Before & After

I think I’ve already mentioned that even though Kyle and I are officially married (got all dressed up, signed the necessary paperwork and drank a bunch of champagne at City Hall), we have still not had our wedding-wedding (white dresses, teary relatives, drunk uncles and all that stuff). The wedding-wedding is in August and we are planning on having a wedding reception and a religious ceremony.

Religious what?! I KNOW. Professor Grady believes in God the same way Kant did (only so far as was necessary to support the hope that the world might not be incompatible with human freedom and morality) and I am my mother’s daughter: we go to church “just in case” and roll our eyes and kick each other under the table while grandma says a prayer before we dig into our Christmas dinner.

We ARE, however, all in favor of entertainment for entertainment sake and decided it would be really nice to have a short and sweet encounter with the Christian Orthodox church on our wedding day. We thought that would be especially fun for our American friends and relatives, who would get to experience Bulgarian culture and architecture in a very intimate kind of way. So, I called the church to ask a couple of preliminary questions about the ceremony and was promptly informed by a priest that for such-and-such amount of money, we get three (?!!!!) priests and a choir and that we both need to be Orthodox Christians. See, here’s the thing…I was baptized when was very little (grandma’s choice, not mine). Kyle, however, needs to go through the WHOLE thing. The priest asked me:

Priest: Your husband? What about him?
Me: He is American.
Priest: I understand that. What church does he belong to?
Me (thinking): How do I tell a priest that the only church that my husband belongs to is The Church of the Rolling Stones and only pays homage to His Holiness Mick Jagger?!
Priest: Is he Christian?
Me: Yes.
Priest: What kind of Christian.
Me: Not Catholic.
Priest: Well, how about you bring his baptism certificate and we figure it out here?
Me: He doesn’t have a baptism certificate.
Priest: Child, if he doesn’t have a baptism certificate, he’s NOT Christian.

So, before we have our wedding-wedding and after we’ve figured out how to download foreign movies with English subtitles, we’ll need to make my husband an Orthodox Christian too.

Honestly, sometimes I think that he will just have enough of all this and change his mind about the whole marriage thing. But, he tells me, it’s already too late for that and he’s here to stay. I wish you had an idea how happy that makes me.