"That Girl" Has Faith!

In the months leading up to our impending wedding (19 days, and couting!), the Donald and I have been thinking a lot about faith and spirituality. And talking a lot about faith and spirituality.  And being faithful and spiritual.  But not in the ways you might expect.

I'm not religious.  I was raised in a church-going house.  My mother is one of the most wonderfully faith-filled people I know.  I went to Catholic school, know all the words to all the prayers, and catch myself wanting to cross myself whenever I hear an ambulence or police siren, a remnant of Sister Virginia's third-grade classroom.  But I'm not religious.

Incongrously however, I'm a very faithful person.  I believe in God, though I struggle to decide if that should be a capital or lowercase gee. I believe in love.  In compassion.  In empathy.  In selflessness. In charity.  In accountability.  And when I hear thoughtful mention of ideas like those related to religion, I can almost see religion in myself.

But then, something happens.  Someone in a cassock or with a Rev. in front of his/her name starts using religion as a weaponized form of faith.  And because these individuals "speak witht he voice of god," it becomes hard for us everyday people to get a word in edgewise.  For me, religion is oppositional to faith.  The machinery of organzied religion feels so antithetical to the private and humble practice of faith.

In religion, it's okay (and encouraged) for someone "with religion" to make statements that are so jarringly antithetical to my understanding of what faith is and can be.  That a religion can promote contradictions like "Like thy neighbor, unless he/she is gay."  Or "judge not that ye be judged... unless you're holier than the other person." And so on.  That's not to say that people who are religious are contradictory. I simply mean that I can find no home within an institution that doesn't see these cracks in its own foundation.

I am not religious, and it is because of my faith. I don't believe that God is capable of hate, because if a force in the universe is strong enough to create love, that same force wouldn't waste its time with the far weaker power of hate. I believe that all people are worthy of love, and respect, and equal rights before God and man.  I believe that it is not my job to judge people around me, even though sometimes I find myself angling for that temp work.  I believe that children should be loved to bits and raised responsibly, and that, because parenting is the hardest profession in the world, it must be taken seriously and not undertaken lightly.  I believe that a relationship in which one partner is subservient to the other is fundamentally flawed, because it does not draw on the godgiven talents of each member of the partnership.  I believe that I make good decisions about my body and what happens to it (and it) and that my uterus does not require external religious legislation. These beliefs are part of who I am.  And they come from my faith. 

As the Donald and I thought about our wedding, and what kind of expressions of faith we wanted to make, we struggled with the question of religion.  I requested from the beginning that we plan a wedding ceremony outside of a church.  To me, our wedding is rite of passage, both for us each individually, and also for us as a couple.  It marks a transition from separate into together, and is the knot that will bind our lives.  The symbolism and significance of this day is so important to me that I could not fathom building our marriage on false premises.  My faith precludes a church wedding because I do not feel I can be faithful to something that stands more for judgment than acceptance, for hate over love, for dictating over questioning.  I cannot in good conscience stand in front of priest or minister who is a respresentative of an organization I do not endorse, and make the tremendous promise to join my life with another person's.  I would be a liar.  Not about my love for Donald.  But about my support for organized religion.  And I couldn't imagine making my share of our mariage promises while feeling like a hypocrite.

This put Donald and I in a bind. What kind of wedding could we have, that would both honor our families that are religious, and serve as a fitting basin for the promises we want to fill our lives with?  We explored our options, and decided instead to have a self-uniting ceremony, in grand Quaker tradition.  In this style of ceremony, there is no officiant.  We will not be standing in front of a judge, a minister, a priest, or a ship captain.  Instead, we will stand beside each other, and make our promises in the witness of our beloved family and friends.  We will celebrate the first day of our marriage by making our wedding promises in our own voices, in our own time, and in our own way.  We have crafted a ceremony with texts and voices that resonate for us.  Some of these words will be familiar from church weddings.  Others will be uniquely and honestly representative of us.  Creating our ceremoney has been an exercise in love.  And in faith.  And we are so moved to have the opportunity to share it with so many of you.

We understand that our decision is a departure from how things are "usually" done.  And we understand that some of you feel that our choice is not as appropriate as a church wedding may be.  We hope that that you will be open-minded and open-hearted, so you can see our ceremony for what it is: our promise to love and support one another for the rest of our journey.  Faithfully.