THE TEAR IN THE VEIL

 

Old ministry friend, John Shaffer, and I exchange remembrances of times past. He and Barbara just celebrated their 60^th wedding anniversary, so we’ve been sharing wedding stories. Here is part of a missive I sent to him… [See, I’m not writing, just corresponding with a friend.]

In my early years of doing weddings, I prided myself on predicting which marriages would last and which wouldn’t. I had a right to; I was always correct. That turned out to be accidental and ephemeral. At some point I began to be wrong as often as I was right.

Also, during my early years, there was a movement for preachers not to accept gratuities for weddings and funerals. The idea was that we were paid a salary as a professional and should not be taking tips for extra service. In addition, it was to be a source of evangelism for non-members.

This absence of wedding fees upset the wives of preachers, whose only source of income was wedding gratuities, since they had to give their egg money to missions. [1]

Also, it confused people, who thought I was rejecting them by rejecting their largesse. After I realized that my gratuitous refusal of gratuities was causing more harm than good, I just took whatever came and said thanks, which is a pretty good approach to life in general.

I think my most… I’m not sure. You can decide what to call it. I was campus minister at ILSU. I had two student weddings the same Saturday. The second one I wrote about in CIW for 5-10-22, the Chinese grad students where the bride was so overcome that she could not answer the questions because she could make no sounds. It was poignant and meaningful, a small wedding in the chapel.

The earlier one was a big, formal wedding in the sanctuary. It was a horror, in a thousand ways, from pre-wedding counseling to rehearsal. The worst thing happened in the bride room, just before the service was to begin.

The bride realized that there was a slight tear in the hem of her veil. It was so small no one else had even noticed it. The wedding consultant from the expensive bridal store downtown said, “No problem, I’ll just use my scissors to cut off the entire last row of lace on the veil, and since all the rows are the same, no one will ever know.”

The bride went berserk. “This is MY wedding!! It has to be perfect!! I want a veil that is 17 inches and not 16 & ¾!!! It won’t be perfect if my veil is short!!” She made everybody wait for half an hour while the bridal consultant went back to her store and got a replacement veil of the “correct” length. [I always hoped that while she was at the store, the consultant cut off the last row of lace and told that bridezilla that it was the right length.]

That was only one of the indignities foisted upon everyone at that wedding. It was a total shallow sham, with me as the hired man, and everyone else, including the parents who were paying for the whole thing, treated as serfs and servants.

Then they went to the gym/reception hall to party so loudly that as I waited in the lounge beside the chapel, with the Chinese groom and his best man, the groom and I could hardly hear each other. We were just ready to walk into the chapel when the frat-boy groom from the first wedding burst through the door, with a retinue of boisterous nincompoops, pulled out his wallet, fanned it open, and said, “How much do I owe you?”

I was thoroughly disgusted with that bunch by then, so I said, “How much do you have?” He looked at it. “Fifty dollars.” [These were 1970 dollars. What would that be now? Five hundred, maybe?] “That will be enough,” I said, and held out my hand. All his friends, plus a couple of Chinese guys, were watching. He had no choice but to hand it over. I gave it to my wife.

When the Chinese groom tried to pay me after his wedding, I explained that the frat-boy groom had paid for him, too.

John Robert McFarland

1] When I started preaching in 1956, all ministers were male, almost all were married, and wives were considered unpaid employees of the church. They did not work “outside.” The tradition, in exchange, was that wedding honoraria were given to the wives. Also, parsonages had gardens, and many small-town preachers kept chickens. “Egg money,” returns on selling excess eggs, was understood as a wife’s contribution to missions.