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A couple weeks back, Kerry and I were married.

There were a couple elements to the wedding that I thought that I’d write about. During the planning phase of the wedding, there were lots and lots of details that I had really no interest in, to be honest. And I don’t think that it’s because I fall into the stereotypical groom who just wants nothing to do with the wedding planning, it’s more that I asked her to be married to me, not to wed me. There is a difference there, and I hope you get the point.

The Ring

My father-in-law works in a machine shop that makes parts for all sorts of amazing things, like rockets. He gave me a tour of the shop and showed me all of the CNC machines and metal lathes and computers. He also told me about the different kind of materials that the shop uses, including some exotic metals that I’d never heard of before.

After Kerry and I were engaged and started talking about the wedding rings, I had started looking at tungsten and titanium rings, feeling that they would be a nice masculine pick and be a bit more special than just surgical stainless steel. Then I remembered, that machine shop can work on those kind of materials and some of those parts that they make are smaller than rings. So I asked my now father-in-law to make a ring. He measured my current ring, and made one out of titanium.

The Chuppah

Fairly early in my relationship with Kerry, I had listened to Rob Bell’s Sex God on audiobook (which I posted about) and it had a very moving chapter entitled “Under the Chuppah”. It included this passage:

Several years ago, I was teaching in our church from the book of Exodus about the chuppah. I had a prayer shawl with me and showed how they would make a canopy out of it and how the bride and groom would stand under it when they exchanged their vows. I got to the end of the teaching and had this sense that something was missing. That I wasn’t finished. I then invited people to the stage to stand under the prayer shawl. People started coming. A married couple would come down, the man obviously being dragged by the woman, but the moment they stood under the chuppah, the man would start crying. People had strong, emotional responses to simply standing under a sheet.

I found that profound and I wanted to include that in my own wedding. I did a bit of research into the chuppah. It, traditionally, is really a sheet held up by four sticks, not much more than the fort kids make with chairs and a sheet out of the linen closet. I also started asking people about it. Friends, co-workers, and customers were all asked about this, specifically the Jewish ones.

I had a Jewish couple come into my store and as we were talking I found out that they are Jews and furthermore the woman actually has a business of creating ketubahs, the Jewish marriage contract. I ran my idea past them and they actually gave me two cautions that I took to heart.

1) People will think you’re Jewish, will you be okay with that confusion?

I had expected that to come up when people would see our pictures years later, but I remember that during the rehersal, I heard someone there ask, “Is he Jewish?”

2) Some Jews may take offense at you taking something that they feel is theirs.

This one caught me a bit off guard. It hadn’t occured to me that taking the single most visible element of a Jewish wedding into a Christian ceremony may actually anger some people. There may be Christians who feel that I’d adulterated my own Christian wedding ceremony by inclusion of a Jewish tradition.

If I had been just a few years younger, I’d have just written that off and said, “If they don’t like it, they can have their own wedding,” But, I’m older, and started asking the Jewish people I know. No one I knew seemed to have a problem with it, and for the people I know and respect now to clear it, I felt I was good to go. Only people in the future that I meet may feel slighted at that.

As a Christian, I feel I have to acknowledge my faith’s Jewish roots. I also acknowledge that Christians generally don’t follow Jewish law what-so-ever. I have no intention of having any sons I might have circumcized, I don’t eat kosher, and I labor on the Sabbath (which isn’t on Saturday for me either, and, in fact, is more of a nebulus idea instead of a “day of rest”). The inclusion of this was because of what it symbolized to the Jews, it would symbolize for me.

The chuppah is to symbolize God’s presence (shekinah) over the marriage and the house that we’ll build together.

There was a bit of a fortunate mis-communication about the chuppah in the wedding planning though. In my mind, I had wanted something very close to the basics- sheet plus four poles. Instead, my ideas to Kerry then were translated to my father-in-law who built something much more substantial for the wedding. How this was fortunate is that it doesn’t look exactly like a traditional chuppah, which makes me feel like we made it a bit more ours, while still retaining the symbolism.

A couple days ago a couple came to me at my job and I’d briefly worked with the lady before and she remembered me. She had two kids with her and a guy who I assumed was her boyfriend, but that’s a guess. Out of the blue, she shows me on her phone a app that records how long she’d been sober. It was just under fifty days. I was a bit surprised to see that she was giving me that information without the topic having come up whatsoever. I told her that I was somewhere at the six and a half year mark, and she found that surprising that she’d met someone else who had similar struggles. She tells me that’s how she’d met “him”, which I pressume again to be a boyfriend and not just an acquantaince.

The actual name “Alcoholics Anonymous” didn’t ever come up, but I presume that they had met through that program, and she also told me with this slightly guarded shame that she also went to Narcotics Anonymous. Or, that’s how I read it. I only went to a few meetings, but I think that maybe there is a pecking order that the people that go to AA look down on the NA people somehow. I told her that alcohol wasn’t the only thing that I had to put behind me and she told me that it wasn’t her first try at keeping clean and sober. I told her that I had had a few false starts at it as well, but ultimately I had to just quit everything I was taking in at once, because whatever I had left to do later brought back whatever I was working on.

She indicates her children and tells me that she’s in a custody battle because she’s about to lose her kids because of her problems. Looks like she has a lot of incentive. The people’s stories that I heard in AA always had that tragic and desperate flavor to it, which made me feel like a bit of a pariah even there, because I didn’t have a story, I just wasn’t happy that my life wasn’t moving anywhere and I felt like that I had allowed substance to become a priority over moving foreward with my life.

My very brief time with the AA meetings was incredibly memorable. AA meetings are a strange breed of church. They won’t call themselves that, nor do they specifically acknowledge a certain deity. Both of those items add to the flavor and charm of it. In my time in churches, all of them seem to have a degree of guardedness that keeps people from opening up and talking about what problems they have. And when they do, there is a syntax for it that one has to make a big show of it. At AA, this community assumes your a screw up, and that’s fine, because you assume they are too. This is the kind of church environment I think that it was like back when Jesus was walking around in Israel.

When I talked to my customers, I included that it must be very nice to have each other for understanding support. Other people do not know. This is something that I am happy that my soon-to-be wife doesn’t and can’t truly understand and also is something that worries me a bit because I’ve had lots of times where people who don’t understand why I have a hard time not finishing a whole bag of Doritos gives me trouble. I’m an addictive consumer and I’ll finish off whatever is put in front of me as long as it feels good. This is a part of my personal mechanics where I have a very hard time being disciplined about these kind of things.

I spoke about that to them. I told them that we’d talked about it, and I’d told her that I don’t get anxious in bars or at a party where there is alcohol, but I’ve said that I can’t have any alcohol in the house, even for cooking purposes, because today I’ll be fine, and tomorrow probably too, and likely the day after that, but eventually, that is going to go down my throat and then things will get bad.

It was nice talking to them, and I hope that they have each other to see themselves to where they want their lives to take them.

Heading through the parking lot at the grocery store, I saw a short, very obese woman dragging behind her a air machine of some sort on wheels, much like the kind of luggage you see at the airport these days. It made a sharp noise whenever she breathed. I found my mind wandering into the area of judgement that I’ve been trying to condition myself out of wandering into… “Has this woman at any point realized that the choices she’s made in her life had finally handed her the bill for a life of poor choices and sloth?”

Just inside the doors, I lean over to pick up a shopping basket, and from behind me I hear a small voice, “Excuse me?” I turn around and it’s that lady. She asks me to lift her air machine into the cart for her. She collapses the handle and I pick it up and put it in her cart. She told me to have a good day and I told her to do the same.

I spent some time feeling a bit guilty for the judgement I had handed her without knowing her at all and, furthermore, failing at my own goal to see the humanity in everyone. That’s what us Christians are supposed to do, right?

Then I passed by a grocery store employee helping her retrieve a jumbo bag of M&Ms that she had fumbled on the floor of the candy aisle when she had tried to settle it next to a box of ice cream sandwiches.

I’ll get better at being a better person, I just have to focus.

Kerry turned me on to a book called The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, which is about a guy’s semester at Liberty University. The author’s name is Kevin Roose and the premise of the book is he transfers from Brown University to Liberty for one semester. Brown is well known for being a very liberal college and Kevin’s background seems to confirm that even further. I’d like to start this blog post/review by saying that having said all of that, and reminding the regular readers of this that I’m a Christian, he went into this with a more open mind than I did. Prior to reading this book I had not a good thing to say about Liberty or it’s founder Jerry Falwell. Both of them, for me, stand for all of the things that I think make American’s particular flavor of Christianity dangerous to both Christianity and America. Roose states in the book that one of his goals is to humanize the far-right, and I think he does a fantastic job and manages to do it very even handedly.

The book kept me engaged the entire read and at no point did it seem to drag. It is well executed, has some exciting and tense moments, and most importantly was very thought provoking.

My thoughts on some passages from the book:

The first includes some of the people who lived in the same dorm as Roose did. Henry is pretty much the only person in the book who fulfills every negative stereotype that I, and I imagine everyone else, have about right-wing evangelicals.

Tonight, after Henry’s outburst, I go next door to Zipper’s room to ask for his advice.

“This just isn’t normal,” I say. “He’s so furious.”

Zipper shrugs. “Well, should we pray for him?”

I’ve asked a number of my hallmates for advice about Henry, and they’re all suggested the same thing: pray for him. At Liberty, prayer is seen as a panacea, and with no other options on the table, I suppose it’s the only thing I can do.

It has been a long time observation that evangelicals like to tell someone that they’re going to pray for them than they’ll tell someone that they’ll do their grocery shopping while they’re recovering from surgery. Either Roose didn’t see this to the same degree, or perhaps the Liberty students are actually better at using their hands to do things instead of just fold them in prayer.

“I know so many girls who have had sex,” she said. “Even some of my best friends.”

“Would the admit that to me?” I asked.

“No way. There’s a double standard at Liberty. If you’re a guy, you can have sex and repent for it, and everything’s okay. But for girls, if it gets out that you’re not a virgin, you’re pretty much a leper. No one will date you. Like, now, I have this reputation as a slut! And I had sex with one guy!”

This passage stuck out for me because I have spent time in the past wondering if the double standard that seems to show up in church reflects the double standard that shows up in general society or conversely society’s reflects the church’s. I recall, years ago, in my loose affiliation with a youth group at a evangelical church that it was once found out that a guy had had sex and it was barely an event, while later the same for a girl and it was a scandal. This isn’t really different from the double standard that American society has as well, just to a different degree.

These girls read the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, an evangelical classic that implores Christian girls to skip the dating process entirely, going straight from friendship to marriage. They accept this book as gospel truth–meaning, Like says, that “you could be Brad Pitt and you’d still strike out with them.”

I remember when this book really was making the rounds and causing a stir in church circles. Roose infers that the book is exclusively for females, but it’s not. It strikes me as nearly impossible to make it to marriage if you need to pair up with someone who’s read this particular book and is on board with it’s ideas. Seems like that really makes getting to the point of marriage a very unlikely prospect. This book seems to me like one of the Christian fads that come around every few years that really causes a stir and then goes away. Remember the WWJD bracelets? On one hand, I really liked the concept of a constant reminder to consider, “What would my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, do in a situation like this?”. On the other hand, why do I need a piece of plastic to remind me to act like a decent human being?

What the book promises is actually not really what it delivers. It redefines dating, and then repackages it under a different name. It’s still dating, it’s just now called courtship because it sets guidelines that are similar to what Liberty University has as rules for dating. Hand holding and three second hugs are as crazy as you can get before you run afoul of Liberty’s rules. Silly? In the book Roose includes this thought:

And that’s a very freeing feeling. When diner dates aren’t just preludes to hooking up, you end up truly listening to each other. The conversation is the centerpiece, and what emerges is deeper and more intimate than if you had been spending your time trying to Don Juan your way into her bed.

There is value to this. My fiancée and I had no choice but to adopt this due to distance and it worked for us incredibly well. I think that I can say that had it not been our conversations about what was important to us before we even had the possibility of any physical contact whatsoever our relationship would have evolved differently and perhaps not as well.

The other day, I hung out with James Powell, the SLD from Dorm 22. Powell was telling me about GodTube, a new Christian website (Motto: “Find Your Purpose”) that purports to be the evangelical equivalent of YouTube.

“It only allows Christian videos,” he said. “There’s a site called MyPraize, too. Have you heard of that? It’s the Christian MySpace. Started by a Liberty grad.”

“That’s awesome,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Ugh, I hate that stuff.”

Powell proceeded to explain that although he understands why Christian pop culture exists and although he thinks there’s some good Christian music out there, he doesn’t like it when Christians simply coopt elements of pop culture, rename them, and claim them as their own. He calls this “cheesy Christianity,” and claims that nothing irritates him more.

“I think it gives us a bad name,” he says. “And really, why should we want to create a separate culture? It makes no sense. God tells us to be the salt of the earth, and we’re afraid to interact with the world on its own terms. When I see something like MyPraize, I just want to shake whoever created it and tell them, ‘Brother, if you think creating a Christian MySpace and giving it a corny, clichéd name is the best way you can possibly honor God, something is very wrong.’”

Powell’s seems to be the dominant view on my hall–Christian pop culture can be worthwhile if done well, but bad Christian pop culture isn’t redeemed merely by the fact that it’s Christian.

Earlier, I wrote about how Roose went into this project with a more open-mind than I had. When I was more involved with evangelicals, their youth seemed mad for everything that had a cross stamped on it. Let me be clear on this- lots of Christian music, I think, is garbage. Boring, trite, derivative, all of the same criticisms that you’d give to the secular record industry’s second and third round of trying to milk whatever is popular these days. This sort of mindset included in the book is what really started to make me warm up to the students he interacted with at Liberty. They’re not mindless drones that open up their head and let the faculty pour in whatever fundamentalist doctrine right on in.

The second part of this is this guy’s inclusion of desiring to be “the salt of the earth” and to be included in society instead of trying to wall off Christ’s followers into their own ivory tower. During my time I’ve come across many young Christians who I really hope that they wise up before the day comes when they aren’t going to be able to stay in the Church-nest anymore and have to live with Actual Real People.

During last week’s breakfast discipleship meeting, I brought up prayer. I told him I still had a bunch of questions about the practice. Like, how does it work? Do prayers actually change God’s mind? If so, then why do so many prayers go unanswered? Why does Liberty’s football team lose any games? Why is the dining-hall food still terrible? And if prayer doesn’t change God’s mind, why do we pray at all?

Pastor Seth smiled.

“First,” he said. “I want you to think about it this way: God is our father, and we are his children. How would you feel if your children didn’t talk to you? A relationship with God isn’t a one-way street. God wants us to ask for things, even if he already knows what’s going to happen. We have to supplicate, to put ourselves in his will.”

His second point was even better. “Prayer may not always be entirely about God,” he said. Here, Pastor Seth quoted the famous Christian author Oswald Chambers, who wrote: “It is not so true that prayer changes things as that prayer changes me and I change things.”

“When you pray for other people, your own heart will be transformed,” Pastor Seth said. “You’ll find yourself living for others, making decisions with others in mind, putting the concerns of others ahead of your own. It’s a way to connect to other believers in the way God wants you to connect.”

One of the themes in this book that I really enjoyed was that of prayer. During my time living in Columbus, I had for years made it a point of prayer regularly. I had a really nice ritual that I had designed and used for some quiet time, but life got a bit crazy, and I just never got back into it. Roose seems to really enjoy prayer and how it effects him by doing it and by being around the supportive people who want the best for him it paints a picture of the practice that really helps me understand why prayer should be happening and I should make a greater effort of dedicating more of my time to it. The passage that I’ve included I think really encapsulates what I took from the book and what I learned right along with Roose.

Another passage on the topic:

And by the time I’ve spent my day like this, dredging up every person in my life who could possibly be undergoing any amount of hardship or strife and praying for their needs, a few things happen.

First, all my problems snap into perspective. Compared to a girl who’s stepfather was in a mine accident or an old lady having her hip replaced, nothing in my life seems all that pressing. […]

Second, the compassion I dig up during those thirty minutes sometimes carries over to the rest of my day.

And I like that.

Say what you will about young-earth creationism (I think I’ve said enough already), but there’s something depressing about a credentialed, university-level scientist who freely admits that he wouldn’t budge in his beliefs even if all the evidence in the universe contradicted one of his scientific theories. Never mind that Dr. Dekker is talking about creationism—can you imagine a physicist saying that about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Or an English professor saying that about his theory of late Victorian poetry? It might be honest of Dr. Dekker to admit that his views are impervious to evidence, but it should probably disqualify him from any sort of university-level teaching.

Another worrisome statement came during a guest lecture in my Evangelism 101 class by one of Liberty’s campus pastors. At the end of the lecture, the pastor addressed the two hundred–plus students in my class this way: “I just want to say this, Liberty students. My biggest worry about you, about all of you, is that you’ll become educated beyond your obedience.”

This is something else that has bugged me. If we are the pinnacle of God’s creation, made in His own image, why are you telling me not to use my God given intellect? Please don’t tell the people that already think we’re stupid for believing that you’re encouraging us to be even more stupid, okay?

P.S., I don’t believe in a six 24 hour periods method of creation, and I bet most Christians don’t either.

I hated the way [Falwell] invented outside threats to fuel his own ministry, and I hated his anti-intellectualism.

I already remarked on the anti-intellectualism. The “invented outside threats” bit doesn’t really make an appearance in the book. Evangelicals have a persecution complex that they frequently believe that the United States government is on the border of passing a anti-Christianity bill and they’re going to round up all of the church goers into camps, or the “gay agenda” which is some sort of nebulous idea of a organized front against Christian values, or even the moral panics of the 80s that had church goers thinking that packs of Satan-worshipers were kidnapping kids and forcing them into sexual demon worshiping rites. These things come up, I’ve been there, I’ve seen it. These things aren’t happening, but there are evangelicals that know it as gospel.

In addition to [Falwell’s] usual slate of media appearances, he’s been busy denouncing the Emergent Church, a growing branch of evangelicalism that de-emphasizes political issues like abortion and gay marriage and seeks to return to a more spiritual form of Christianity.

If I had a choice of a church to go to, it’d be an Emergent.

[Brown students] party, we learn, and we contemplate the metaphysical, but we rarely do all three simultaneously and en masse. And maybe that’s just as well. Maybe secular college shouldn’t be in the business of collective effervescence, and maybe most college students aren’t looking for mass spiritual euphoria from their schools. But after all I’ve seen this semester, I can’t say I blame the ones who are.

This, I think, is an ideal church service. Party, learn, contemplate.

Here’s the thing: I don’t believe it. I know what the Bible says, but I don’t believe the world is arranged according to a two-category binary. It can’t be. Just look inside the saved category, for example. All semester, I’ve been exposed to the vast range of personalities at Liberty, and I’ve seen the complexity of what I used to think was a unified whole. For every Zipper who fits neatly into the norms of evangelical culture, there’s a Jersey Joey carving his own path. For every Liberty student growing in faith, there’s another one lying in bed at night wondering if all this God stuff is just made up. Once you dig under the surface, Liberty is every bit as messy and diverse as any secular college, and lumping everyone on this campus into a single category seems irrational and simplistic.

This is something that I’ve considered as well. I know that there is just as much “kind of saved” as “kind of pregnant”, but is it really as cut and dry as the staunch evangelicals make it out to be? I remember reading some of Rob Bell’s stuff and he had gone into some thoughts about how if God truly wants a relationship with every human and if not accepting and actively becoming a Christian during that brief week that some kids from a midwestern church show up in your rural town in Non-Christian Country are trying to witness to you, then God has set himself up for lots of failure. That’s some heavy stuff to consider.

“No!” he says. “Not at all. Listen, you’re in a period of transition. You’re still struggling to find your spiritual identity, and there’s no shame in that. God doesn’t make everything clear for us right away. We have to engage our faith, wrestle with it, make it ours. Otherwise, it’s dead.”

I’m not sure if Pastor Seth meant what he said, but I hope he was being genuine. It’s not every day you meet a conservative evangelical pastor who tells you that being a Christian is more about doubt than dogma. It might not have been completely orthodox, and it certainly wasn’t typical of Falwell-style fundamentalism, but today it was exactly what I needed to hear.

That’d be a real cool thing to hear from a spiritual mentor, and I’m certain a rare thing to hear from someone in the evangelical mindset.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anybody. It’s fair and actually gave me respect for Liberty, although I don’t think I’ll be sending my kids there.