By Siamang.
Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know about me. My wife and I got married by a Reverend and had prayers and blessings and God mentioned in our ceremony!
Hemant has a post up about people wishing to get married in a Quaker style, with no officiant.
It got me thinking about my wedding.
I was an atheist at that point in my life. My wife now calls herself an atheist but at that point I’d describe her more precisely as a nontheist.
We chose to get married surrounded by our friends and family overlooking the ocean, though we did inquire at a local church.
We engaged a Reverend as an officiant. She was very open with us, and let us decide how much religion, if any, was to be included in the ceremony. We chose a nondenominational type of service. God was mentioned, there was silent time for prayer, and Reverend Cheryl offered a blessing.
We decided that these elements added a solemnity and a recognition of the eternal and the unknowable, and they were of worth in our ceremony. We felt that they communicated something about us and the life we were building together. We didn’t include any passages from the Bible, or any other holy book. We didn’t mention any religious figures… and in that way, I think, we were communicating something about ourselves not following a religious tradition.
I thought of it as a sort of “ceremonial shorthand” for something we are… deep, questioning people with an awe of the universe around us.
This was ten years ago… before the current “be loud and proud” movement within atheism. In retrospect, I guess you could say were were having an “in the closet” wedding. Trotting out God to please our families… not wanting to make waves, or a scene, or offend anyone by (gasp!) stating our own beliefs in our own wedding ceremony.
I think of it now like trying to convey something in a foreign language. There’s no way we could, in the middle of the wedding, convey a deep, questioning awe-filled ATHEIST ceremony. The attendees just wouldn’t have been able to understand it. It would have been so foreign to them… so alien. There’s no way we could expect that they could get into the deep emotional, spiritual and contemplative frame of mind with our atheism being front-and-center.
So we spoke a language that they could understand.
-Siamang
Aye, today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Ahoy to ye, ye sorry lot of ruddy scalawags.
And be mindful of this, matey, whilst conversing in yer pirate-speak, ye be strikin a mighty blow against global warming.
Arrrrr.
