Kristin Janz

Tag: faith

  • An unusual wedding (mine)

    So, Donald and I got married on May 8th. He’s already blogged about it, with pictures. I don’t have any pictures yet, so if you want to see some, you’ll have to go to his blog. (Neither of us had the chance to take a lot of photos during our wedding, unsurprisingly, but Donald copied his mom’s memory card onto his computer before she flew back to Louisiana.)

    It was kind of an untraditional wedding. We did get married in a church (we both attend church regularly, so that was important to us). The words we said in exchanging our vows were pretty typical. Our minister married us. But we pretty much dispensed with all the other traditions.

    To begin with, we got married during a normal Sunday church service, instead of having a separate wedding service. I’d felt for a long time that a traditional formal wedding wasn’t for me, but my faith in God and connection to my church are important enough to me that I didn’t want to disconnect my wedding ceremony from those, and go the courthouse route. And it always seemed to me that the essential parts of a church wedding really only take about 10-15 minutes (“do you take this man, do you take this woman, etc, etc, I now pronounce you husband and wife”). A lot of the other parts–the Bible readings, the songs, the homily–seem to be there to pad the service out to a half hour or so, so people from out of town feel that it was worth it for them to travel for hours just to get there. Or, less flippantly, they’re there to make the wedding into more of a church service. So I thought, why not just stick the wedding into the middle of an actual church service?

    I also felt that there can be so much pressure to make the wedding into a picture-perfect spectacle that a lot of other important things can get lost or forgotten. It’s a lot of work, planning a wedding, even such a simple wedding as ours. I didn’t want our attention (or anyone else’s) to be on my dress, or the flowers, or the decorations, or the bridesmaids’ gowns, or any of that other stuff. I wanted it to be about the commitment that the two of us were making to each other, and the trust we were putting in God to help us keep it.

    Fortunately, Donald was totally on board with having a simple wedding, and maybe even a little bit relieved that I wasn’t going to try to pressure him into wearing a tux or tailcoat, and he wasn’t going to get dragged around to look at flowers and tablecloths.

    So, the wedding was during an actual service, which meant there were people at the ceremony who weren’t wedding guests. I wore a knee-length sleeveless blue and white dress, and didn’t carry flowers. We didn’t have bridesmaids or groomsmen. I didn’t walk down the aisle, nor was I “given away” (both sets of parents were asked to stand and give their blessing during the ceremony, though). The songs, sermon and Bible readings were all there as part of the normal church service.* And no one read 1 Corinthians 13! Yay!**

    We did exchange rings, and we did kiss once the minister announced we were married! No sense throwing out the baby with the bath water!

    We also skipped the professional photographer and posed photographs, and headed straight to the reception from the wedding. The reception was just at our old apartments (before getting married, we lived in upstairs and downstairs apartments of a two-family house), no sit-down dinner, or dancing (Donald was relieved about that, too), or embarrassing speeches from friends and family. We had a buffet of cold finger food catered by Whole Foods (sushi, veggie and fruit platters, plus various dip and cracker/chip assortments), plus cheese and wine selected by my friend Bob. Bob also baked the cake, a delicious lemon genoise with lemon frosting. It was all very relaxed, and people seemed to have a good time. We had a good time too, which I hear is not necessarily the case at one’s own wedding. Of course, we had a lot of friends and family helping to keep things running smoothly during the reception, and cleaning up afterwards! Without them, we wouldn’t have had nearly such a good time.

    We also had a Saturday afternoon party (the day before the wedding) for out-of-town friends, and friends with children (the Sunday night reception was pretty late, so we thought it would be nice to have something at an earlier hour for people with kids). And the day before that (Friday), Donald and I took our families out to Legal Seafood for dinner. I was glad to spend all that time with family and friends, instead of spending it getting my hair and nails done, or making table centerpieces!

    Donald’s parents and sisters were all able to attend, and his sisters’ daughters. My parents, grandfather, brother and sister were also there, and my sister brought her daughter, but unfortunately my brother’s wife and two sons couldn’t make it (they live in Europe, and airfare is pretty expensive).

    I’m glad we did our wedding this way! It was much less expensive than most weddings (under $4000), and less stressful. And we got to focus on the things that were important to us, not the things that the Wedding Industrial Complex thinks ought to be important. Thankfully we both have tolerant and understanding families who were supportive of us in our desire to celebrate our wedding our way, and we’re very grateful for that.

    We then went and spent all the money that we’d saved*** on the honeymoon, which I’ll hopefully find time to write about before too much longer.

    * This sort of wedding is not for everyone. For instance, because the wedding was part of a regular church service, we didn’t get to pick the Bible readings and songs. We were okay with this (one less task to do!), but some couples might not be.
    ** I have nothing against 1 Corinthians 13, but reading it at weddings is kind of overdone, especially considering that it isn’t even about marriage or romantic love!
    *** This is an exageration. We didn’t spend that much money on the honeymoon. I mean, it was Italy. In May. For 2 weeks. And we didn’t live exclusively off of pizza and sandwiches. (One of my goals was to spend more on the honeymoon than on the wedding, but I haven’t added up all our receipts to see whether we managed it. My other goal was to plan the wedding without reading a single bridal magazine, and I did accomplish that goal.)

  • Is there such a thing as Christian horror?

    I just finished reading the 2nd Edition of Coach’s Midnight Diner, an anthology of “hardboiled horror, crime, and paranormal fiction with a Christian slant”.

    I was mostly reading it because my boyfriend has a story in the anthology. But I’d heard of this anthology before. I remembered being impressed by their submission guidelines. Most Christian magazines and anthologies are way less forgiving of profanity, sex and violence in the stories they publish than, say, the authors of the Bible (to pick a completely random example). So I was heartened to read that it wasn’t really an issue for them; I think the guidelines said something along the lines of “God’s not a pussy, and neither are we.”

    They’ve, um, changed it since to something less crude. (“This is not Guidposts or your Sunday School quarterly.”) But I still approve. The first anthology they put out was subtitled “The Jesus vs. Cthulhu Edition”, further evidence that the editors have a sense of humor.

    The one I read was “The Back From the Dead Edition.” Some of my favorite stories: “Flowers for Shelly”, by Greg Mitchell, was possibly the most memorable story in the anthology, with the best description I’ve ever read of a first person narrator who turns into a mindless zombie during the zombie apocalypse. Jerry Gordon’s “9th Ward” was also memorably creepy, very short, but with a twist ending that I didn’t see coming. I’d be amiss not to mention Donald’s story (for which he used the byline D.S. Crankshaw), “The Office of Second Chances.” I don’t claim to be offering an objective opinion here, but it was one of my favorite stories in the anthology; it’s probably the most humorous story, with its send-ups of action/thriller cliches and Lovecraftian horrors from beyond time. I also liked Maggie Stiefvater’s “The Denial” (about a demon who falls in love with a human woman, and finds some kind of redemption), Daniel G. Keohane’s “Box” (about a victim of child trafficking) and “Small Accidents of God”, by Virginia Hernandez (a teenage girl is unnerved by the menacing shadows she can see hovering around other people, and hopes that “getting the Spirit” will make them go away).

    One thing that the anthology got me thinking about is whether there can even be such a thing as Christian horror. I’m not talking about the window dressing of horror, the zombies and demons and serial killers and such. What I mean is that many critics seem to be arguing that one of the essential features of horror fiction is, at its core, a sense that everything is meaningless. That there’s no underlying purpose to our lives, or to life in general; or if there is, then the mind behind that purpose (if there is such a mind) does not wish us well. Most Christians would agree, I think, that this worldview is antithetical to the essential doctrines of Christianity.

    I realize that Coach’s Midnight Diner doesn’t limit itself to horror fiction. But having read the anthology didn’t do much to convince me that there is such a thing as Christian horror. Most of the best stories were neither horror, nor particularly Christian (I don’t mean that they were anti-Christian, just that Christianity wasn’t relevant to the story). Some were one, but not the other. Even stories with horrific or frightening elements often ended on too much of a redemptive note to seem true to the grim and hopeless horror aesthetic.

    I think one of the reasons I especially liked “Flowers for Shelly”, though, is that it did a better job than any of the other stories at walking the line between Christian faith (the first person narrator who turns into a zombie is a devout Christian, and of course there’s the question of how God could allow a zombie apocalypse to happen to good people), and grim hopelessness (perhaps there’s a purpose, but the zombified protagonist isn’t going to find out what it is). It’s also a bleakly funny story.

    Of course, on the other hand, the Bible itself can be pretty horrific, and not just in window trappings (“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit,” as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us). I’d argue that if you read the entire book, the horrific bits are just local minima (to use a scientific analogy); overall, there’s a purpose. Not necessarily for individual lives, though. People die without ever seeing the redemption that they’d hoped for.

    So I guess I don’t have an answer to my own question. One thing I do know, though; every so often while I’m typing up a blog post, it auto-saves and tells me how many words I’ve written so far; and for an awfully long time while I was writing this post, the word count was 666.

  • Fiction and faith

    At least for the past week, I’ve been able to keep up with my pledge to myself to make more time for reading, and I finally finished a book I’d been at for a long time. Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk about Their Vision and Work, by W. Dale Brown. It was published in 1997, so it’s a little out of date in some ways, especially since some of the interviews took place in the early 90s. All this talk about the first Gulf War, and newspapers still being viable, and hardly anything about the internet.

    The fiction and faith thing is a subject I’ve been interested in for a long time, so the book gave me a lot to think about. The writers interviewed are mostly lit fiction folks, so I had to grit my teeth at a lot of comments about how fantasy fiction can’t be considered art. Most of the writers in the book don’t really write “Christian” fiction (i.e., the stuff you find in Christian bookstores), even if they’re writing about God and faith.

    One of the things I noticed was that, with few exceptions, the writers featured in the book were all quite liberal, politically. I guess since that’s where I find myself, it doesn’t surprise me that writers who wrestle with issues of faith and redemption in their work would have a similar outlook. But I do know Christian writers who aren’t writing standard Christian bookstore fare, who are not any more interested in providing easy but unsatisfying answers than I am, who are more conservative, politically. So I wondered if there was some sort of selection bias, as to the writers who were chosen. Few were genre writers–are genre writers more likely than literary fiction writers to have conservative politics? I don’t know.

    Another thing that I came away with–something I’d already been thinking that was reinforced, really–is how easily and unfortunately we dichotomize. Many of the writers spoke of being too religious for secular readers, but too secular for religious readers. Fiction is religious, or secular. We’re Republicans or Democrats (at least in the country I’m living in). We’re intellectual, or uneducated. And Mississippi-born author Will Campbell, in his interview, talks about how contrary this is to the teaching of the New Testament, and yet how endemic it is in so many churches to do it anyway

    “If you start saying, ‘Brothers and sisters … worldly standards no longer count in our estimate of anything. What this means is there’s no such thing as race … What this means is there’s no such thing as communism and capitalism and North Vietnam and South Vietnam. These are human categories, human standards, and Paul says these are no longer of any account. You don’t consider these things anymore.’ That’s when you start getting into trouble.”

    Campbell’s mostly talking about his involvement in the civil rights movement, but I was really struck by how it applies to so many things, and how far I fall short of the standard God calls us to. I mean, this judging of people (or ideas, or works of art) by the categories you’ve put them into isn’t a problem that the church has exclusively. Literary fiction writers and critics disdain genre fiction. The college-educated look down on those with only a highschool degree (or less). People who eat exclusively natural and organic food look down on those who live off frozen entrees from the chain grocery store. But Christians fall into it, too, me as much as anyone else, and I was kind of moved by the reminder of how wrong-headed it is.

    I’m not advocating the kind of tolerance where no one should express strong opinions about anything, or disagree with anyone else. I just mean that, all too often, we dismiss someone or something because of the category we’ve put them into. And even though I might not like it being done to me, I do it to others. I don’t want people deciding not to read my stories because they’ve found out I’m an evangelical Christian. But I tend to dismiss pretty much all Christian popular fiction (the stuff that Christian publishing houses produce, and that’s sold in Christian bookstores) as insipid and not worth my time. I get irritated if lit majors think my fiction can’t possibly be worth reading because it’s mostly science fiction and fantasy. But I make the same judgment about romance. I don’t want people at church to think I’m a bad person because I would vote for the Democrats if I were a US citizen, and think abortion and gay marriage should be legal. But I’m pretty quick to judge all the Republicans at church because of the policies of their party on the environment, international policy and domestic social issues.

    I’ve heard secular humanists say that this kind of judging based on having categorized someone as “other” is the fault of religion (or maybe even the fault of Christianity, specifically). But I don’t think it is. I think it’s a very human instinct (or perhaps an animal instinct), and I think it’s one of the things that the Christian faith explicitly commands us to put behind us.

    We just don’t do a very good job.

  • Every language

    One of the things about my church that I think is really cool is that they have ASL translation at one of the evening services, so that people who are deaf can more easily engage with and participate in the parts of the service that aren’t written down. Tonight they went one step farther. There’s usually some sort of music performed while the offering plates are being passed around, and tonight it was sung by a mixed group of deaf and hearing people (I think they’re all in a Bible study group together). One woman sang into the microphone, and everyone else sang by signing.

    I just thought that was incredibly cool, and a great way of encouraging and supporting the diversity we have in our congregation. I got all teary-eyed, and all that.

    Of course, later on in the service there was something completely unrelated that I was annoyed and offended by. But I guess there’s something positive even in that. We all come together each week to worship God, and we have different ideas about how to do that, so much so that it’s pretty much impossible to do anything without offending someone. And yet, we still keep coming. We keep trying.

    And every so often, something happens to remind me why I keep showing up, week after week.