Weddings, Ceremony, Ritual, Etc.
“...a wedding: none of the ‘rules’ accomplishes a thing,
pragmatically. (The bride’s train just drags along the floor and gets dirty,
for heaven’s sake.) The slow, measured walk down the aisle, the special
clothes, the book from which the minister reads, the canned vows: it is all
increasingly called into question now.
Couples write their own vows, the idea being, ‘But we want this to be our wedding. We want it to express who we are. We want our friends to share our joy, and they can’t do that if we have to say words someone else wrote a long time ago. If things are going to be real, they have to spring spontaneously from our love, and not from a printed page.’
Hmm. Are you sure you are on firm ground there? We might ponder a few embarrassingly obvious items.
First, spontaneous or not, we would all agree that there are some spontaneous displays that we don’t want just now (we are still talking of weddings here). An infant vomiting, for example. Very spontaneous, and natural, and perfectly sincere, but somewhat disconcerting to the rest of us. Or some well-meaning relative who rushes out to rumple the bride’s hair lovingly as she comes in. Or some bright soul who jumps up in the middle of the proceedings to share a reading that has meant a lot to her.
No. Oddly, some ‘rule’ is presiding here; some decorum, some appropriateness, some acknowledgment of a weight of significance suffusing the occasion. We can’t quite do what we want. At some point the rest of us have to lapse into silence and focus our entire attention on the ceremony that is occurring.
Second, it turns out that we do, after all, most earnestly wish the occasion to be a ceremonial one. A couple doesn’t get married, be they never so blithe and earthy, on the fly in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek. Everything else has to stop. And what occurs now must have some forethought investing it.
If we do not like Thomas Cranmer’s angelic English, that, of course, is a very great pity. God himself will not prevent our cobbling up our vows. But, one way or another, they have got to be cobbled up. It may indeed be the case that some wedding has occurred somewhere, in which the man and woman (they would scarcely wish to be called by such heavily ornamented words as bride and groom) sauntered up to some random spot, accompanied by the ragtag and bobtail of their friends, and ‘chatted’ their vows. Perhaps so. But such an event will not serve, we suspect, as any sort of paradigm for weddings. All of anthropology, sociology, and religion cry out against it.
Third, our spontaneity caucus is missing something. It is missing the paradox that lies at the root of all ceremony and ritual, namely, that by reaching for the seemingly artificial phenomenon of ceremony, lo and behold, we are all carried beyond the shallow puddles of the spontaneous, into the deeps of genuine significance.
Through the imposed, we meet the natural. Through the prescribed, we meet the sincere. This is always and everywhere true. No tribe, culture, civilization, or society has ever operated on any other assumption.”
~Thomas Howard
Couples write their own vows, the idea being, ‘But we want this to be our wedding. We want it to express who we are. We want our friends to share our joy, and they can’t do that if we have to say words someone else wrote a long time ago. If things are going to be real, they have to spring spontaneously from our love, and not from a printed page.’
Hmm. Are you sure you are on firm ground there? We might ponder a few embarrassingly obvious items.
First, spontaneous or not, we would all agree that there are some spontaneous displays that we don’t want just now (we are still talking of weddings here). An infant vomiting, for example. Very spontaneous, and natural, and perfectly sincere, but somewhat disconcerting to the rest of us. Or some well-meaning relative who rushes out to rumple the bride’s hair lovingly as she comes in. Or some bright soul who jumps up in the middle of the proceedings to share a reading that has meant a lot to her.
No. Oddly, some ‘rule’ is presiding here; some decorum, some appropriateness, some acknowledgment of a weight of significance suffusing the occasion. We can’t quite do what we want. At some point the rest of us have to lapse into silence and focus our entire attention on the ceremony that is occurring.
Second, it turns out that we do, after all, most earnestly wish the occasion to be a ceremonial one. A couple doesn’t get married, be they never so blithe and earthy, on the fly in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek. Everything else has to stop. And what occurs now must have some forethought investing it.
If we do not like Thomas Cranmer’s angelic English, that, of course, is a very great pity. God himself will not prevent our cobbling up our vows. But, one way or another, they have got to be cobbled up. It may indeed be the case that some wedding has occurred somewhere, in which the man and woman (they would scarcely wish to be called by such heavily ornamented words as bride and groom) sauntered up to some random spot, accompanied by the ragtag and bobtail of their friends, and ‘chatted’ their vows. Perhaps so. But such an event will not serve, we suspect, as any sort of paradigm for weddings. All of anthropology, sociology, and religion cry out against it.
Third, our spontaneity caucus is missing something. It is missing the paradox that lies at the root of all ceremony and ritual, namely, that by reaching for the seemingly artificial phenomenon of ceremony, lo and behold, we are all carried beyond the shallow puddles of the spontaneous, into the deeps of genuine significance.
Through the imposed, we meet the natural. Through the prescribed, we meet the sincere. This is always and everywhere true. No tribe, culture, civilization, or society has ever operated on any other assumption.”
~Thomas Howard
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