This is not a post about my own wedding, which is coming up (but I am sure I will have something up about it sooner or later), but rather about a wedding at the ECUSA 'Cathedral of the Incarnation' (or "The Cathedral of the Reincarnation" as we call here in my town) that I attended the other day. It was bizarre, and made me very happy to be a continuing Anglican.
The lady who did the wedding didn't even follow the '79 BCP Order for Marriage. They used some other crazy text. The couple did their own vows, which were rather sentimental and shallow I thought. There were no hymns or anything... so even though the ceremony was done in the context of the Eucharist, it really did not feel like a community experience. They really cut back on the responses, I suppose because they thought most people wouldn't know them, so maybe that was why we all felt like we were watching a piece of weird performance art. There were no chasubles, no procession of clergy, no altar rail, no nothing. The acolyte, after the Holy Communion, then reserved the reaminder of the Precious Blood in an aumbry!
The whole thing was just very watered down. Of course they admitted everyone to the Holy Eucharist, and there was, as to be expected with Rite II, very little talk of sin and redemption. My fiancee, who is not a theologian by any stretch of the imagination, thought the whole experience was not very worshipful or holy.
At the reception, some "priestess" got up and prayed for the food. She began to quote Scripture in her prayer, but came up with her own, weird translation of the passage in question. She said, "Oh God, you said it was not good for people to be alone, so let us make for them partners to be with...." or something like that. She was quoting (I use that term loosely) from Tobit.
So the whole thing was very strange indeed. The organ music was nice, though. Hard to mess up the "Wedding March".
