I ask them to bring a plate for the daily bread and either one cup or two, as they choose. These utensils should be ones that either already have meaning for them or will become sacred to them by virtue of being used in this ceremony.
The choices the couple makes say much about their values.
On this occasion, Jonathan has provided a plate from his grandmother’s kitchen. On it are two pieces of cinnamon toast—because while both Jonathan and Mary like cinnamon toast best of all for breakfast, they do not agree on just how cinnamon toast should be made. Wheat toast and lots of brown sugar for Mary Carrie, and egg bread with lots of butter and white sugar for Jonathan. They compromised by bringing both styles. (Jonathan’s father carried the plate of toast from where it was sitting on a side table to the couple.)
To the bride and groom: Take a small piece of the toast and feed one another that you may be reminded of your responsibility to nurture one another daily, and that you may recognize and celebrate your differences. Take a taste from each others style of cinnamon toast.
(With humorous awkwardness, they fed one another. Too big a piece to eat in one bite—much chewing, crumbs down the front of the bride’s gown.)
Minister: Many days will you share meals at the same table. From time to time, as you eat your daily bread, may you realize that the cinnamon toast has been sanctified by this ritual sharing—may it bring back memories of this day and the vows you have made.
There are two cups here. One is a pewter beer stein engraved with the couple’s initials and today’s date, bought by Mary Carrie and filled with beer brewed at home in his basement by Mary Carrie’s dad. (Her dad brought the stein from the side table to the couple.)
The other is a wineglass Jonathan bought from the restaurant where you were having dinner the night that marriage was proposed and accepted. You were drinking fancy French sparkling water, so Jonathan bought a case of the water to keep for special occasions. He has labeled the bottles with such dates as First Anniversary, Fiftieth Anniversary, Children, Christenings, Graduations, and Miscellaneous Great Days. (Jonathan’s mom brought a bottle of the water, and Mary’s stepmother carried the wineglass from the table to Mary and Jonathan.)
Minister: Drink to one another. (The bride and groom take turns giving each other a sip from the stein and the wineglass.)
As long as you live, may you never be too busy to celebrate whatever great occasions come to your lives. May you have many reasons to drink from these vessels.
Will the congregation please rise.
Jonathan and Mary Carrie, before this service you signed the legal papers. You have made vows, exchanged rings, and shared a symbolic meal. On behalf of the state of Ohio, and the religious community that I serve, what you desire has come to pass.
I ask those assembled to join me in this pronouncement, saying together:
“We, your family and friends, now pronounce you married!”
The bride and groom embraced and kissed with such intensity and passion, we should have considered bringing in a privacy screen for this part of the service. They were very good at kissing.
The congregation needed no cue. They had really become accomplished in their part of applauding and cheering at the right moments, and this was a very right moment, indeed. KAFOOM—it was the Fourth of July inside the hall. YAHOOO!
Minister: Come—let us make a blessing and benediction. (The immediate family stood around the minister and couple in a circle.)
The minister held out his hand, and the bride placed a hand on his, followed by the groom’s on top of hers, bride’s again, groom’s again, and minister’s on top.
Let us pray together, silently.
(There was quiet for a time.)
Minister: If a wedding is supposed to be joyful, then we have achieved that and more, I think. The spirit of joy here is one blessing of many.
Another blessing is this circle of family standing around you, their lives intertwined with yours.
Yet another blessing is all these friends who have witnessed this wedding on behalf of the larger human community.
More than this, Jonathan and Mary, may God bless and keep you;
May the sun of many days and years shine upon you;
May the love you have for one another grow and hold you close;
May the good true light within you guide your way on together,
May your dreams come true, and when they don’t, may new dreams arise.
And long, long years from now, may you look at one another and be able to say, “Because of you, I have lived the life I always wanted to live—because of you I have become the person I longed to be.”
God bless, God bless, God bless.
Let the music and feasting and dancing begin!
The congregation whoopied all over again.
HOORAY! YES! SIC ’EM, DAWG!
The bride and groom did not march down the aisle.
Marching was not called for. Dancing was.
When the accordionist struck up an old, slow waltz, the groom held up his arms in the dancing position, the bride stepped into his encircling arms, and they waltzed carefully, gracefully down the aisle and out the door and into the rest of their lives.
(Pause.)
You might want to take a break here.
Most of those of us at the wedding felt we needed one.
We went to the reception, where we feasted, danced, and more-than-moderately rejoiced into the evening. We went home with reluctance, drained of emotion and satisfied with having played our part in a memorable rite of passage.
What a time we had!
In the days that followed, we talked about why the wedding worked.
When you are ready to take up the consideration of this celebration, I’ll take you backstage, and we’ll have show-and-tell. Make no mistake, despite its apparent success, there was a struggle backstage. When ceremonies are made out of real lives and not manuals, the pull-and-push struggle is inevitable. The backstage ritual is more important than the show out front.
This review of the wedding is in eight short sections.
TROUBLE
Does it surprise you to know that what you’ve just witnessed is a second marriage? Much of what gives strength and beauty to this wedding is the fiasco of the bride’s and groom’s first marriages. They learned something the hard way the first time. And were determined to get it right this time. This is often the case in ritual celebrations. Why should it be any other way?
Lest I be misunderstood, let me make it clear, in no uncertain language, that if you got it right the first time, you are both lucky and to be congratulated. And if you had a traditional, formal white-gown wedding in a traditional setting with a traditional service and it all went well, leaving you with great memories, then you did the right thing for you. That’s the heart of my case—you should do what works for you and your family and friends.
Unfortunately, many couples do not succeed in doing so.
The first time, both Mary Carrie and Jon had married college sweethearts in June a week after graduation. Mary described hers as “the classic Barbie Doll royal fairy princess catastrophe.” Jonathan didn’t have much feeling for his wedding. “The bride and her mom planned it. They paid for it. All I had to do was get a ring, rent tuxes for me and three friends, and show up.”
Their experiences of first marriage were also parallel.
Both families were uneasy and unhappy over their children’s haste to marry. They felt the couple was too young, immature, and naïve. And sure enough, both first marriages had gone sour from the beginning. Significant changes occurred in each person during their first years out of college, as they pursued adult jobs and careers. They grew further apart rather than closer together.
For Jonathan, having a child right away greatly strained the relationship with his wife. She wasn’t ready for children. When Jonathan’s wife became pregnant again and had an abortion without first telling him, he went off and bought an expensive sports car for hims
elf without first telling her. The fierce fighting began that finished by ripping apart the already torn fabric of their relationship. On the third anniversary of their wedding, she filed the divorce papers. Happy anniversary.
It was a quieter story for Mary Carrie. “Love died,” she said. “Just slowly shriveled up and died. Our marriage became a prune.” When her husband confessed he had fallen in love with someone else and wanted out of the marriage, Mary Carrie wasn’t mad or hurt. She was relieved. She actually laughed. Not at the news but at recalling the title of a song she had heard the day before, which pretty well summed up her feelings: “You did not walk out on me—you only beat me to the door.” The marriage had lasted four years, and they went quietly out the door of wedded blisslessness together with a lot less noise and ceremony than they had made crossing the threshold of the wedding. When they divided up their possessions, there was little argument—neither of them wanted anything that reminded them of the marriage.
(An aside—thoughts about statistics on marriage and family.)
As a minister for thirty-four years who has officiated at hundreds of weddings, I can tell you that this account by Jon and Mary is all too common. It is far closer to the norm than we care to acknowledge.
More than half of all first marriages end in divorce.
Marriages that fail usually last about three years, and the highest rate of failure is in the first-marriage, under-twenty-eight-years-old age group. And these are the ones who are most likely to do the full show-biz wedding.
More than half of America’s children will be raised in the complicated circumstances of multiple parenting.
Eighty percent of the population is growing up in or near an urban environment, and seventy-five percent of all women and ninety percent of all men work outside and away from the home.
The world of once-upon-a-time is myth.
Mother and Father and Dick and Jane and Spot and Puff don’t live together anymore. If they ever did.
As for the prince-and-princess weddings that ignore these facts of life, we all know how happily real royal princesses live ever after their perfect weddings.
Real people should marry in a real world, not the world of make-believe.
As early as possible in the discussion of a wedding, I ask, “Where are the land mines—in your personal lives and relationship, and in your families?”
Anybody in the family really unhappy about the wedding?
Anybody in the family not speaking?
Any serious problems with religion, money, alcoholism, mental instability, disease, or infirmity?
I ask if the bride is pregnant, if they’ve been living together, and how the families feel about such things.
Is either set of parents divorced? And if so, what’s the climate between the parents? Are there stepparents to consider?
How did the families feel about the first marriage, and what’s left over and unresolved from that?
What’s the worst thing that could happen?
–
I have never officiated at a wedding that didn’t have an element of family discord in it somewhere. Never. Just as I have never officiated at a wedding that did not get out of hand in some way—more people involved, more expense, more of something than was expected or desired. And I have rarely met a young, first-time bride and groom whose wedding and marriage plans were grounded in reality.
–
Like life in general, things do get out of hand.
Life is trouble.
There are always land mines.
Not only in weddings, but in every other public rite of passage I know about.
UNTROUBLING TROUBLE
I mention these sobering matters not because I wish to address them in detail here, but because they were part of the consciousness of Mary and Jonathan when they came to see me, and matters of concern from the very outset of our conversations. “We don’t want it to be that way again for us—not the wedding, not the marriage, not the family life.”
They were eager that their wedding come in the context of the facts of their lives now. They wanted to do everything they could do to improve the odds for a meaningful, workable, satisfactory marriage. They knew what could go wrong. They knew where the big land mines were. They knew that weddings and marriage and life were all bittersweet affairs.
Their realistic view of the matters of marriage kindled enthusiasm in my own heart. I could really get involved in this wedding. I almost hugged them. If I had had a Roman candle and some sparklers in my office that day, I would have fired them off. Hooray for reality!
All progress in human affairs, and there is a great deal, you know, defies the cynics. And though I know it seems hard to believe sometimes, those who learn from experience often profit from their often-expensive education and don’t make the same mistake more than twice. The list of what we have learned the easy way is mighty short. Most of us do grow up, and in the growing up, wisdom somehow comes.
There is an essential truth about the rituals of life at stake here. A bedrock-granite kind of truth that should not be missed:
Reformation is essential to vitality in all rituals.
Everything that has life in it must change and grow or die.
The rites and ceremonies marking human events have evolved over time and continue to change, though slowly, slowly. Reformation did not cease with Martin Luther. Re-form-ation is ongoing, led by the needs of live people—and followed, however reluctantly, by organized religion.
The rituals change when the forms of celebration no longer fit our yearnings to celebrate the realities of present circumstances. The rituals change when we reach for a more authentic expression of our deepest human experiences. What does not change is the yearning.
This change is nothing new.
It has always been so, is so, and shall ever be so.
It is the nature of life itself, always forming and reforming.
It is neither right nor wrong—it is the way it is.
BIOGRAPHY
You will appreciate their wedding ceremony if you know more about the lives of Jonathan and Mary Carrie. Rituals that have vitality in them arise out of real lives. Rituals that are only words on paper must become flesh and blood or they are empty. Everything’s perfect on paper. In real life, it rains on weddings.
Jonathan is a first child, with one younger sister. He had first married at twenty-two, divorced at twenty-five, and was now thirty-one. He has a seven-year-old daughter from that first marriage—she lives with her mother and stepfather in another city. After Jonathan’s divorce, he had dated often, had two semi-serious relationships, and had moved to a new city—Columbus, Ohio—to find a job and attend graduate school for a master’s degree in science. In the meantime, both his mother and father also divorced and remarried. The mirror of his family life was cracked, chipped, and broken.
–
Mary Carrie, twenty-nine, is a middle child between two brothers, both close to her in age. She also had married at twenty-two. Divorced at twenty-six. She likewise moved to Columbus, enrolling in the same graduate school as Jonathan.
They met when he accidentally locked her bicycle to his with a cable chain. Waiting around for the “stupid S.O.B.” who immobilized her transportation, she forgot her “kick his butt” speech when he showed up and her “heart went pitty-pat.” A most unexpected and disconcerting response.
But Mary Carrie had had enough of “that pitty-pat jazz,” and politely accepted Jonathan’s politely extended apology and rode off on her bike. She didn’t see him again for two weeks. But she thought about him. A lot. She didn’t see his bike around, either. But she did look a couple of times. Well, maybe every day. It bothered her to have him on her mind, especially when she’d only spent a couple of minutes with him and hadn’t really looked at him all that closely.
Her Jewish grandfather used to say, “A man should smell right,” meaning she should not ignore her intuition. Also, she had read somewhere that what really attracted peopl
e was a chemical substance called pheromones—the molecular essence of a person’s scent—literally attracting at the almost subconscious level of smell. She didn’t trust family voodoo or spook science any more than she trusted pitty-pat. She had vowed if she ever, ever got married again, she would trust her brain. It would be an arranged marriage where she did the arranging—with a man who made sense to her. And then she’d worry about falling in love with him.
So when she found her bike locked to his again, she thought seriously about abandoning the bike and running for her life. But she didn’t.
For a long time afterward, Jonathan tried to plead the Fifth Amendment on whether or not he had deliberately locked his bike to hers the second time. He insisted it was a coincidence within the range of statistical probability. She knows now that Jonathan is an incurable romantic. But he’s also very good about hiding his feelings and cautious about expressing them.
Despite all her teasing and probing, she didn’t get the truth out of him on this subject until the day after she proposed marriage to him. (Don’t miss that: She proposed to him.) In response he gave her the lock and chain he used to shackle their bikes together, along with the combination to the lock. She accepted it as an engagement ring and still keeps it in a special box in her dresser drawer.
–
They dated for about a year and a half, spending two summers apart. And in that time, as they unfolded their lives for one another, their friendship grew. I stress that word because they so often emphasized it when they spoke with me. Also, they talked through their previous marriages—every aspect—especially money, sex, and children. They spoke of their mutual determination to get it right next time. If, of course, they ever did it again. Caution ruled their lives still.
That second summer apart was lonely for them both. The loneliness that leads to daily phone calls and frequent long letters. When they came together in the fall and Mary Carrie was looking for a new apartment, Jonathan put a lumpy envelope in her hand and said, “Think about it.”
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