. I honestly don't even know if I want to disparage it or avoid disparagement, which. On the one hand, I don't want to play down things where people find connections, and can stave off the natural loneliness of life. On the other hand, I want people to have the substantial comfort of the ceremony and the community's encouragement as a context for sex; I've seen sex from that place and I think it's so much healthier and beneficial than it would be elsewhere. And I see a lot of people getting really hurt with sex in an amarital context. I dunno. Maybe I just think it works better in that context. It has the opportunity to be more everyday, and so can become more transcendant. I'll just direct anyone interested in a good spiritual take on this to Lauren Winner's delightful and insightful book Real Sex, which says what I'm trying to say here about a million times better.

From this point in the conversation on Saturday, we went on to the ring exchange and the vows and the charges and the making out and the clapping. It was all very beautiful, and I hope hope that it succeeds. That it becomes everything that we hoped for.

I didn't talk very much about people who are not getting married at that time. I did briefly mention that I didn't want all of that ceremony business to make it seem like single people have to get married to be happy or whatever. That marriage, because it is normal and natural, is also necessary. I left it at that, saying that I don't think we hear enough of that sentiment, but that was a wedding, and we were there for that. I've got a lot more to say about how weddings aren't a big deal, and how that relates to people not getting married, I'll come back to that tomorrow.