The Commitment Diaries

Where God is Non-Denominational

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After deciding to marry, Girlfriend and I had to find someone to perform some sort of ceremony. This was our first hurdle—and, we told ourselves, the only one that really mattered. To pull this thing off, we just had to gather together the two of us, a bit of space, and someone with a special relationship with God. Everything else, we said, was gravy. So we set off to find ourselves a Friend of God. The Church That We Used to Belong To was Out of the Question. In fact, that’s how The Church That We Used to Belong To became The Church That We Used To Belong To. No matter how familiar the rituals were, how much like home those buildings felt, how much like family to stand there during services—we were building a new family together, and could not swallow Absolute Rejection anymore. Many of our friends belonged to Churches of Good People, Hoping for the Best. I trust these friends, admire these churches—and deeply appreciate the paths they cut toward social justice, tolerance, and peace. I heard one such church, in Pennsylvania, unable to accept the notion of marrying two men, or two women, to each other—and unwilling to practice double standards—decided they could marry no one to anyone at all. Other churches happily join men and women into sacred pairs. They’ve even developed the bureaucratic aggravation of required couples classes, and church membership. But, well…these are not the kind of churches Girlfriend and I were raised in. We learned a meat-and-potatoes faith: This is Right and That is Not and This is how We Say So. Not much silence, not much experimental worship, not much interest in what Other Churches do. We may have been cafeteria congregants, but from the perspective of our faith experience, The Churches of Good People, Hoping for the Best feel a little like salad bars of sanctity—valid, valuable, nutritious, great for preventing heart disease—but requiring a knack we simply do not have. I see folks leaving salad bars with what look like fantastic meals on their plates. I walk up bravely to those same choices, mix and match with my wildest abandon, according to my deepest appetites. And still, my plate looks like a gathering of fine ingredients—uncooked, unconnected, undone. So we tried The Church That’s A Lot Like The Church That We Used to Belong To, Except in Significant Ways. We found a Friend of God there who also used to belong to the Church That We Used to Belong To, and also left so he could marry—a woman, in fact. We are practically spiritual triplets. He explained that The Church That’s A Lot Like the Church That We Used to Belong To, Except in Significant Ways is still not quite exactly ready to marry two women together. But there were some possibilities: we could cross state lines, do something in a more rebellious jurisdiction. We shook our heads: no drive-throughs, we decided. Well, then. We could meet inside the church, and have a service. But when we got to the Big Moment, we would have to leave the sanctuary and go outside, where God is non-denominational. And he, as an official Friend of God, could not prompt us in our promises, or bless us exactly, in any particular way. That would be up to our friends. We looked at one another, shrugged. Girlfriend had said she wanted an outdoor wedding. We started explaining to our friends. Some were angry for us, that we’d be kicked to the curb for our Big Moment. Some were sad for us, as well. And some handed us laughter, like our first engagement presents: you should build a passageway, came one suggestion, for when you leave the church and head out to the sidewalk. Build it out of hoops, and raise it off the ground by a few inches. Then the whole crowd can jump through them, on the way to get you hitched. There’s a story we’ve both read to one another. In it, two women discuss whether or not to marry. “It’s a statement,” one says. “It’s a joy,” the other counters. The first agrees: “For us.” The other pushes: “For everyone. Joy to the world is joy to the world. Why is everybody so darned fussy about where the joy comes from?” Or where the joy’s acknowledged? I imagine ourselves, our Friend of God, our friends all out there on the sidewalk—a kind of spiritual picnic—a gathering of Good People, Hoping for the Best, singing joy to the world out of season, and probably well out of key. I figure God will hear us, even through the hum of passing cars. © 2002 Melissa Capers “Whether or Not to Marry” from The Riverhouse Stories, by Andrea Carlisle, Calyx Press, Corvallis OR: 1986.