I Married Two People Today

10 July 2010

I’ve never actually written down this list, but somewhere in my brain is a list of major goals I have for my life. Most of them are private matters, what I call Sam Beckett goals. Others – such as not having an only-child – are goals I’ve made rather public. Around 1:00 this afternoon, I was able to finally accomplish one of the longest-standing goals on the list.

Today, for the first time ever, I performed a wedding ceremony. How did I find myself in this situation, you may ask, and why did I even want to do that? Those are good questions. I’ll try my best to answer them, so prepare for some back story…

Even when I was a little kid, I thought it was weird how, so often, the person officiating a wedding had no special connection to the bride or the groom. I think I saw this most often on TV: the bride and groom would invite all their closest friends and family, and then just get some judge to be there with them. At the last minute, he’d have to lean into them and say: “What are your names?”

When Jennifer and I were married, I had my grandfather perform the ceremony. Two years later, my sister was slated to get married but, alas, she did not share the same closeness with our grandfather that I did. As a marginal Witness at best, she also wasn’t close to any of the elders in our congregation, either. So, she and her fiance’ asked me to do the job. I went into the Dakota County courthouse and asked what would be required, and the old lady behind the counter said I would need either a minister’s certificate or a ‘letter in good standing’ from my religious body.

Witnesses don’t pass out certificates to their ministers, so I figured I’d have to get a good-standing letter. At the next meeting, I approached Phil, the congregation presiding overseer. He basically just said he’d get back to me on that. Over the next several weeks, I worked on the wedding talk. Witnesses have an outline for their wedding talks, and I used that to fashion a great talk. After about two months, Phil asked me one evening: “Do you still want to do your sister’s wedding?” I thought this was an odd question, because it seemed as though Phil just thought the matter would evaporate in such a way that he wouldn’t have to take care of it (yes, I think he would make a great manager, too). I said yes, my sister still did want me to perform her wedding.  I even told him I’d been working on the talk, and Phil looked at me funny, probably wondering how a non-elder had gotten his hands on the outline (oh Phil…so innocent). So Phil said we would talk about it after the next meeting. God, he was great at stalling.

After the next meeting, Phil asked me to join him and another elder down in the basement (never a good sign). The other elder happened to be my Uncle Jeff who, as both an elder and my Uncle, always thought it was his place to stick his nose into my business a little too much for my liking. Anyway, Phil said that the Watchtower Society really prefers if only elders perform wedding ceremonies. This was bizarre news for me to hear, as I had, of course, already looked up the Watchtower Society’s stance on the matter, and, in a Watchtower from the 1970s, they said that any baptized member of the congregation was qualified to perform weddings and funerals, as long as they had a penis.

But before I could pull out this article and share it with Phil, my Uncle Jeff jumped into the conversation. We argued for about five minutes, going in a complete logistical circle, in which Jeff asked why my sister wouldn’t want an elder to perform her wedding (I said: “‘Cause she doesn’t like them”), then said the elders from my last congregation didn’t like me and asked why that was (I wasn’t sure, but I think it’s because they were assholes), then said that he’d never heard of a non-elder performing a wedding (I reminded him of my non-elder Uncle, from my mom’s side of the family, who had performed a wedding just a few months prior – Jeff had been present at that wedding).

Phil finally cut in and basically said that if I insisted on performing the wedding, he would give me the letter I needed, but that he really felt I should consider the Society’s viewpoint. That’s a weasel phrase that elders like to use a lot. See, the beauty of that phrase is that they can’t later be accused of forcing anyone to do anything, yet if you don’t do what they want you to do, they can make things very difficult for you. It’s kind of like the Mafia.

A few days later, I told Phil that I wouldn’t do the ceremony. I told him that “if the Society doesn’t want me to do it, then I guess I shouldn’t want to do it” (notice how God isn’t even in the equation here?). Later, some of my relatives expressed dismay that I even contemplated performing the wedding and, when I asked how they knew, it turned out Uncle Jeff felt no compulsion for confidentiality. I also learned that the Society DID allow any baptized male to perform a wedding, but that they had recently changed it – via a private letter to the elders – such that only elders could perform ceremonies. Don’t ask me how I was supposed to know this.

Anyway, I didn’t perform my sister’s wedding. I did, however, get to say the prayer. From that day on I held out hope that, one day, I would get to perform a wedding. In fact, had it not been for this very incident which convinced me to never strive to be an elder, I may have tried to become an elder just so that I could perform weddings.

In 2002, my sister married for the second time. She asked if I wanted to do the officiating, seeing how she knew I no longer gave a rat’s ass about Uncle Jeff and the other elders. But without crawling to the elders for permission, I didn’t know how to go about getting a minister’s license, so I had to decline.

In 2006, one of my co-workers announced he was going to perform a wedding. In a matter of days, he became an online minister and received certification to marry in Minnesota. I was jealous of way he was able to just decide to do something and then, with relatively low hassle, actually do that thing. I repeatedly told him how I had long wished to perform a wedding one day.

Soon after, a couple of our friends planned their wedding, and I was again approached regarding doing weddings. With the internet in full force, I looked up online to see if I could get a minster’s certification without going through the Watchtower. Turns out, I could have, but doing so would have aligned me with another belief structure, an explicit no-no in the Witness cult, and I surely would have faced discipline.

Then one day, I wasn’t a Witness. This solved the problem of getting certified, but it created a new problem: everyone I knew either shunned me, or was already married.

But today, I finally achieved my goal. My sister’s husband’s younger brother married his girlfriend this afternoon and there, on a pier in the St. Croix River (but definitely on the Minnesota side of the river), I officiated. Later, during the reception, my sister said to me: “Now you have one more thing you can cross off your list.” Indeed, I do.