Yesterday, I went to a friend’s wedding. It was unique in that it had a double ceremony, one Christian and one Hindu. They both had a common theme, of course, the tying together of two people into one unit. But the accretion of religious elements around that common core was very different for each religion. One had a lot of Jesus and the other had a lot of Ganesh and other gods with whom I am unfamiliar.
To me, non-religious fellow that I am, both sets of religious add ons seemed remarkably arbitrary – all the more so since I had the opportunity to see two sets of them side-by-side in the same day. Obviously the Christian ceremony was more familiar, but no less arbitrary, from my view. I have to say that the Hindu ceremony has much cooler production values – the colorful attire most of all.
The core of both ceremonies was “do you two want to be together and act as a common unit?” and “are the families cool with that?” It makes me wonder about the first time in any religion where a priest sidled up to the people who wanted to get married or their parents and said, “You know, it doesn’t really count unless a priest is involved in this process, and we talk about God (or gods) for awhile during the ceremony.” There is nothing intrinsically religious about the joining of couples. Seeing both rituals together makes it apparent that God (or gods) were something of an afterthought to the process.
Good food, though. And watching the mix of cultures – two groups of people practicing wildly different religions happily sharing a day watching one of their own marry a person from the other group without much more resistance than saying “hey, this is kind of different” – makes me feel like we’ve come a long way in certain respects. Though, I wonder what that says about the power of religion. I’m not sure you can be devout and watch such entirely different religions in practice without it occurring to you, “hey, at least one of these has to be wrong.” Not really my battle to fight, I guess.
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