I'm becoming a wedding grinch. It's not because I'm against weddings per se; I could never declare unclean what Jesus blessed in His first miracle (cf. John 2:1-11). No, my problem is what weddings in western civilization have become. Instead of celebrations of holy Christian matrimony, today's weddings have morphed into an obscure ritual intended solely for fancy pictures and a prelude to a drunken bacchanalia. (For more of my rant, read my post "The Problem with Weddings" on my church's website under "Pastor Ben.")
Interestingly, we're exporting overseas our self-centered materialism and its affect on marriage. A recent Reuters story ("China's 'me' Generation") tells us how the one-child policy in China is one of the factors behind their now-rampant divorce rate. One Beijing marriage counselor/psychiatrist says this about young adults in China: "They are weak in horizontal bonding, communicating with the same generation. They tend to apply a vertical approach to horizontal relationships." In other words, they're spoiled, selfish brats who have been raised badly.
Why on earth are young couples so foolish to think that a fancy, expensive wedding is preferable to a healthy, lifelong marriage? I'm weary of pregnant brides and couples who bring their children to premarital counseling. I don't condemn them; after all, most of them haven't been raised to know any better. What grieves me most is their fairy-tale picture of a wedding: no expense is spared in order to meet everyone's expectations. So what if the marriage falls apart? At least the wedding was nice!
Repent, Church. Stop surrendering the meaning of matrimony to the wedding planners and cardboard wedding cakes. Speak out against cohabitation and materialism. Teach abstinence, self-control, and commitment. Throw away the trashy "How to Have Great Sex" magazines and read scriptures like Ephesians 5:21-33 and 1 Corinthians 13 to learn what marriage is really like. Trust and obey God rather than dumb luck.
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So true. One would think, from the frenzy for wedding accouterments that there is a powerful belief working in the background: the more money I can spend on flowers, the band, a glitzy hall, prime rib at the hall, gag-reflex tuxedos and wedding gowns from Frederic's of Hollywood ... and the buffier we look on the videos ... the more we do all that and read the how-to stuff from Cosmo ... then the better our marriage will be.
One would think that with the gritty hyper-energy that eructates from erotic anticipation ritualized in the obligatory co-habitation "practice run" and the pagan liturgy enacted at the reception, that the happy couple might has well be glued together forever, since they had done all their homework.
Every single couple knows better. Outside the sacrament there is that sinking feeling that the brass ring has been missed, and all this business is just your usual static radio, droning in a distant room in a nursing home, covering the empty, frightening silence.
They will divorce, statistically, within a few months or years. They will find that into that silence, and the gray valley of the moments in between, that one cannot carry the little talismans of Dionysius, no matter how orgiastic they seem.
They find, in the boredom, that the pornography of the wedding cult is not enough to found a marriage.
People should read this.
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