Going to the Chapel:
Exploring a Deeper Spiritual Union

photo by michael weisbrot

To state the obvious, the urge to merge has ramifications a lot more complex than hiring a hall, swapping some jewelry, and commandeering a cake—complex as all of that can be. Yet whether one’s in Town Hall, in an Elvis-themed chapel in Vegas, in one’s own living room or reciting vows through a scuba mask, there’s hopefully still a lot of magic to the central moment, the rite that proclaims to two people and to a community that their destinies are conjoined.

How does that central moment feel to those who’ve experienced it over and over? No, I don’t mean that guy you knew in high school who’s—a-hem—so curiously unlucky that he’s currently embarking on union number five. I mean the celebrants, the souls who hath the power vested in them to declare you husband and wife—or whatever permutation of the concept suits the principals involved. For everything else, there may indeed be Mastercard—but these folks, by definition, are primarily concerned with the part that’s priceless.

To Father Robert Magliulo of Christ the King Episcopal Church in Stone Ridge, who’s been joining lives for 19 years, it’s a moment full of paradox. “It’s a very odd role,” he said. “It kind of blurs the separation of church and state to have a minister declaring a contract sealed. I actually like the European system, where couples go to the town hall and sign a registry, then go to church for the blessing. The church should really be in the business of blessing things, not creating civil unions. Before the sixteenth century, the church pretty much stayed out of the marriage business.”

And back then, as Magliulo also pointed out, the hearts and flowers we’ve come to associate with wedding bells had little relevance, taking a back seat to the really important issues like dowry, bride price, and other fiscal realities. Such remnants of that era as the word “obey” in the marriage vows, the questions of who’s giving the bride to her husband and so on have been a long time fading away.

photo by beth blis

The community’s stake in successful union, however, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Episcopal canon law permits Magliulo to wed only members of his congregation—no walk-ins off the street, mind you—and mandates a certain amount of counseling first. “The intention is a life long union,” he said. “So we really try to facilitate a lot of open discussion. There’s a 130-question questionnaire designed to point out trouble spots and get people talking. We need to get to the real nitty gritty.”

Sometimes the best efforts aren’t enough to prevent disaster. “Once I was working with another clergy person, a woman, and we really broke our asses trying to get this woman to see that this guy was bad news. There were things we knew that confidentiality prohibited our sharing. We tried everything we could think of. We couldn’t believe this sophisticated woman, a therapist, was going to go through with this. They were separated in a month.”

Despite that experience and a Wedding from Hell in which the bride was a full hour late (“It was about ninety-five degrees in the church—people were getting furious, going out to smoke and complain; the groom was hyperventilating”), one senses that Magliulo finds the blessing of unions an enjoyable part of the toughest job he’ll ever love. “In our church, we bless unions between two men or two women as well as marriages… Those people have such courage and tremendous love—and the process of counseling and sorting out past baggage is much the same. But no matter who the couple is, they are considered the actual ministers of the sacrament, the actual officiators of the wedding rite. I just bless them.”

At the Bruderhoff community in Rifton, marriage is taken very seriously indeed. “The culture is falling apart because people have forgotten what marriage is,” said elder Johann Christoph Arnold with complete conviction. “If the marriage is on the wrong soil, the children will feel unstable and unsure. They’ll never have the chance to become what they’re supposed to be. The family was God’s first creation, and we still hold to the original: ‘One man, one woman; till death shall part them.’ The sexual sphere is the holiest sphere of life, and not intended to be trifled with. So when our young people get interested in each other and they’re all in a rush, we say, ‘Hey, slow down. What’s good gets better.’ When you marry, you marry a soul, not a sex object.”
Interfaith minister Puja Thomson of New Paltz doesn’t think of the process she engages in before a wedding as counseling per se, but the theme of self-examination still surfaces. “I really try to have a couple share with me what their spiritual and cultural roots are, where they are presently. What do they share? Where does their creativity lie? What word do they want to use for God? It might be the Universal Light, the Creator, the Goddess—what resonates for them?” Thomson has facilitated the joining of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. “No two have been alike. I try to help them build something that’s about what they want to make by doing this, what draws them together.”

Buddhist weddings, as ordained priest Geoffrey Shugen Arnold of the Zen Mountain Monastery pointed out, are a comparatively recent innovation. “Buddhism was historically a monastic tradition,” he pointed out. “But we do perform weddings here for practicing students.” And, monastic tradition or no, the Buddhist folk also try to help couples get at the essence of what they’re embarking on. “In coming together, joining two into one, they’re embodying Buddha’s essential teaching that unity is the nature of all things. A lot of the struggles come from the conflict between the desire to feel separate and distinct on the one hand, and the desire to dissolve into unity—there’s a tendency to see those as mutually exclusive states, but in Buddhism, there ultimately is no conflict.

“As a spiritual event between two people, marriage is a living example of that.”

—Anne Pyburn