then, who becomes the living seal of the promise, notarizing the vow with real weight. Even in the early European Middle Ages, before the times of official church or government weddings, the expression of a vow before a single witness was all it took to seal a couple together forever in a state of legal matrimony. Even then, you couldn’t do it entirely on your own. Even then, somebody had to watch.
“Would it satisfy you,” I asked Mimi, “if Felipe and I promised wedding vows to each other, right here in your kitchen, in front of you?”
“Yeah, but who would be the person?” she asked.
“Why don’t you be the person?” I suggested. “That way you can be sure it’s done properly.”
This was a brilliant plan. Making sure that things are done properly is Mimi’s specialty. This is a girl who was veritably born to be the person. And I’m proud to report that she rose to the occasion. Right there in the kitchen, while her mother cooked dinner, Mimi asked Felipe and me if we would please rise and face her. She asked us to please hand her the gold “wedding” rings (again with the air quotes) that we had already been wearing for months. These rings she promised to hold safely until the ceremony was over.
Then she improvised a matrimonial ritual, cobbled together, I supposed, from various movies she had seen in her seven long years of life.
“Do you promise to love each other all the time?” she asked.
We promised.
“Do you promise to love each other through sick and not sick?”
We promised.
“Do you promise to love each other through mad and not mad?”
We promised.
“Do you promise to love each other through rich and not so rich?” (The idea of flat-?out poor, apparently, was not something Mimi cared to wish upon us; thus “not so rich” would have to suffice.)
We promised.
We all stood there for a moment in silence. It was evident that Mimi would have liked to remain in the authoritative position of the person for a bit longer, but she couldn’t come up with anything else that needed promising. So she gave us back our rings and instructed us to place them on each other’s fingers.
“You may now kiss the bride,” she pronounced.
Felipe kissed me. Catherine gave a small cheer and went back to stirring the clam sauce. Thus concluded, right there in my sister’s kitchen, the second non-?legally-?binding commitment ceremony of Liz and Felipe. This time with an actual witness.
I hugged Mimi. “Satisfied?”
She nodded.
But plainly-you could read it all over her face-she was not.
What is it about a public, legal wedding ceremony that means so much to everybody anyhow? And why was I so stubbornly-almost belligerently-resistant to it? My aversion made even less sense, considering that I happen to be somebody who loves ritual and ceremony to an inordinate degree. Look, I’ve studied my Joseph Campbell, I’ve read The Golden Bough, and I get it. I thoroughly recognize that ceremony is essential to humans: It’s a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don’t stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change, much the same way that a stable boy can lead a blindfolded horse right through the center of a fire, whispering, “Don’t overthink this, buddy, okay? Just put one hoof in front of the other and you’ll come out on the other side just fine.”
I even understand why people feel it’s so important to witness each other’s ritualistic ceremonies. My father- not an especially conventional man by any means-was always adamant that we must attend the wakes and funerals of anyone in our hometown who ever died. The point, he explained, was not necessarily to honor the dead or to comfort the living. Instead, you went to these ceremonies so that you could be seen-specifically seen, for instance, by the wife of the deceased. You needed to make sure that she catalogued your face and registered the fact that you had attended her husband’s funeral. This was not so you could earn social points or get extra credit for being a nice person, but rather so that the next time you ran into the widow at the supermarket she would be spared the awful uncertainty of wondering whether you had heard her sad news. Having seen you at her husband’s funeral, she would already know that you knew. She would therefore not have to repeat the story of her loss to you all over again, and you would be saved the awkward necessity of expressing your condolences right there in the middle of the produce aisle because you had already expressed them at the church, where such words are appropriate. This public ceremony of death, therefore, somehow squared you and the widow with each other-and also somehow spared the two of you social discomfort and uncertainty. Your business with each other was settled. You were safe.
This is what my friends and family wanted, I realized, when they were asking for a public wedding ceremony between Felipe and me. It wasn’t that they wanted to dress in fine clothing, dance in uncomfortable shoes, or dine on the chicken or the fish. What my friends and family really wanted was to be able to move on with their lives knowing with certainty where everybody stood in relationship to everybody else. This was what Mimi wanted-to be squared and spared. She wanted the clear assurance that she could now take the words “uncle” and “husband” out of air quotes and continue her life without awkwardly wondering whether she was now required to honor Felipe as a family member or not. And it was quite clear that the only way she was ever going to offer up her full loyalty to this union was if she could personally witness the exchange of legal vows.
I knew all this, and I understood it. Still, I resisted. The main problem was that-even after several months spent reading about marriage and thinking about marriage and talking about marriage-I was still not yet entirely convinced about marriage. I was not yet sure that I bought the package of goods that matrimony was selling. Truthfully, I was still feeling resentful that Felipe and I had to marry at all merely because the government demanded it of us. And probably the reason this all bothered me so deeply and at such a fundamental level, I finally realized, is that I am Greek.
Please understand, I do not mean that I am literally Greek, as in: from the country of Greece, or a member of a collegiate fraternity, or enamored of the sexual passion that bonds two men in love. Instead, I mean that I am Greek in the way I think. Because here’s the thing: It has long been understood by philosophers that the entire bedrock of Western culture is based on two rival worldviews-the Greek and the Hebrew-and whichever side you embrace more strongly determines to a large extent how you see life.
From the Greeks-specifically from the glory days of ancient Athens-we have inherited our ideas about secular humanism and the sanctity of the individual. The Greeks gave us all our notions about democracy and equality and personal liberty and scientific reason and intellectual freedom and open-?mindedness and what we might call today “multiculturalism.” The Greek take on life, therefore, is urban, sophisticated, and exploratory, always leaving plenty of room for doubt and debate.
On the other hand, there is the Hebrew way of seeing the world. When I say “Hebrew” here, I’m not specifically referring to the tenets of Judaism. (In fact, most of the contemporary American Jews I know are very Greek in their thinking, while it’s the American fundamentalist Christians these days who are profoundly Hebrew.) “Hebrew,” in the sense that philosophers use it here, is shorthand for an ancient worldview that is all about tribalism, faith, obedience, and respect. The Hebrew credo is clannish, patriarchal, authoritarian, moralistic, ritualistic, and instinctively suspicious of outsiders. Hebrew thinkers see the world as a clear play between good and evil, with God always firmly on “our” side. Human actions are either right or wrong. There is no gray area. The collective is more important than the individual, morality is more important than happiness, and vows are inviolable.
The problem is that modern Western culture has somehow inherited both these ancient worldviews-though we have never entirely reconciled them because they aren’t reconcilable. (Have you followed an American election cycle recently?) American society is therefore a funny amalgam of both Greek and Hebrew thinking. Our legal code is mostly Greek; our moral code is mostly Hebrew. We have no way of thinking about independence and intellect and the sanctity of the individual that is not Greek. We have no way of thinking about righteousness and God’s will that is not Hebrew. Our sense of fairness is Greek; our sense of justice is Hebrew.
And when it comes to our ideas about love-well, we are a tangled mess of both. In survey after survey, Americans express their belief in two completely contradictory ideas about marriage. On one hand (the Hebrew
