My of my least favorite social duties is weddings. The normally low level of Catholic Church music plunges to new lows as “their favorite song” (sometimes schlocky-romantic, sometimes full of innuendos) is played during Communion. The bride has confused a ball gown and a wedding dress. A ball gown is daring and slightly immodest; a wedding dress – high collar, long sleeves – stresses the bride’s (devoutly wished by the father) virginity. Then the bridesmaids all too often look like they wandered in from Las Vegas, where they are working girls.
The Las Vegas theme is repeated at the reception with a disk jockey introducing everyone like an MC before he begins torturing the guests with “music.” Then there is the drinking.
St. Lambert’s Church has a “Dear Reverend Know It All” Column (pp. 3-5 of the bulletin). (Gratias to dotCommonweal) A few selections to tempt you to partake of his wisdom:
The couple have been shacking up.
They rent the hall and then go see the priest. He tells them there are four other weddings that day and they respond, “but we’ve rented the hall already.” Someone suggests a garden wedding if the church is occupied. The priest says we can’t do garden weddings. (More on this later.) The young couple begins to complain about how narrow minded the Church is with all these rules and regulations. They eventually pick a date. Then the bottom drops out. It seems the groom is not Catholic. He was baptized in the First Reformed Church of the Druids, though he never practiced. This means there must be a dispensation for the marriage, another irritating Catholic invention, and the wedding date cannot be confirmed until the dispensation is received.
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The special day comes, the best man is still drunk,the groom is hung over, no one knew about that interesting tattoo that the maid of honor had way low on her back, now revealed by the plunging back of her dress that is held up only by wishful thinking. Grandma, upon reading the logo of the maid of honor’s tattoo, has fainted.
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The music reaches levels that cause blood to drip from some peoples’ nose and ears. The joyousevent ends with the bride and groom being the last to leave the hall. They are slow to go up to the room they have rented in the hotel because nothing new or beautiful awaits them there. The groom promptly falls asleep, being heavily sedated already, and, as he snores away, with his shoes still on, our blushing bride, having shed her dress of virginal white, thinks back on this day, her special day, the most important day in her life, the day she has dreamt of since she was a little girl. They will stay an extra day at the hotel, but cannot afford the time or money to go on a honeymoon because on Monday they will both be back at work in order to pay off the colossal bill that their special day has incurred. For some reason, the bride is depressed.
You might like this guy:
http://donotbediscouraged.blogspot.com/
Let the women wear whatever dresses they like, the clerics do, and if the bride doesn’t have a “proper” dress she can always asks the cleric to borrow his. That would be Christian like.
White Gowns were used to show one’s wealth, because in the old days when majority of the women didn’t have several dresses to choose from to get married in. A new white gown showed the brides family financial status.
My wife & are agree re bride’s dress. In fact, my wife urges young women to study the wedding dress in The Sound of Music.
The reductivist notion from a previous commenter that white dresses were just materialist display is laughable but perfectly in accord with the appalling modern notion that a wedding should be Bridezilla’s will writ large. The Orthodox Jew Michael Medved once wrote a great article on the evils of honeymoons — first taken by Napoleon & symbolic of “you & me, naby, against the world” — which he thought a big decline from the Jewish tradition of a week of parties at the new home where the community celebrates with the couple but also reinforces the community’s stake in the new family…