Category: Worship

As I mentioned before, I’ve noticed how low-church minister’s manuals tend to include the Episcopal prayer book wedding rite along side some other minimal service. I also can’t help but notice that Universalist and Unitarian wedding rites — even the humanist ones — take cues and sometimes whole passages from an Episcopalian rite. But which one? Not the 1979 prayer book, of course.

With the 1937 joint Unitarian and Universalist Hymns of the Spirit there was a minister’s guide — a book with all the services that one wouldn’t need most Sundays, or which only the minister would need a copy so as to save the cost of printing — that is terribly hard to get a hold of. All I have is a photostat. (Ah, now now I can’t find that! So I’ll post about it when I find it.)

OK, back to the 1894 Universalist Book of Prayer compared with the 1892 Episcopal prayer book, itself almost identical with the 1789 prayer book. (This online version has them together.)

1. The Universalists didn’t publish banns. I think California was the last state to do away with marriage by banns — though it persists in Canada — so no great loss there.
2. The exhortation is shorter than the 1892 Episcopal service, and unlike it fudges about if there was ever a time of human innocency (Eden) and makes no comparison to the married couple with the mystical union of Christ and the Church.
3. Universalists confessed their legal impediments to marriage, but not against “dreadful day of judgment.”
4. Universalist brides did not vow to obey their husbands; indeed, I’ve never seen that usage in Universalist texts.
5. Troths are plighted and given the same way in both services. (I love this stuff.)
6. In the Universalist service the ring “is consecrated” by unknown means “token and pledge of your mutual truth and affection; and worn upon the hand of the woman becomes the accepted symbol of that spiritual union which it is the office of marriage to secure” but in the Episcopalian service omits a blessing of the ring.
7. The Episcopalians have “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder” and the Lord’s Prayer before the final prayer; the Universalists don’t.
8. The Episcopalian prayers end in a Trinitarian embolism; the Universalist prayers close with a “Jesus’ name” ending.

It is worth a look to see if Universalist wedding services closer to 1789 were more or less distinct.

There seems to be no new liturgy, just cycles of revision, rehabilitation, and retranslation. The wedding services and fragments Unitarian Universalist ministers pass among themselves and down the generations are no exception.

I came across a service today that seems very familiar. It was printed in Christian Worship: A Service Book (Christian Board of Publication, 1953) meaning it was intended for future Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) ministers and probably more liberal American (Northern) Baptists. It was pulled from W. E. Orchard’s The Order of Divine Service for Public Worship (1925), and he “adapted [it] from Horace Bushnell’s form of marriage and elbaorated” making it Victorian at heart. On top of it all, Orchard was a very High Church Congregationalist minister in London; he ended up a Roman Catholic priest. Still with me?

Oh dear, it’s awful.

Here’s one line:

“Long before men had developed ceremony or inaugurated priests, marriage was celebrated, with God the creator its first priest and witness and guest. It is his institution for the comfort and convenience of mankind, and is therefore enshrined with dignity and honor for all who enter into it lawfully and in true affection.”

In sure there’s some meaningful sentiment there, and an implicit repudiation of Eden and the Fall which says to me that the author was trying to square what people believe and how they prayed, but it lacks something. A poetic voice is lacking (put a passive voice is present!)

It is also too florid: “Thus marriage will be to you, if you have it in your hearts to beautify and enrich it by your tender devotions, your mindfulness to little things, your patience and sacrifice of self to each other.”

Plus — and perhaps this a personal hatred not shared by others — the rite theologizes the ring in a fashion all too often seen: “This ring is of precious metal; so let your love be the most precious possession of your hearts. It is a circle, unbroken; so let your love each for the other be unbroken through all your earthly days.”

(Call me a ghoul but I wonder how many machinists and sailors lost a finger because they resisted putting a slit in their wedding band? Oh, yeah. There was that Marine.)

The whole service is drippy. Little wonder the editors of Christian Worship: A Service Book did what a good number of Baptist “ministers’ manual” editors did: added the Episcopal prayerbook wedding rite, too. This is the kind of thing, though there are a bundle of them; any decent Bible or church supply store will have a few titles. Well, the ones in the South have them.

Though here’s a Baptist minister’s manual that offers the briefest wedding ceremony I’ve ever seen: Pendleton’s.)

Well, if I think weddings ought to be simpler than they are, I ought to help make it so. I also think that such service should reflect my conviction that two persons of the same sex may be married. The era of liturgical division between “holy unions” and proper marriage should end.

Here’s a rough workflow.

1. Get a sense of the units and length of services that our grandparents — if they were Protestant — would have recognized. See what features have been added.
2. Sample these services in parallel with Universalist and Unitarian services to see what theological assumptions carry through.
3. Compare these with the theological position I think is correct, and the best informed liturgical underpinnings.
4. Share drafts with colleagues, privately, for review.

Let me know if you want to me on the share list. Perhaps we can come up with a commonly held rite.

This is the last of my to-do projects for the time being.

I’m planning out what my next blog writing projects are: this prospectus has to do with a kind of pastoral liturgical resource one sees little of.

What do you do when someone dies and there are no human remains?

This has to be traumatic for the survivors, but hardly a new situation considering the unrecovered bodies of mariners, explorers, and soldiers.

I’ll be gathering and writing some resources in the next few weeks. Leave a comment if you have a special request.

This is the eight hundredth entry for this blog.

Oh dear, the bride from Duluth, Georgia with the “social event of the season” wedding wasn’t kidnapped but ran away to New Mexico. By bus. I’m sure Greyhound won’t use that image in their summer TV ads.

I wasn’t going to mention this story but PeaceBang did and I wanted to add a Georgia native’s two cents. (But she’s right about it being “a friggin’ coronation” — that’s how they’re done, God help the poor dears.) But . . .

1. If you’re going to do something boneheaded, don’t do it in metro Atlanta, unless you want CNN to broadcast it to the world.
2. There is no life in Duluth, Georgia, much less Society. The town’s sole reason for being is to give a scenic approach to the Mall of Georgia.

Making fun of Gwinnett County aside, I do feel for brides and grooms who get snookered into what has been aptly called the “Wedding Industrial Complex.”

Ministers and churches are often lumped into the Wedding Industrial Complex; I think this is unfair. In my experience, far too often couples — and here I mean unchurched couples with no relationship to the parish — think of the venue and officiant last and least. The usual workflow order is reception site, clothes, flowers, music and — oops! — wedding venue and officiant. By this point, they’re often looking for a bargain and sometimes I’ve been asked to “cut a deal.” I never do, given the flowers are always more than my fee and I know I have more experience than 90% of the wedding planners out there.

Inflexible? Perhaps, but I’ve never met the romantic, woe-be-gone couple of lore — she’s got a terminal illness or he’s being shipped overseas next week — who really needs a freebie or sliding fee, and listening to my colleagues, they’re pretty rare. Not that there’s room for change, so keep reading.

As for the situation today, I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of professional wedding advice-givers. The wedding book people are the worst. They set up the fantasy of “I can have it all; I can do it all; It can be all about us” but when it’s over, you have an expensive blowout that looks conspicuously like everything else this season.

In my experience, wedding couples “want to do it right” but having few models than the Chuck-and-Di wedding and its celebrity copycats (and we see how they turned out) weddings tend to turn out wrong. Pretty, perhaps, but too frequently cumbersome and ostentatious. Without the background and production values, “royal” weddings are usually invitations for disaster, if not tackiness.

The best weddings I’ve seen are the ones where expectations are modest, where the couple members have an equal stake in the successful outcome of the wedding, and where creative thinking has more of a role than “let’s blow the family fortune.” But who’s going to make that point?

Clergy should step up and show leadership in weddings. Perhaps someone should write a book.

Outrageous, gut-knotting extravaganzas are hardly the way people of faith should be celebrating the union to two people. Proportion is what’s called for. More jolity than pagentry. I well recall the advise Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners) gave. Paraphrasing, the wedding celebration should be the best kind of entertaining you have.

If you party a certain way, eat and drink a certain way, dress a certain way, and reunite families in a certain way, you already have the notes for how elaborate a wedding might be. A friend got married in a very chi-chi wedding, but that worked because her family is social and has experience in society functions. But if you rarely entertain, or if you idea of a good party involves a day at the lake or tailgateing, then perhaps you should really make it personal and take a hint from your own life.

The fairy-tale wedding is a fairy tale. I once looked in the wedding book of a precessor in my last pastorate, in particular, the World War Two years. I imagine wartime Washington was tense for engaged couples — Seth Brooks was doing several weddings a week — but the record book shows that there were a number of different standards given. You can tell from the locales. Some were married in the sanctuary, others in the minister’s office, some in a private home, and other still in the minister’s apartment. (The parsonage wedding was once common I gather.)

And I bet there were as many “happily ever afters” from the small non-church weddings as came out of any sanctuary.