Weddingbee Blog

For me, the most important aspect of wedding planning, after finding a venue and caterer, is selecting an officiant. This is particularly difficult for Mr. Spaniel and me because of our multicultural backgrounds, and MINE in particular.

So I was kvetching to my MOH that I wanted to have a “partially Jewish ceremony”, but there were five obstacles to finding a rabbi who could perform the ceremony: (1) I don’t really consider myself to be Jewish anymore (except culturally), (2) I am not joining anyone’s congregation, (3) Mr. Spaniel is not Jewish at all and will not consider conversion, and (4) we don’t plan to raise our children Jewish (um, except culturally… they will know their backgrounds, but we won’t be taking them to synagogue on the High Holidays or anything…), and (5) we’re getting married on a Saturday, and possibly before sun-down. I guess any rabbi who was willing to let the first four obstacles slide, though, would probably not be terribly concerned about the fifth! Wonderful helper that she is, my MOH offered to call on some of her connections (the rabbi who did her wedding, and people at the Jewish day school where she works) to see if she couldn’t find me some referrals anyway. I can’t even tell you how helpful it is to have a MOH who has already been married.

I know this would make my family happy.
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I’m blogging live from our new house as we finish a long day of painting and house projects. Being here is solidifying the very real move that I am going to make to live with my Lamb Lover after we’re married. I’ll leave my old city and embrace the new.

This reality has reminded me a lot of the words that Ruth spoke in the Old Testament. They are a favorite at weddings. Mrs. Cheese used them, and they’ve been suggested on several wedding websites. They’re beautiful and the bond described is so representative of the marriage relationship.

The words, however, were not about a marriage relationship at all. The short story is that Naomi, her husband, and her two sons moved to a new town to find food during a famine. Naomi’s husband dies and her sons marry two local women, one of them Ruth. Then the sons die. Naomi cannot support herself and tells her daughters-in-law to go back to their families and remarry. One daughter-in-law goes back, but Ruth says to Naomi:

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

The story of Ruth, of course, doesn’t end here.
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So, I’m a 2-wedding bride. We had our first ceremony July 25th of this year at Point Dume in Malibu. We’ve lived (or at least have been on leases) together for the past 2 years and always knew we’d get married, just not when. However, upon moving to Los Angeles and being unable to find a job with the same kind of benefits I had in Seattle, or even being accepted for private insurance, it became kind of necessary to get married. (Don’t ask me why a 26 year old female who has run a marathon, rarely drinks and doesn’t smoke can get rejected. Sorry that’s a bit off topic.)

Now, to answer some of the questions that came up after my previous post.

Being legally married before a Catholic ceremony is probably frowned upon in general, but I think there’s a good chance that a reasonable priest will be open to this, and from what I understand, all discretion is left to the priest. I kind of lucked out in this department, because our priest has been a friend of my family since well before I was born and is known to be more ’inclusive’ than some priests. His thoughts on the matter are that it’s good to have people marry in the Church and being overly prohibitive isn’t going to really help anyone. He knows that the two of us aren’t as religious as we could be, but we were both raised in Catholic families and this felt right for us. Being raised Catholic, I had mostly been to Catholic weddings and they always felt like they had more ’weight’ to them. Once we decided to get married, I knew Fr. Paul would be involved.
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After my mini-ceremony tantrum, Mr. Joey and I sat down and selected readings for our ceremony. We each picked one and agreed on the third. So, here are our picks.

My pick: Reading 1

Wherever you go, I shall go,
wherever you live, I shall live.
Your people will be my people,
and your God will be my God.
Where you die, I shall die and there I shall be buried.
Let Yahweh bring ills on me,
if anything but death should part me from you!

– Ruth 1:16-17

Mr. Joey’s pick: Reading 2

Strive for the greater gifts.
And I will show you a more excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels,
but do not have love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

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Before we got engaged, before we even had “the talk“, we talked one evening about how we didn’t want a priest to marry us. Mr. Bear Cub and I are not religious, and this tends to confuse a lot of people (especially my family). Luckily, those that don’t agree with our beliefs at least respect our right to live our lives the way we want to, and believe what we want. Mr. Bear Cub and I are both humanist.

Happy Human, the Humanist logo

I say that we have differing “beliefs” than those who follow religious sects because normally those who are religious believe that atheists don’t believe in anything.
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I’ve been reading the comments many of you have posted about your own weddings, and it seems like a lot of you are supportive — and perhaps a little envious — of Mr. MJ’s and my decision to keep our wedding incredibly small. While a lot of you are super-excited about your large weddings (yay!), some of you are feeling obligated to make your wedding big and all-inclusive. That’s very understandable. Today I want to talk about how Mr. Mary Jane and I are dealing with those pressures.

One thing that often plays a central role in weddings is religion. After all, marriage is not just a matter of legality. For the majority of people (of many cultures), marriage is a sacred bond before God. An important part of many non-secular wedding celebrations is to share them with those you love. A place of worship full of supportive loved ones strengthens the bond of the newlyweds, and the two families can celebrate their joining together. Mr. Mary Jane and I are not religious. Even if we had chosen to have a larger wedding, the ceremony would not have taken place in a church. We’re fortunate to have families who are understanding of this. Our parents and grandparents are not upset about our choice to have a secular ceremony, so we’re “off the hook” in that regard.

Along the same lines of religion is culture. I won’t ramble on about something I know very little about, but I do know that in some cultures, weddings are big events. There is no getting around it. Mr. Mary Jane and I are both your average boring Midwestern white people, so we don’t have any extra cultural issues to consider.

The other big issue I see many couples facing is that of the ever-growing pressures of “How-can-you-not-invite ______?”. We all have many people who care about us. Sadly, when weddings are involved, those people can sometimes get pushy and/or jealous. I’ve seen many posts on the boards revolving around guest list drama: how to invite one coworker but not another, whether to allow “and guests” who are strangers to the bride and groom, etc. Moms and dads can often get caught up in the excitement of the event too. They treat it as their own wedding, wanting to invite their friends and family - people the couple has never even met! This is something we really wanted to avoid, and here’s how we did it.
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Like Ms. Mascara and Mrs. Dumpling, various bees before me have blogged about doing Pre-Cana and taking the FOCCUS test. Like most men I know, Mr. Joey was not really interested in any type of pre-marital counseling. He’s willing to spill the beans on our checking accounts with a financial planner but not discuss our relationship with counselor or other certified person. I totally understand. I’m not really comfortable talking about my feelings in front of a stranger, either.

Since our chapel doesn’t offer marriage prep classes, I set about trying to find somewhere else to take them. Engaged Encounter was out. Mr. Joey can’t afford to lose his entire weekend at this point in the school year. Doing it in the summer would be fine, but our officiant said that that would be cutting it too close. I called some local Catholic Churches but had no luck either. Classes had already started, or they only allowed parishioners to participate. I looked into private non-Catholic counseling, but the price tag was hefty and Mr. Joey wasn’t willing to shell out that kind of money for something he didn’t think we needed.

I was about to give up and force Mr. Joey into taking the Engaged Encounter when my sister suggested I look at Seattle University. I had planned to get married in their chapel but the date that was available didn’t work with our schedule, and I had to give it up. I wasn’t sure they’d let us take Pre-Cana there since we weren’t getting married in their chapel, but thought I’d try anyway.
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Why was last Thursday night different from all other nights?

Mr. HC and I hosted our first Passover seder as a married couple… like the real grown-ups that we are now. What made this Passover so meaningful is that not only was it the first event we collaborated on as part of our newly Chewish household, it also was the first Jewish holiday I have celebrated since my conversion to Judaism in March.
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When Mr. B and I started talking more seriously about an engagement, we had a number of discussions on religion. He is Catholic, and a majority of his extended family is Catholic. I am Lutheran, and my family is either Catholic or Lutheran. Although the two religions are very similar, there are some key differences between them. I didn’t, and still don’t really care about the location of our ceremony, but I was more concerned with who conducted the ceremony. My family has been attending the same church for the last 20 years, in which the same pastor has presided. It was/is important to me that we were both comfortable with the person performing the ceremony. For me, that meant someone we were very familiar with and knew well. Thus, an obvious choice was my pastor. However, it was/is important for Mr. B to have a Catholic ceremony. We discussed many different alternatives that would appease the both of us. For a while, I considered having an outdoor ceremony outside of either church. Of course, I quickly changed my mind when I remembered how unpredictable the weather in Texas is, and how expensive it would be to have a Plan B in case of rain, cold weather, or sweltering heat.

I think the most beneficial result of our discussions was that each of us was able to understand the other’s views of their own religion. We both respect that we were raised with different religious backgrounds, but we are more open to explore each other’s religions now that we have a better understanding of its importance.
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A while back I posted about our experience taking the FOCCUS survey. This past weekend, we completed the last step in order to get married in the Catholic Church by attending Pre-Cana class.

Some of you might be wondering what Pre-Cana is. Before attending, Pre-Cana was always a mystery to us, and a lot of other couples we know who have gone through it. According to Wikipedia:

Pre-Cana is a course or consultation Catholic couples must undergo before they can be married in a Catholic church. The name is derived from John 2:1-12, the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee, where Jesus performed the miracle of turning water into wine.

Approaches to Pre-Cana vary among Catholic dioceses and parishes. Often six weekly sessions will be led by a priest or deacon with support from a married Catholic couple. Common topic include: compatibility of the couple, basic principles of Catholic marriage and family life (namely theological meaning of marriage), conflict resolution within marriage, rules the couple is accepting to follow (including, but not limited to, natural family planning).

Now that you have the Wikipedia definition, I’ll tell you a little about our experience.
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Good news! We met with the priest this weekend to go over our test results (one of the perks of getting married in a Catholic church… you have to take a test) and guess what? We passed. We are officially compatible. I’m glad I know that now after being together for almost 7 years.

Anyway, I wanted to post some pictures of the church we’ll be getting married at. It’s called Immaculate Conception Church, located on the north side of IM. It’s the church I have gone to my whole life. They just put new landscaping in around the church, so it should be great for pictures at our wedding! Actually it’s part of the reason Shari decided she wanted to photograph our wedding (thanks Shari!).

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Earlier, I wrote about my decision to convert to Judaism. Today, I thought I’d share a bit about what the process entails, for those of you who are interested in conversion*, who are intellectually curious, or who are just eager to relive those hilarious episodes of “Sex in the City” in which Charlotte goes through the conversion process. This is another loooong post. Sorry!

*A quick caveat: Modern Judaism is divided into a few movements (Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, etc.), which differ from one another in their level of observance, their liturgy, their approach to textual interpretation, etc. My conversion is through the Conservative movement, so I can’t really speak to what the conversion process is like in the other movements.

[Image source.]

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m in the process of converting to Judaism, and I’ve promised to write a longer post about my decision to convert and what the conversion process entails. So here goes a loooong two-part post…

The popular assumption is that anyone who converts to Judaism for marriage does so only after being pressured into it (usually by a naggy future mother-in-law, whom I’ll call “Estelle,” after George Costanza’s mother). “My darling baby boy. You can’t marry a shiksa!” kvetches Estelle. “Did you eat? Are you eating? Vy are you so thin? Is that shiksa not feeding you?” But Mr. HC’s family has never expressed any concern about his marrying “outside of the tribe” or put any pressure on me to go Jew. To the contrary, they’re to this day incredulous that I’d want to do such a thing!

What led me to convert was this: Judaism has played a very important role in Mr. HC’s life. His closest friends are those he made in Hebrew school, who bunked with him in the “dork tent” in Jewish summer camp, and who traveled with him to Israel. He wanted our future children to have these experiences as much as I wanted our children to celebrate their Chinese heritage. He hopes that our children will feel “at home” in both cultures. I, on the other hand, hope that our children will inhabit a corporate identity, such that they are not sometimes Jewish and sometimes Chinese, but rather always a union of both. But however our children choose to deal with the identity question, we know that we want them to be truly bicultural, to be Chinese and Jewish.
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Without going into too many researchy-technical definitions, Pre-Cana is a seminar thing that you and your fiance have to go through in order to get married in a Catholic church. If you really want to learn more about it, go here. But if you want my jumbled account, keep reading. And reading.

I was very nervous before we went. You see, I wasn’t born with the “I’m a chick, let’s talk about feeeelings” gene, so the very thought of having to do just that in front of church people and strangers scared the mess out of me. I had heard horror stories about it being 2 weeks long or weekend sessions, and that you are forced to talk OUT LOUD about your money, plans for kids and intimacy. Psshhhhhttt… no thanks. Can’t do it. And definitely NOT in front of church folks. But, it was nothing like that. In fact, it wasn’t scary at all. We basically sat in a room for 8 hours with other engaged couples and only talked amongst ourselves. There were, however, some parts we kinda hated, besides the food.
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The very first item on our agenda after getting engaged was picking out a date for the wedding. The process was such an ordeal though that I just couldn’t bring myself to blog about it until now. But I thought I’d write about it today just to test out my theory that there ain’t no trauma that a box of Trader Joe’s chocolate raspberry sticks can’t fix.

As you might know, Mr. HC’s family is Jewish and mine is Buddhist. Although the two of us are quite secular, we both wanted to be respectful of our families’ beliefs, as well as to honor the cultures from which we came. Still giddy from being engaged and totally naive as to the ways in which wedding planning can be one ginormous pain in our collectively large buttocks, we started looking into dates that would be auspicious for both cultures. “There’s 365 days in a year,” we stupidly observed. “How difficult could this be?” Idiots!

[Jew-Bu: cute on t-shirts, but much tougher in reality.]

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