Weddings

At the wedding reception, the toasts were made. They were standard wedding toast fare- some prepared and rehearsed and some from the hip, some emotional and some funny. At the end, Doug, father of the groom, came to the front and accepted the microphone. His toast, I later learned, was completely unprepared. He started to tell a story about helping his son move across the country. On the drive, Dustin asked him, “Dad, how did you know Mom was the one?” It’s a normal thing for a young man contemplating marriage to ask. Half the audience exploded with laughter. We laughed because we knew how Doug knew. He knew because his girlfriend was pregnant. Nearly thirty years later they’re celebrating the marriage of their third child.
We’ve got a lot of romantic notions about “the one”. Despite the statistics, the rumor goes that there is someone out there for everyone. And we think it’ll be thunder clear that we’ve found our one. But in most marriages, those moments of clarity come in small, almost imperceptible slices: washing the dishes, planning a vacation, laughing at a shared joke, fighting about the same damn thing for the hundredth time, in sickness and in health. Marriage is less about fate, a calling from the future into the present, and more about memory and commitment.
In Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology, marriage is a sacrament. I used to be a good Protestant and object to that notion, but anymore it seems like all of life is a sacrament, or at least sacramental. A sacrament is a physical act (commended by Jesus) which draws us toward the Divine. Marriage has at least the possibility of doing just that.
But what doesn’t, really? Eating and drinking with friends or strangers opens me to God. So do the pain of running uphill, the pleasure of skiing downhill, parenting, chess, and good stories, so why not marriage?
When Doug and Val got married, a bookie wouldn’t have given them very good odds for success, and they probably wouldn’t suggest it as a good beginning, at least not in theory. Remarkably, they stayed together, not because they’re exceptionally strong, or destined to be together forever but because in the ins and outs of life together, they began to live sacramentally with one another. Doug’s fumbling toast bore witness to that.

Deliver Us From Evil

Last week someone told me that George Bush and his cronies are the American version of the Taliban. Remember the Taliban? Then, just yesterday, I was in the grocery store, in the book section (I don’t know what to say about books in the grocery store) and a title caught my eye. It was called Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism, by Sean Hannity. I cannot imagine a more ridiculous title. No, I’m not planning to read it.
The first half of the title, “Deliver Us From Evil,” is an obvious appropriation of the tail end of the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t know what Mr. Hannity’s particular religio-spiritual pedigree might be. I also don’t know who came up with the title for his book. When they snagged that catchy phrase, they obviously wasn’t paying attention to the context. No doubt it sounds good, appeals to us religious types. But the Lord’s Prayer is a plea for help, not a battle call. In the prayer, it is God who defeats evil, not us. There is also no pla In the book title, it seems to be Mr. Hannity and his friends who will do the defeating. I’m all for cooperating with God in God’s work, but let’s not jump ahead. Maybe us religious types should be put off.
Then there’s the odd triad of evil: terrorism (got it), despotism (ok), and liberalism (right . . . huh?). Wait. What possible connection could there be among these three? True liberalism opposes the other two. I wonder what Mr. Hannity thinks he’s adding to the national dialogue by using such half-witted rhetoric. He can’t possibly believe that liberalism is the same as terrorism. It sells books, though.
I wonder what connection there is between American liberalism and despotism. Likewise, how is American conservatism anything like the Taliban? To call these analogies caricatures does disservice to caricatures. They’re beyond inept; they’re hopelessly unreal and contribute nothing to our national conversation.
No doubt there are some at either end of the political spectrum (and a few in the center, I suspect) who are totalitarians at heart. The majority, though, are sincere, and usually misguided, participants in the broad democratic experiment.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually kind of enjoy this kind of political discourse. I also kind of enjoy watching orangutans behind plexi-glass throwing shit at one another: it’s a captivating fantasy for a time, but after a while I’m bored and more than a little ashamed of myself.
In America we have guaranteed to one another the right to speak freely. Thankfully, the right to speak does not include the right to be heard. The free speech rights of Mr. Hannity and his Republicans-equal-Taliban opposites should be defended. Let them shout their useless slogans and poor attempts at poetic analogy until they’re hoarse. But let the rest of us ignore them. Their comic book mentalities won’t help us at all. We have more important things to do. We have the hard work of listening and speaking, and making real decisions for a real world.