Awe

First of all...

it is exciting that I was able to find my blog. I couldn't remember the website, so I linked to it from my facebook page. Looking at my last entry (from over a year ago), I smile because I'm not so sure that I married "the guy who has it all together." Instead, I married my best fried--the guy who broke my heart x2 and infuriated me many times over, and still does--but the guy I can't imagine living my life without. It got to the point where I knew that if I didn't go ahead and marry him, I was going to lose my best friend forever.

We had a beautiful wedding. Of course there were a lot of imperfections about it. The one thing that sticks out the most is that my hubby was too anxious to get much of a meal at the reception. We had asked all our friends to make their best dishes, and hubby, being the careful person that he is, loaded his plate as he usually does at a buffet -- salad and limited "good stuff" first, with the expectation that he'd go back for a 2nd (and 3rd) plate. Well, when you are the guest of honor and hosting and speaking, so much for the return trips to the buffet table. Our well intentioned friend packaged left overs, everything carefully divided with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, in the same aluminum containers. Alas, every bit of leftover tasted of the overpowering pasta salad.

But all in all, it went, and it was in flux. I was surprised I cried at my wedding (I was told afterward by multiple individuals that it should be no surprise that I cried). But I never cry in public -- except on my wedding day I suppose. We wrote our own vows, and as I stood there in the fancy poofy wedding dress (with a prom dress hidden underneath, mind you), making these deep vows that I had written to a man who had just stated equally deep vows to me -- that this was it. I was giving my life away to him. So the tears came. Our experienced pastor and guide fortunately had some tissues on him. But, oh I wish he had given it to me earlier! Above all, I hate snot.

It rained on our wedding day. We were told that means good luck for a year. We eventually escaped to our hotel, which was across the street from the hospital where we work. We got two nights of a standard-sized room as a generous gift from a woman who works in the medical school. I had insisted on no wedding presents, but we did accept useful gifts, such as hotel nights. Only I kept crying and feeling confused and going back to my apartment where my parents and sister were staying. My mom had an odd affect and seemed irritable the entire wedding weekend. In hindsight, she was going through the same odd assortment of mixed feelings as I was. Alan lovingly drove me back to my apartment later that night, and again the next morning, my to my parents' surprise.

Our first day of marriage (not counting the wedding day) was spent looking for new bedding. At the very least, you should get a new bedding set, my mom had said. I agreed with her completely, and I wanted nice clean bed sheets, unlike the 99 cent ones bought second-hand from Savers (with the stains on them!). But being the (overly) frugal person I am, we spent way too much time looking for the right sheets at the right prices.

That night, we stood on the balcony of our hotel and Alan hugged me from the back as we looked at fireworks together. Don't fall, he said, as I stepped up and held onto the railings. Glitters of fireworks danced in the night sky.

On institutions

Two heads are better than one. Together everyone achieves more. Many hands make light work.

Life has a whole slew of challenges far too onerous for a single person to handle. So you've got buddies and groups and teams and units and troupes and so on -- combinations of multiple individuals, complementing and supplementing one another in various ways.

Of course, individuals can step on each other's toes -- after all, we all think of different things in different ways at different times. One way to harmonizes these differences is to institute rules and roles and guidelines and timelines to address to the who, the what, the how, and the when of what needs to be done.

This newfound rigidity invites defiance,  which, in turn, gives rise to rules to enforce rules. Very soon the original spirit and purpose that brought everyone together in the first place is buried beneath layers of institutional scaffolding. Protecting organizational structures becomes an end in itself.

The Shack by Wm. Paul Young depicts a God who is profoundly anti-institutional. Institutions inevitably engender "some kind of chain of command or a system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it." God further laments that "the good and ongoing existence" of human systems frequently takes precedence over "the value of the individual" -- a phenomenon that "lies behind every struggle for power, every prejudice, every war, and every abuse of relationship."

All this sounds pretty bleak, but I believe that, despite their shortcomings, institutions are necessary in this broken world. With regard to religious institutions (e.g., the Church), religious scholar Huston Smith has argued that one oughtn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good:

"If [Jesus] had not been followed by St. Paul, who founded the Christian Church, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated in a single generation. As it is, we have it today.... Institutions give traction, give sprituality traction in history. So we have to take on the burden of those institutions if we're serious."

Institutional religion surely has its vices. It can breed disaffection by effectively trying to shoehorn the same unmodulated message into unique and differentially needy human souls. It can serve up dispassionate, zombie-like doctrinal assent that nurtures little or no spiritual formation. It can wield its collective power in terrifyingly brutal ways in the name of protecting itself. We could go on and on.

But its virtues abound, too. Institutional religion provides a fairly concrete set of existential, moral, and ethical bearings informed by centuries of tradition that, if one does not necessarily subscribe to entirely, one can at least work with and draw guidance from. Its continued existence as a societal entity means that people have to reckon with it one way or the other. It cannot be dismissed as a mere personal eccentricity -- at some point one must deal with the question, "What's all this church stuff all about, anyway?" Its pervasive reach means that people often end up in a church service regardless of whether they want or intend to be there -- and sometimes that's how we come to accept certain things that are good for us even if they initially don't seem terribly palatable. Institutional religion can also lend its mighty voice to the "good" side of social movements, as we saw with the push for civil rights in the 1960s.

I think that institutions, above all, remind us that from the beginning God created us as interdependent beings. That it is not good for man to live alone. As I shared in my baptismal testimony a few years ago, "it's not simply about me -- it's about us, a body, a community of believers, young and old, strong and weak, striving to love one another amid our differences and bear witness to the One who called us into being."

I'm getting married in the mornin'!

Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime.
Feather and tar me;
Call out the Army;
But get me to the church.
Get me to the church.
For God's sake, get me to the church on time!

With a little bit o' bloomin' luck, I will get to the church on time, and the whole thing will be splendid -- at least that's what everyone's been telling me.

As the days preceding the wedding have dwindled in number, I've been inundated with a flurry of typical pre-wedding queries (Are you nervous? Are you excited? Has it sunk in yet?).  My response has generally been a pretty pro forma positive -- not because I'm actually ambivalent but because my emotions tend to congeal into an impenetrable numbness when big changes are afoot.

It all melted away today as I entered our reception area. The elegant whites and reds and blacks of table cloths and flowers and decorative lanterns, and the hustle bustle of many hands at work, all left me with a fleeting but palpable sense of the "surreal" (as Yaolin so aptly put it, herself feeling very much the same emotions).

All of this, for us?