...And I Do Weddings
My friends asked if I could perform a Buddhist wedding. The answer: I didn't know. I took the vows as a bodhicari (lay minister) over ten years ago at the Dharma Vijaya Buddhist Temple. But I never registered to perform weddings when I lived in California.
Utah, it turns out, requires no registration. All you have to be is a minister "in regular communion with any religious society." Since I return to the temple often when I visit Los Angeles, and I continue my practice of meditation (as I'm able), I qualify— even though these days I don't have an inclination toward the beliefs of any particular sect of religion.
My friends designed their own ceremony, based in part on the service my wife and I wrote for ourselves five years ago, which in turn we based on a service a friend of mine in Los Angeles had used. But ours contained very little recognizable as Buddhism, and they wanted more (perhaps in part to annoy some of their strict Mormon relatives). So I began and ended the ceremony with Buddhist chanting. My "adornents" included an eclectic mix from Jodo Shinshu and Tibetan Buddhism, while the chants themselves came from Theravada. No one seemed to mind. The service, I'm told, was very beautiful, and everyone seemed pleased— except the Mormon seminary teacher, and he was somewhat mollified because we asked him to do a blessing from his own tradition.
I'd never chanted solo in front of a crowd before. I'd never performed a wedding before. I kept telling myself as I stood there, "This is about them, not about me." No reason for me to be nervous. (Yeah, right.) But not only did it come off well, I found I actually enjoyed it. So yes, in addition to being a tax preparer, writer, goat rancher, peaceworker, and theologian, I also do weddings.
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