Marriage and Other Acts of Charity by Kate Braestrup

Author:Kate Braestrup [BRAESTRUP, KATE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / General
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2010-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There are Persons of God who offer truly heroic caritas to the homeless and to the inhabitants of lunatic asylums and prisons. They brave the unsanitary and olfactorily offensive abodes of the ignorant and impoverished, and risk moral as well as physical peril serving alongside our armed forces.

Others serve in houses of worship, bearing quotidian witness to the workings of God. For those brave souls, there are budgets to oversee, politics to manage, and meetings to attend, not to mention the weekly requirement that they say something both entertaining and spiritually coherent from the pulpit.

Meanwhile, I’ve got the best ministry job you can imagine. I hang around with good men, and with citizens who are generally decent people, even if they might be disoriented, hypothermic, injured, or grief-stricken. I get to spend a lot of time outdoors, in various picturesque Maine locales. My ministry involves few meetings and little to no paperwork. How did I happen upon such a ministry?

Well, I live in Maine, which not only boasts scenery but also a convenient and excellent seminary. As a law-enforcement widow, I was well positioned, as they say, to be considered when the position of Maine Warden Service chaplain opened up. Because Drew left me with a pension and health insurance, I could afford to start out as a volunteer. I had family and friends to help me rear my children, so I was able to devote time and energy to my work.

“How did you get into this job?” Monica’s friend Simon asks me over coffee on our first date.

God placed it in my path.

“Can you tell that joke at the wedding?” Jeremy asked enthusiastically of the “get your own goddamned blanket” story, and Melanie swats him. “What? It’s religious!”

“The more usual readings are from First Corinthians 13, or the Gospel story of the Wedding at Cana.” Jeremy and his fiancée, Melanie, have come to visit me in my office in Augusta. “I recommend taking a little peek at the Song of Solomon, and of course you may have favorite verses or poems you’d prefer.” I hand them a selection of wedding readings. We discuss the location for the ceremony, the order of service, the number of bridesmaids and groomsmen, the flavor of the cake, and whether an iPod can be programmed to provide music for the processional and recessional.

“What about vows?” asked Melanie. She’s an attractive, intelligent young woman with a beautiful smile. She looks undersize, though, and I can’t tell whether this is because she reminds me of the widow Anita or if it’s just because any normal person looks like a elf standing next to Jeremy.

“Well,” I said, “you’ve got a few choices. There are the traditional love-honor-and-cherish vows, which come in a few versions…” I hand them a sheet of paper. “There are less traditional vows…” (more paper) “… and of course you could… ahhh… write your own.”

I’ve heard people stand together before God and solemnly promise to make the coffee every morning, vow to never go to bed mad.

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