Jenny Block explores the power of ritual during a pandemic
The human experience is consists of rituals, and when those rituals are compromised we are often left feeling adrift. Graduations, Pride parades, birthdays, weddings —all have been canceled or altered because of this pandemic. How readily we can adapt and accept change that must occur is a testament to the human spirit. Though we fear change, though it may take disaster to force us to reassess, when that disaster does indeed rear its ugly head — be it fire or flood or famine or disease — we see through the flames and the rushing waters and the starvation and the death to discover not only who we are, but what we truly love.
I recently wrote about the truly ingenious wedding of two young lesbians, Lindsey Leaverton and Bri Houk, for The New York Times. The pair got married at a drive-in theater, complete with popcorn and tailgates and animated concessions dancing across the giant screens against the backdrop of a vast Texas sky.
The drive-in movie theater is an interesting phenomenon. It was designed to allow people to be apart together. It allows us to have an experience that is at once private and public. We are aware there are others around us, and yet we can be immersed in a film without intrusion.
So how apropos that this couple would choose to have their wedding at a drive-in — how perfectly emblematic of this strange time in which we’re living, in which we are all having our very own private and individual experiences quarantined from the outside world and yet all going through the same catastrophic event. We are alone together.
How very much like marriage that is: Two people join together to take on the world, which is exactly like — and completely different from — everyone else’s trip around the sun.
This is not the first time the universe cocked its head to the side and laughed at Lindsey Leaverton’s plans. She had a promising career as a Christian music singer, with a strong following and a church that was like a home to her. But when she came out, the true colors of those institutions emerged. Her label dropped her. Her church dropped her. Friends and family dropped her as well.
It was one of those moments where you have to decide what you are made of. Will you allow others’ expectations of you to destroy you because they don’t align with your own truth? And then, years later, will you allow a pandemic to come along and steal a wedding day months in the making?
Planning a wedding during a lockdown is much like deciding what to save from your home when it catches on fire. What can be easily left behind? What things cannot be replaced? You can buy new clothes and bedding and furniture. But what about the things you can’t buy? Your papa’s dog tags from the war; your grandmother’s wedding band; the photo of your great aunt who was the first woman to graduate from her law school.
That’s the thing about weddings. There’s a whole lot of lovely window dressing that can be added. But at its core is a simple ritual binding together two loves and two lives to face an ever and rapidly changing world over which we have virtually no control.
The flowers from the bouquet will die. The dress will be wrapped in a sea of tissue, not daring to dream that it will get to dance around the ballroom floor once again. The menu will be long forgotten, the cuisine a distant memory. And the matchbooks will be tossed into junk drawers across the country if they even make it all the way home with guests.
But that toast your best friend made. The way your father surprised you with his new Fred Astaire skills as he twirled and dipped you across the floor. The sound of all of the people you love clicking glasses and wishing you well. Those things you will never forget. Those are the things that set the course for a marriage. Those are the things that make a wedding not just a party, but the first of many rituals that will leave an indelible mark on your life experience and remind us that, come what may, we were here, and we will continue to be here.
Each day I wonder when the pandemic will subside; when black lives will finally matter as much as white lives to everyone; when we will once again have a true and sane and just and kind leader in the Oval Office; when all police will remember their place and their oath to protect and serve; when the economy will flourish.
In the meantime, I marvel at how we are surviving; how we are protecting the rituals we love and need; how we are standing up for one another; how we are finally holding people accountable for the behaviors we have too long ignored. This is Pride month, and despite it all, I feel incredibly proud to be a lesbian — to be an ally, to use my privilege for the only thing it should be used for: raising up those without a voice.
I’m grateful for the drive-in weddings and the drive-up graduations and the drive-by birthdays. I am grateful for the virtual cocktail parties and Zoom chats. I am grateful to have those rituals to cling to amidst everything going on right now. And I am grateful to know that we can and will overcome — because we must. Every time hate comes calling, we’ll flush it out with light, and we’ll hold tight to those things that truly make us who we are. It’s the only way. So, this Pride season, in all this darkness,
I commit to protecting our rituals and to using my visibility to be part of the light.
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