A Wedding, a Cross and a Tiger

On Re-mystification and Living in a Historical Context

I’ve always hated weddings. Not in a cynical, edgy way, but in the practical way you come to hate your morning commute or meatloaf night. My father was a pastor, and as such, he often officiated weddings for a living. As the son of a pastor, I attended a lot of weddings the way some kids had to attend boring office parties. I think I attended more weddings by the age of 18 than anyone besides weddings singers and caterers ever do. So, as you can imagine, the magic wears off after a certain point. It’s just another event, another weekend you won’t get back. Less the miracle of love and commitment and more the grinding of human hearts into a uniform shape like so much sausage.

However, three days ago I attended my little sister’s wedding. It was a small, private affair with just close family and friends- about 15 people. The service was held in a Salvation Army chapel that shared a parking lot with a children’s playground and donation center. My sister also hates big weddings- I guess it runs in the family. That morning, I found myself waiting in the outer room filled with faux wood tables, chairs and polyester carpet that seems to be ubiquitous in churches. I was sitting with the small group of people gathered for the wedding. It was a strange energy in the room, a little anxious, a little excited. More than a little familiar.

For me, being in a church was a strange experience. I was raised Christian, but became an atheist in my mid-teens. Since moving out of my childhood home at 19, I haven’t been to a church more than a handful of times for over a decade. The imagery was familiar, but also strangely foreign. Like visiting your hometown and reconnecting with an old childhood friend. After the initial wave of nostalgia, the more time passes, the more you realize how much you’ve grown apart and how little you have in common anymore.

At 11 AM sharp, the service began. The music started- a sappy love song I never cared for and couldn’t name played (Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s hit from A Star is Born). Two little girls started to cast the flower petals down the aisle with contrasting levels of focus and accuracy that reflected their small but noticeable age difference. Their brothers were being coached by their father (the best man) on how to properly hold and present the rings. A photographer stood in the back of the room with her camera ready possessing all the poise and focus of a trained sniper. The life-sized crucifix stood solemnly in the back of the chapel draped with a purple sash. All familiar sites, all things I had seen before. The sacred had become not profane, but mundane.

But then, the song changed to the traditional wedding march, and the excited side conversations ended. My little sister entered the room, beautiful and smiling in a white dress and I was hit with an emotional gut punch. Immediately, tears welled up in my eyes but with a joy so pure that it could only be expressed physically. My little sister was getting married, and it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

The service began and was complete in under 20 minutes. I won’t regale you with the blow by blow- it was a pretty standard affair. A slightly nervous but enthusiastic pastor (or “officer”, as the Salvation Army calls them) performed the rites with care and gentle authority. Verses from the Bible were read. The loud, confident voice of my now brother-in-law contrasted with the quiet but self-assured voice of my sister in volume as well as tone. My brother-in-law’s vow was lengthier and more jovial and my sisters was short, sweet, and heartfelt- they have something of a “cat marries a golden retriever” dynamic. The vows were both laced with inside jokes that made them personal and laughs punctuated the happy tears in the small audience. The final line was said, the bride was kissed, and the ceremony was over.

I have always struggled with sincerity, but that day it came easily to me. The simple act of a wedding- modest, short, and intimate- became something more than the sum of its parts. The mundane became sacred again, if just for a few hours. The religious imagery and scripture took on a quality that I had not experienced for over a decade. There was a beauty and quiet authority that shone through that afternoon.

I feel like sincerity is something that is very difficult to come by in the modern world. I know I’m not alone in this feeling. Just look at our culture- everything is steeped in cynicism and sarcasm. Entertainment is all self-referential and deconstructed. Even commercials are often post-modern and bizarre like a “Tim and Eric Awesome Show” sketch. It is very common to talk to people who can only express their true feelings when filtered through several layers of irony. It’s easy to see why, too. The world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. The institutions that once held society together have either been revealed to be flawed or lost relevance in the modern age of technology and hyper connectivity.

That had been my attitude towards the world for most of my life. Why trust an institution like the church when it was corrupt and would just let you down? Religion had been disproven with the advent of modern science and made irrelevant. Who cares about the country you’re from? It’s just lines on a map. Who cares about marriage? It’s just a government contract that can be undone. As such, I’m still not married. I sometimes say I am married and refer to my partner as my wife, and it’s not completely untrue. We’ve been together for a decade. We’re legally considered common law married in our state and have most of the legal benefits of marriage- sharing health insurance, being each other’s beneficiary on life insurance and a joint bank account. We don’t file our taxes together, but mostly because we are lazy- we’re legally qualified to do so, though. We’re functionally married, so what’s the difference?

As I mentioned, I’m the child of a pastor. Funny enough, so is my partner. I think that’s part of what allowed us to bond so heavily since we shared a unique experience and upbringing. As such, neither of us are Christians and it’s partially due to what I described earlier about growing up in the church. The sacred becomes mundane. Which is why the religious imagery that often comes with weddings can feel hollow. With the disenchantment that comes with the loss of faith, a marriage merely becomes a contract.

There was one other event that happened to me over the weekend of my sister’s wedding that affected me emotionally in a profound way. While hosting my parents for the wedding, we decided to pick out a movie to watch. It involved the usual awkward decision-making process that goes into picking a movie to watch with your parents- finding something that will appeal to everyone, avoiding anything edgy, and above all avoiding something with sex scenes- and we picked out the 2012 film “The Life of Pi”. I had never seen the movie before, it didn’t seem like my kind of thing. My understanding was it was about a kid who got stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger and I am more of a “guys with swords fight each other” kind of film goer, so I never gave the film a second thought. The movie opened with a scene of a man (the titular Pi) talking to another man, a writer. Pi told the man that he had a story that would make him believe in God. In a way, his story ended up causing me to believe in God, too.

I won’t spoil the whole movie, but it’s been out for over a decade, so I think at least a rough outline is justified. Pi is the son of a zookeeper living in India. However, the zoo falls on hard times and is forced to sell the animals and move to Canada. They pack up the animals, hoping to take them to a buyer in Canada as they make the start of their new life. However, it was not to be. Disaster strikes and a storm caused the ship to sink. Pi is able to escape, and he finds himself lost at sea sharing a lifeboat with a tiger that had also survived the shipwreck. Pi is able to survive the sea and the tiger and in a tale of epic heroism, survival, and resourcefulness he is able to find dry land again.

Only, that’s not the truth. I won’t go into detail, but when the writer interviewing Pi digs deeper, he finds that Pi was not being entirely truthful. The story about the tiger was a lie. He was stuck on the lifeboat with three other people, including his mother. Pi has to do horrible things to survive. He survives, but he is the only survivor.

The film poses a question- what is more important- The literal truth, disenchanted, unflinching and stark or a lie that can make the intolerable tolerable? A lie that can make meaningless suffering seem purposeful. As he tells his story, we learn there was more than a little truth to Pi’s tale. The specifics were not true, but there was an emotional truth to them that reflected the real events.

As I get older, I find myself searching for something more. This seems to be something so universal it has become a cliché. But perhaps that’s why things like religion and marriage ceremonies exist. I am not religious, but I see its value. The stories of the Bible may not be literally true in my view, but they do speak to something deeper. An emotional truth that’s at the core of our very existence. A need for meaning and purpose.

This brings to mind a story from the Bible that I always hated growing up, the story of Adam and Eve. I always thought God was cruel in the story. Why even make the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why make the serpent? Why even make humans with the capacity for the knowledge of good and evil? Hell, why not just create humans directly in heaven, why the whole song and dance of living on earth before they can get to heaven? I’m not a lawyer, but the whole thing seems like entrapment to me. But that was the way I saw the story as a cynical teenager who had been betrayed by religion and those who represented it to me. As an adult, I looked at the story with different eyes. The story, when not taken literally, is one that is about the nature of human existence and suffering. The knowledge of good and evil was not merely to judge the external world, but themselves. To see themselves for who they are and what they could live up to and to be judged and found wanting. This was symbolized by their nakedness- when they lived in ignorance, they were blissfully happy. But when they gained knowledge, they were ashamed of their nakedness and they were cast out of the Garden of Eden.

I find myself naked, and I am ashamed. In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, Frederich Nietzsche talks about the concept of “the last man”. Someone who lives at the end of history. Not in the literal sense, but in the way that they experience the world. There was nothing before them and when they die the world dies with them. Removed from the historical context that created them, naked and afraid. Like a word without a sentence. A sentence without a book. A book without a library. No context. I have lived most of my life like this. But I don’t want to live like this anymore.

I had one other experience a few years ago that I think began the journey to where I am now. I was taking a vacation to see my in-laws and we were meeting in South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. Honestly, Mount Rushmore kind of sucked. It is a lot smaller than you think it is, for one. But other than that, it’s a pretty mediocre tourist trap. Take a picture with the monument that you will never look at again. Use one of those crank machines that turns a penny into a souvenir. Buy an overpriced t-shirt at the gift shop- you know the drill. There was one experience at Mt. Rushmore that spoke to me, however. There was a Lakota man who was there giving a presentation on the native history of the area and his people’s traditions.

Moving past the obvious tinge of white guilt that came with the story, what struck me was his obvious connection to his people and their past. He did not see himself as a disconnected biological node, but as a branch in a tree that stretched back to the beginning of humanity. He lived in a historical context. He had a purpose. This was the first time in my life that I ever considered having children. Not just to continue my family, but to be invested in the future.

That’s the thing about living historically. You stop seeing yourself as an isolated individual, but as a link in a long, unbroken chain. What will your children (or at least future generations) think of you when you’re gone? What would your ancestors think of you? It can be a difficult pill to swallow. The metaphor of “the red pill’ has been used ad nauseam, but the principal is sound. There is some knowledge that will change you fundamentally in a way that makes it impossible to live your life like you had before. Or, to put it in another way, once you eat the apple, you realize you are naked, and you can never come back to the garden. You know what it is to be held to a higher standard and that you may not measure up.

I know this is something that can be difficult to do in the modern world. The chances for community, solidarity and meaning are few and far between. The institutions that once offered these things are in disrepair or have lost legitimacy. It’s awkward to take the first step and there are many who will mock sincerity and a search for meaning. And yeah, sometimes it can be a little cringe, as the kids say these days. I think it’s worth it, though. For better or worse, the world we were born into is not the one we live in now. We will live through an era of change and chaos. We are the generation that will live through a massive change and our job will be to rebuild and salvage something from the ashes. So, I try to do what I can to plant the seeds. Build relationships. Get invested locally. I’m starting a mens group in my city to meet up and do some fun activities but also to volunteer in our community. I proposed to my partner, and we’re getting married after a brief, 10-year courting period. Someday, I will be a father. I will do everything I can to make the world a better place for the generation that comes next. And the one after that. I don’t know if what I do will help, but I do know that I believe it’s worth it to try. Maybe, that belief will be enough.