Turning The Haters Into Believers: My Mom's Campaign To Preserve The Engagement Ceremony

My engagement ceremony: mom, me, dad, and the drummers because what's a celebration without drummers?!

Last November while preparing to host Thanksgiving dinner for my family of origin and our friends in Boston, I started picking up on my mom's ulterior motives for the visit.  During a pre-Thanksgiving phone call that included my requests for jollof rice and rum cake, she repeatedly inquired about my engagement ceremony DVD.

"But mom, you have a copy."

"I know but I gave it someone and they never gave it back."

"Um, well, you might need to go on ahead and give them a call and say, 'Where is my DVD?!'"

"Please, just give me your copy."

"Why?  So it'll go missing like the one you had? Mom, you can't just go around passing out copies of our engagement ceremony like it's a bootleg copy of a Tyler Perry movie.  Why don't you just call the guy who did the videography and ask him to make you another copy?"

"I did and he said he doesn't have it anymore."

"He doesn't have it?!  It was only five years ago!  See...some of these Nigerian vendors...what kind of shady business is he running?"

"Tinu PLEASE! I promise I'll give it back."  Then I heard my father's voice in the background, coming to my defense: "I don't blame her!" he said to my mom. "I wouldn't give you another copy either." 

Clearly, I am my father's daughter.

As a compromise we spent the day after Thanksgiving wading through Black Friday crowds to kill time while waiting for Staples to make a copy of the DVD.  My advice to my mom: "As soon as you get back to Maryland you should take this copy, keep it as your replacement for the one you gave away, and then make a copy so we don't have to do through this again."  So you can guess my reaction when I recently received the following voicemail: "Hello? Ah, yes -- Tinu? This is your mom.  How are you? Look, please can you help me make a copy of your engagement ceremony DVD? Please, I really, really need it.  So if you could do that for me I would kindly appreciate it. Say hello to Josh."

*sigh*

Now before you start leaving comments about how I'm such a terrible daughter, rest assured, my mom has yet ANOTHER copy of the DVD made at the SAME Staples.  In fact when I dropped it off, the gentleman looked down at the cover and said, "Oh! I remember copying this last time!"  But before I sent it off to her, I was curious as to why her Nigerian friends, intimately acquainted with the custom, were asking for the DVD.  Her short answer: "Well all their children are getting engaged and marrying white guys."  Dissatisfied with her response, I kept pressing her on the issue.  I mean, there are lots of other Nigerians they know whose children have married someone who isn't Nigerian so... why us? "Well," my mom added, "their children said that won't do an engagement ceremony unless their parents  do it the way you guys did."

The conversation still left me scratching my head. A traditional engagement ceremony serves as the official introduction of two families being joined together through marriage because in Yoruba culture, as in many non-Western cultures, when you marry the person you do marry the family (and sometimes the whole tribe).  More importantly, it also serves as the groom's opportunity to beg for the bride.  The most indelible memory from our engagement ceremony was how hot it was in my parents basement where the ceremony took place even though we had the A/C cranked up (but hey, it was August in Maryland).  And while ceremonies can have unique elements, many elements are pretty common like the entrance of the groom's family, bringing out the bride, prostrating to parents/elders, singing, and reading the groom's family's "letter of intent" (which I think my family actually drafted).

My mom kind of tip-toed around the issue but I realized that one of the main elements of our ceremony that her friends' children wanted to replicate was the absence of "the D-word": DOWRY.  

From the time I was old enough to attend engagement ceremonies and understand their significance, my father made it abundantly clear that he would NEVER accept dowries (money) for his daughters because there is no amount of money in the world anyone could ever give for his daughters.  So while our ceremony included an exchanging of gifts between families -- I'm pretty sure a case of Martinelli's Sparkling Cider and some fruit baskets were involved -- a dowry played no part in the ceremony and my husband was not complaining.  I'd say my dad's view is pretty rare among Nigerian men of his generation.

So I thought I'd give my mom suggestions for engagement ceremony resources that would not involve me spending so much time making DVD copies: "Have you look on Youtube?" I asked, totally expecting my mom not even know what Youtube was, "There are lots of engagement ceremonies on there."  But mom never ceases to surprise me: "Oh please," she responded, "There are so many stupid ones on there. I don't have time for that foolishness."

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From Beans to Chocolate

I knew something was up when my husband came home from work one evening, disappeared into our kitchen without a word, and reappeared in our living room holding two glass of bubbly.  Now you'd think I'd get the hint that he had something important to share with me, but as I am wont to do, I tried (and failed) double-tasking as long as I could, assuring my husband that I was hanging onto his every word by grunting a few "mm-hms" and "uh-huhs" every thirty seconds while clicking away on my keyboard, eyes locked on my computer.  When I realized the looming shadow suddenly cast over my screen was from my husband standing over me and not the sun setting, I had no choice but to put my computer aside and give him my undivided attention.

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Jesus is Not Post-Racial

Poor Gary.  I think he may have been at my church growing up...

In May 2004, I met my husband right before I left town for Memorial Day weekend.  I'd just barely survived my first year of law school and planned to spend the holiday weekend in Maryland to detox my soul.  But over a three week period, every Sunday at church a different person would come up to me, insisting that I meet this guy from church who was starting law school in the Fall.  I knew it was really serious when a friend visiting from Nashville even insisted that I meet this guy.  So one fateful Sunday, a friend finally introduced us after church. There was no love at first sight; no fireworks.  But that meeting sparked the beginning of a friendship that evolved into a romance, engagement and marriage over the next three years.
 
Most people wrongly assume that my husband and I met in law school because we're both lawyers.  It's understandable--we did attend the same law school and overlapped by one year.  In fact, most of the lawyer couples I know connected over Torts or spent long nights "studying" Constitutional Law outlines together, but alas, we don't share the typical "Barack and Michelle Obama love story."  When I tell people that we actually met at church, I find it amusing how often people are taken aback.  I'm not sure why, but I have some theories: A) They assume lawyers are angry at God for law school and conclude that "Christian lawyer" is an oxymoron and our profession is full of soul-less, religion-averse, God-haters; or B) They think that God fits so snugly under the notches of the Bible Belt that He ceases to exist North of Maryland.  And if so, then surely Massachusetts is at the cusp of eternal damnation.
 
Moving to Boston after our first year of marriage entailed lots of searching: a job for me, a place to live, somewhere to park our car, the closest L.L. Bean for winter outfitting, etc.  But searching for a church proved to be an adventure far more hilarious than we expected.  First there was the church that packed us in like sardines, featured impromptu solos from the pastors in the middle of sermons, and took time to recognize "100% tithers" (I still haven't quite figured out the math on that one--how can anything less than 10% can still be called a tithe?).  Then there was the so-seeker-friendly-that-we-don't-make-any-definitive-statements church, where the sermon began with "Well, I think maybe what Paul might probably be trying to say here could possibly be perhaps..." but we really enjoyed the free bagels and the Starbucks gift cards!  And then the suburban churches we visited left us feeling literally and figuratively out of place at their disbelief that we drove in  "all the way" from the city (a mere thirty minutes).
 
You see, neither of us really had to "look" for a church before.  Growing up, we attended the same church that our respective parents attended, and in North Carolina I attended the same church for eight years.  So we came to Boston having done very little church research, with a few half-hearted recommendations from family and friends, and  a resigned "I wish I had a church I could recommend to you in Boston, but I don't," from one of our North Carolina pastors.  As we began church shopping, we talked about what we were looking for--how we would know when it was time to stop browsing the aisles and settle into a particular congregation.  Chief among our concerns was worshipping in a place where we felt accepted and affirmed as an interracial, married couple.  And very early into our relationship, I learned that nothing to do with the demographic make-up of a church's pastoral staff or congregation.
 
When my husband and I were dating, I expected some less-than-ideal reactions from family members, but was completed blind sided by the comments I heard from members of my church (many of whom had no idea I was dating anyone, much less, a White guy).  In one instance, a friend relayed a story about a disagreement with another church leader.  To drive home his point that the other person involved was everything but a child of God, he concluded: "AND he's married to a white woman!"  (Trust me, he didn't intend it as a compliment.)  In another instance, while chatting with a fellow graduate student, I learned about some church leaders who, when talking to their child about dating, ended the conversation with, "You want to marry someone who looks like mommy don't you?"

After we got engaged and entered the realm of church-based, pre-marital counseling, I noticed that none of our assigned reading acknowledged that two people who don't look like each other might actually meet at church and consider spending the rest of their lives together.  So I asked another classmate who was also engaged and in an interracial relationship if she knew of any books that churches or pastors used in pre-marital counseling with interracial couples.  Her response: "No, because there aren't any.  And I think that silence speaks volumes about how most churches really feel about interracial marriage."

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and I realize that my shock had more to do with my overly idealistic and unrealistic view of church that was, quite frankly, unbiblical.  There is no perfect church because at its core is a community of broken people.  So even in a faith community that holds diversity and multi-culturalism in high regard as a core value, and boasts a congregation made up from every tribe, race, nation, and tongue, Jesus does not simply become a panacea for the racist thoughts and behavior to which we are all susceptible.  It's not enough to simply be comfortable with having lots of different people in the room (but it can be a great start).  In fact, if I hear a church harping on "racial reconciliation" for more than five minutes, I start to get a little nervous. 
 
Our search for a faith community in Boston included many twists and turns, but eventually led us to settle in a Presbyterian congregation where the dominant culture is Pan-Asian.  And on the one hand, I'd like to think that I could find out what our church leaders really think about racial issues by asking: "How would you react if your son or daughter married someone that doesn't look like you?" But the truth is, racism is too pervasive to have a litmus test.  It doesn't matter how many flags from different nations are displayed around our sanctuary; how many worship songs and hymns we sing in other languages; how many AIDS orphanages we support; how many East Africans or Koreans we adopt; how many Historically Black Colleges and Universities we reach out to; how many hours we tutor and mentor children from the local housing project; how many care packets we prepare for the homeless; how many outreaches we hold for the Spanish-speaking community; how often our sermons reference  Martin Luther King, Jr.; or how often our bulletins and announcements include imagery with different colored hands, rainbows, or kaleidoscopes.  But rather, our willingness to embrace and display grace in the midst of messy lives, full of  misconceptions, mistakes, misunderstandings, and missteps around race (among other things).