Weddings in Oz

Yesterday I had a final follow-up visit with my radiologist who gave me the thumbs up: Everything looks good. The nurse who brought me to the room asked me about Elai’s wedding. “Did you get really drunk?” she asked. I was taken aback! “Not really my style,” I said, “but we danced a lot.”  She went suddenly serious, “Good for you,” she said, “very healthy.” Hmmm.

Weddings reveal a lot about culture. The last few weddings I’ve been to have been in Mexico. One was in a cavernous, heavily guilded cathedral in Mexico City. For weddings there, you book a mass, show up outside the enormous wooden doors (the bride’s dad escorts her that far from the curb across the stone plaza) and then the priest takes over, walking her down the endless aisle to the altar. The wedding party makes its way down on its own, and the mass begins. Marriage is a sacrament to Catholics, like Communion, so the ceremony is part of the worship service.

The weddings I’ve been to in evangelical churches in Mexico have also been full services, open to everyone, with the wedding ceremony added. Weddings are considered a ministry of the church. But with the stringent separation of church and state in Mexico, church weddings are not legally binding. You have to get married beforehand by a justice of the peace. I have an American friend who married a Mexican woman, and the whole wedding was planned, but his documents never arrived from the US in time to perform the legal rites before the wedding, so the question was whether the couple could be married in the sight of God before the government had its say. Most Mexican pastors would not perform such a wedding. Interesting theological conundrum. Who unites man and woman in marriage? God? The Church? The government? What if these are at odds with one another? We’ve all seen this.

In North America, people have far more ownership of their weddings, writing their own vows, and moving outside to beautiful gardens and exotic destinations. This is a good thing, giving couples freedom to express their own culture in their celebrations (Elai and Mikael added the Mexican lasso to their ceremony). Of course, there is always a price to be paid, a flip side to such freedom. In North America weddings are pretty much private affairs, no longer a ministry of the church (I went through a bit of culture shock when I signed a contract renting the church building for Elai’s wedding that said “Contract for Personal Event.”) I love the individual expression, but I'm still a bit saddened that the greatest symbol of union between Christ and the Church—the exchange of wedding vows before God and His Family that unite two people as one—is no longer a ministry but a “personal event.” Every culture picks its spot on the balance between community and freedom.

I hope Elai’s wedding showed something about the Thiessen (and Berthiaume) cultures. We wanted people to come early and stay late and feel welcome. We wanted God to be at the center of it and for the couple to know people loved them. We had a big wedding party, and everyone who came from out of town was hosted by our Canadian friends (Janey’s family actually moved out of their house to give eleven Berthiaumes a place to stay), and we did fun things together. (This was how Robert and I planned our wedding 25 years ago, with a full week of activities together, and I’m glad our kids carried on the legacy.) We went on a tour of a local winery and hiked the Bruce trail below Janey’s house. We had a dance (minus the alcohol) at a hall where one sister of mine decorated in steam punk for Elai, with gears and old lanterns gracing the tables, another sister made Christmas cookies, and another served. The Berthiaumes actually stayed through Christmas, and on Christmas Day we got to experience a bit of their family culture. They sat around Janey’s dining room table and made seven little gingerbread houses with m&m’s, red-hots, licorice and gummy bears for trim and chocolate mints for shingles. There was even a Stonehenge. We all got to judge for first place. Lizzie won. Later we introduced Mikael to our family Christmas tradition: the string game where you hide stocking stuffers throughout the house and connect them with a maze of string, one roll per kid.

Such a rich, rich time. Culture, culture, culture. Oz moments. You can see I’m still unpacking it.