Wedded Bliss

A couple years ago (I don’t actually remember when!), two people I love very much asked me to marry them. Apparently, they told me, I could become a “minister” in three minutes over the Internet. If I did this, I would be able to legally marry them and any other couple (that is, any couple with the right to legally marry in this country). They aren’t religious, at least not in the strict sense of the word, but they are spiritual in a thoughtful, humanistic, practical way that I admire. They wanted somebody they knew well to be the officiate.

I was honored, and also a little terrified. As usual, worst-case scenarios sped through my mind. What if they wanted me to write the ceremony and found what I’d written terribly cheesy and meaningless? What if I ruined their wedding by having a panic attack right there in front of 100 or so of their closest relatives and friends? These fears were short-lived, but there were at least three other reasons that I waited a fairly long time before giving them an answer.

First, I felt like officiating a wedding was wrong somehow. I’m sure my Greek Orthodox background plays a role here, but I didn’t feel like I was really worthy of marrying anybody, even two people I loved and knew well. I didn’t have the right training. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to become a minister, much less to live with that title for the rest of my life. Ultimately, after praying over this for awhile, I decided that my friends wanted me to marry them because they loved and knew me and because I knew and loved them; I did not need to get caught up in the title I would have to take on to conduct the ceremony.

Second, while I had no doubt that they were meant to get married--they had been together for several years, and now, they wanted to celebrate their love for each other in a public, joyful, meaningful way--in some ways, I felt like I knew them too well. I had a sense of the things that kept them together, loving each other, and also the things that could be “Achilles heals” in their relationship. Ultimately, I realized through prayer that to think I had some right to even consider how their relationship would pan out was condescending, not to mention judgemental. Love is too mysterious and holy for anybody to understand, even the people involved in the relationship. They had loved each other for a long time; they knew what they were getting into by promising themselves to each other forever. They wanted me to be present _because_ I knew them. Knowing was not a liability; it was a strength.

There was also another conflict, one that required an even deeper level of prayer. I wondered whether it was right and faithful to legally marry two people when so many of my friends could not legally marry, when I myself could not legally marry. At the time, I wanted to marry my partner—to have a ceremony, nothing big or fancy, just our closest friends and some meaningful words and then a meal and maybe, OK, some dancing—but we never agreed on any details, not when or where or by whom, not who should be invited, if anyone, not even how we felt about entering an institution from which we were legally excluded, not to mention an institution that is rooted in heterosexism and sexism and the darkest sides of capitalism.

I knew straight couples who refused to marry in the U.S. because they had queer friends who couldn’t marry. I knew straight couples who refused to marry, period, because the institution is so deeply flawed. (This week, I even learned of a church in Minnesota that is now refusing to conduct legal marriages because to do so is to be a party to the heterosexism in our society, though any two people who love each other can receive a spiritual blessing). And so, as confused as I was about my own desire to marry, I was even more confused about my friends’ desire. It was not as if this contradiction was lost on my friends—they named it on the day they asked me, recognizing how strange it might be for a lesbian to marry a straight couple—and still, I wondered at times why they wanted to do it. They were by far the happiest couple I knew—so what difference would a ceremony make? Why bother?

Ultimately, however, I decided that to refuse to marry friends for whom I would do anything made little sense. I should be working to broaden marriage rights, not to deny them to friends who could enjoy a right that everyone should have. And so, on the same day that I agreed to marry them, I sent a donation to the Human Rights Campaign, and another donation to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and I wrote a letter and sent it to all the government officials who represent me on the state and national level about how important marriage rights were for me and for so many of their constituents. One could read my actions as some kind of penance, but I just wanted to affirm all the ways people can love each other, and I figured the best way to do that was to act in concrete, albeit small, ways. Marrying my friends, who are about the most just and thoughtful people I know, was one action I could take to affirm inclusive, truly reciprocal love.

And then, one afternoon in May, I signed their marriage license nervously, worried I would make some careless mistake that would reveal me as the fraud I was. Afterwards, I read the words they had written in front of their families and friends. (They made it easy for me, allaying my fear that I might write something inappropriate--and I even managed to overcome my stage fright!). I listened to the promises they had written for each other. I gave them a glass of wine to drink from and stomped on the glass to honor the groom’s Jewish heritage.

It was probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.

The next thing I knew, I was getting asked to marry people on a regular basis. I have said no a few times, mostly when I’ve felt I didn’t know the couple well enough (or when I was pretty sure they didn’t know each other well enough—so, I suppose I do hold some level of judgment over whether people’s relationships are likely to work out despite my conclusion that such a judgement is not right). But I have now conducted four weddings, all distinctly different, and while the most recent three cannot compare to the experience of marrying my closest friends, they were equally moving in their own way.

Last fall, I married a woman I work with, a feisty, short Latina who is deeply committed to social justice, whose entire life is dedicated to the work of equality, who is a fierce and loyal ally to GLBT people. I did not know her tall, white, serious and shy fiancé, but the way she talked about him and the conviction with which she lives her life convinced me that I wanted to give her the gift of being their officiate. She was especially concerned about having a non-sexist, non-heterosexist ceremony. I met with the bride, talked to her about what marriage meant to her and her partner, wrote a draft of the ceremony, and let the couple revise it to their liking. It was a beautiful outdoor wedding. As part of the ceremony, all of us who were present passed their rings around a circle, declaring that we all held them in love and friendship on that day and for the rest of their lives. Now, as the bride in this couple faces some deeply painful personal challenges, I remember that day, and I hold them in prayer and love, gently and carefully, the way I held their rings—and, right now, this is all I can do for them.

Two weeks ago, I conducted another wedding. Again, I knew the bride, but not her fiancé. Again, she was a woman for whom I have always had a great deal of respect. She grew up in extraordinarily difficult circumstances and raised a son, now in his 20s, mostly on her own. While raising him, she somehow managed to get a PhD without losing touch with her roots. Her research and teaching center on providing access to education for people like her, people who are not white, not middle class. Once, a few years back, I was helping her to paint the cupboards in the kitchen of her first newly-purchased home, and she asked me, “What do you think it takes to be a truly ethical person?” That conversation, like many conversations I’ve had with her, continued with a stark and brutal honesty—and also some humor.

In the small circle that included her grown son, her husband’s grown son, and her best friend, I found myself moved to tears as I read the words she’d written to mark this love she’d found (relatively) “later” in her life. I have faith that the two of them will walk together and continue to grow in love as ethical people.

Last week, I married two former students. I don’t know much about their relationship, but I know them both as strong, thoughtful leaders who are committed to creating positive changes in the world. I had the bride in class during her first semester at UMM. She came to Minnesota as an exchange student and stayed for college, overcoming overwhelming financial challenges to graduate. Her mother and siblings came from Argentina for the wedding; they were so grateful and moved and proud. I found myself choked up more times than I can count. That wedding was a kind of closure for me; I loved that I was playing a role in sending these two young people into the next phase of their lives.

I was worried about conducting these last two weddings because I am mourning the ending of my own relationship. I didn’t want my sadness to interfere with the joy of their day. Some days I feel like a failure; how could I have loved someone for six years without realizing it wasn’t meant to be? What gives me the right to decide whom I will marry and whom I will not marry when I am not even capable of sustaining the best relationship I have ever had? There is, of course, and even more embarrassing reality: being around happy couples is just plain hard right now. I don't want to be bitter, but sometimes, I am.

Instead of making me more bitter and depressed, however, the weddings had just the opposite effect. Somehow, while I was officiating, I felt this sense of complete humility and wonder wash over me. The ceremony was not about me. In a way, it wasn't even about the couple, or the couple’s children or parents or siblings or friends. It was about something so much larger, a coming together of two people’s pasts and futures in one, short, holy, poignant day. It was about faith in its truest sense—the faith that something lovely and whole and real can grow out of a world so deeply fragmented.

And, on a more personal (or selfish?) level, the weddings affirmed how blessed I am. Even without a partner in life, I am lucky to have so many loved ones who have led by example, who have taught me in small and large ways to ask the right questions, to keep moving forward even in the face of adversity, to work for a just, peaceful, whole world in every small and large way possible. When these people find other people with whom to share that vision, and they want me to be part of a ritual that binds them together spiritually forever, I can feel nothing except awe. If I can help people I admire to honor what is best in them—their capacity to love, to dream, to be real with another person—by marrying them—then why shouldn’t I do so?

Anele Rubin

Anele Rubin’s first book of poetry, Trying to Speak, is the best book of poems I’ve read in over a year. Rubin’s poems are both perfectly crafted and deeply resonant with a range of emotions as varied as the notes the keys on a piano can generate. Lately it seems I find books that do one or the other, but not both—they are either carefully crafted but not deep enough, or full of a raw, real truth that is, unfortunately, not conveyed in language precise or stark enough to leave me breathless. I feel awed only when the poet is engaged with a question or idea that is sustained throughout a manuscript and explored courageously and meticulously and tenderly.

Perhaps I am so drawn to the poems in Rubin’s book because they are about the struggle to be fully present in one’s own life, one of the topics I wanted to explore originally in this blog. This struggle is always present in the poems, and the poems’shapes reflect the content flawlessly. The narratives and images feel reticent, small, careful not to reveal too much.
The opening poem, “On the Corner,” sets the tone for the book by presenting the
the question of what it means to have a home, and what it means to feel. The poem is about an old, crazy woman who has lost her way home, but finally “…remembers/where to turn. She’s not the only one without/ a sense of direction or to whom happiness comes/ sometimes like a sharp pain.” The presence of happiness is not only haphazard but also defies expectations, feeling like pain instead of joy.

Sometimes, happiness cannot be accessed at all. In “Herself,” Rubin writes, “Other days she’d go by the school yard/ and feel like she could almost feel,/ like any minute she would feel/ a roundness she knew as a little girl.// But on this day what she saw did not begin to enter./ What she saw was pressing against the hole/ giving it shape.” And the poem ends, “…She felt the sun curve/ around her. She could not feel what it curved around.” In “Tonight,” she writes, “I feel like I’m at the bottom of a canyon,/ that what I know of my life is just an echo.” The speaker “tr[ies] to see clearly,/ to see through the halo to the thing,/ but it’s no use.”

But the book is not about being stuck in a place without access to emotions or to the center of oneself. It is, instead, a book about, as Toi Dericotte put it in her blurb on the back cover, “emotional resurrection.” What gets through the evenness of every day life, or through the grief that feels like emptiness, is the wonder in the ordinary. This idea that the ordinary moments of our lives are full of wonder is certainly not new, but what is new about Rubin’s presentation of this seemingly simple spiritual truth is the fact that wonder can be accessed simultaneously in both memory and the present moment without diminishing the power of either, that the ancestral power of her dead are both actually present—that is, their real lives are laid bare and raw in the poems—and spiritually present, providing a sense of hope and continuity through the sometimes troubling lineage.

In her poem “In the Local Floral Section of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden,” Rubin writes, “There are dead leaves and new blades of grass./ I am here on a log and it almost doesn’t matter.” But then she goes on to write that pieces of the speaker are wrapped around husband and child and sibling, “and a part of me/ is looking over my shoulder/ for the shadow of my mother.” But in the end, the reader is left with a sense of wonder, inaccessible in all its fullness, but real nonetheless: “Yet my body like an empty cicada shell/ hunches forward, motionless here/ as my eyes roll for pleasure/ in the dirt strewn with last year’s life/ and that bird, unseen, is singing/ what I want to say/ in a tone I will never acquire.” These lines are just a taste of the spiritual path the poems force the reader to walk, often painfully, always slowly, always with expectation.

After reading this book twice in one week, I dreamed I was a child learning to play the piano; I did not understand the reason my mother (a woman quite different from my actual mother) was so eager for me to learn, but I wanted both to please her and to master the challenge myself. Soon I was happy for the challenge, and before I knew it, the notes started to come together into a simple melody. I knew I was playing a song I’d heard before, and I knew it wasn’t a difficult song exactly, but I also recognized the depth to the music in a new way. I was puzzled by this dream at first, but then I realized that Rubin’s poems are like that, new territory that I felt forced to finish, painfully reverberating through my own losses and fears and struggles, but also evocative of the wonder I can access through the act of creation (as well as the act of sitting of still and listening).

I just returned from a vacation in California, where I visited my sister and brother-in-law and their son, who will be two in September. It has been almost a year since I last saw my little nephew. I am so in love with him in every possible way, but what is most amazing about spending time with him is how truly delighted he is at everything he sees, no matter how many times he’s seen it. He will point to the trees that are moving in the breeze outside the window he has been looking out of all of his 21 months of life and exclaim “wow!” over and over. When we are driving somewhere, or when we are pushing him in the jogger, he will point excitedly at every large vehicle, truck or tractor or SUV, and kick his legs. (This seems to be a sign that nature is at least as powerful as nurture, but that’s another topic for another blog). Every day his father walks him down to the end of the peer in Capitola village so he can see the fish in a tank there, and again and again, he will suck in his cheeks and make fish sounds and watch them with wide eyes, clapping.

I want to see the world the way he does. I wish I could sustain that joy. But I know it is a joy that gets lost when we age. Yet somehow Rubin has returned to her readers that sense of wonder as seen through adult eyes, as felt by adult hearts. Wonder is victory over the emptiness we all carry as adults, no matter what grief or fear or baggage we are pulling along behind us. I want to feel, her poems say over and over. I want to be present in my own life. And it is possible, she tells us, possible and wonderful.