High Noon Matrimonial

It came to the part of the ceremony where it was beholden on Father Henry to ask the church, as he had done so many times before, “if anyone knows of any reason why these two should not be married, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

There was a moment of silence, and the priest was just about to move on with the rest of the wedding ceremony when a lone voice at the back of the church rang out, “me…me, I object.”

The people gathered in the church were initially stunned into silence, then like the sound that an approaching wave makes towards a shore, the groundswell of voices bubbled upwards with a force that even Dom Perignon would have had trouble finding a strong enough cork to hold down.

Father Henry strained his eyes to see the person who had objected but a jumble of other things nearer to his field of vision competed for his immediate attention. The bride and groom in front of him both gasped in synchronized horror; the parents of the bride on the front row jumped up with arms extended as if they were participating in a Mexican wave in the absence of the rest of the stadium; and the mother of the groom on the other side of the aisle slammed her hands onto her face with such force as to raise the concern of the priest about the imminence of bodily injury.

However, the father of the groom stood out in Father Henry’s mind as the incredible sole departure from the unfolding freak out. The balding middle-aged man broke out into a wide grin in amid the social Armageddon that was taking place all around him. To the priest’s mind, the image of the man smiling at that precise moment was so out-of-place it was like watching a presidential inauguration where the guy being sworn in was wearing flip flops and a tie-dye shirt whilst taking the oath in Swahili. There was a point where you stop asking what’s wrong with this picture and start questioning whether what you were looking at could possibly exist in the form being presented to your brain.

Now, in the training course and manual that the church equips priests like Henry with for officiating over marriage ceremonies, there actually exists instructions as to what to do if there is an objection raised during wedding ceremonies. According to the handbook, the priest is supposed to pause the proceedings and ask the parties objecting to the nuptials to step aside and to discuss their objections in private before deciding what to do next.

As is clear to everyone who had ever undergone academic training and then had to do a job or task for real in the chaotic and messy place, we call planet “earth”, the world that exists in textbooks does not at times look anything like the thing called “reality.”

Like the final stages of the sinking of the Titanic as viewed from the bridge of that stricken ship, Henry could see the façade of order and continuity that existed in the church a moment ago being rapidly replaced by something Henry associated with the last nights of Pompeii. He had to restore order and do it quickly, or he could be looking at making the sort of history secluded in restricted histories of the church or celebrated in banned comic books. Two distinctions that he had always harbored unconscious and unspoken ambitions to avoid.

Henry raised his voice above the rising crescendo of extraneous noise contaminating sound that was beginning to threaten his innermost thought processes by shouting, “I need everyone to calm down and listen to me…silence! I need everyone to be silent!”

As a move to restore order, Henry would have score a rating of “good effort but will have to do better and more in order to save yourself from the abyss.”

The level of background noise in the church died down a bit for a few seconds, but then the momentum towards order was disturbed by a burst of laughter from the groom’s father.

The priestly textbook, his years of training and experience (as well as common sense), would have steered Henry away from confronting the laughing man, but the moment got to Henry, and he sternly asked, “I don’t see what could possibly be so funny about this situation Mr. Crumb…perhaps you could explain to all of us why you find humor in what’s happening?”

“Of course there’s an objection to this marriage,” gleefully proclaimed the bald and overweight man, who happened to be the father to the groom on what was purported to have been living through the happiest day of his young life, “who would want to be related to the most miserly penny-pinchers on the planet.”

“Who the hell are you calling “penny-pinchers”?” Came the return salvo from the opposite aisle, “This is rich coming from mercenaries who make leeches look well-mannered and civilized.”

Henry noticed that the juicy morsel just lobed over to that side of the church came from the father of the bride with a verbal delivery which reminded the priest of someone performing a spit.

Father Henry was mentally composing his next words of admonishment to both of the warring sides when he overheard the groom say to the bride, “I thought they had agreed at the end of the pre-nuptial that the deal was done, and that the hatchet ought to be buried…I guess I was wrong.”

Before the bride could answer to what the groom had just said, Father Henry interrupted the couple by asking, “was there some sort of pre-nuptial agreement signed by the two of you? Is that right?”

The bride hesitated for a moment and then tried to answer but at the last moment she could not find any appropriate words, so she just nodded her confirmation to what the priest had just asked.

Ignoring the rising crescendo in the background, Father Henry then stabbed a finger at the couple standing in front of him and asked in a tone of voice which left no room for denial, hesitation or obfuscation, “I want to know right now what was agreed to in this prenuptial meeting and why it has led to what’s happening in my church now?”

The groom, a young man recently called to the bar, tried to put up a fig leaf of an obstacle to the aggressive probe by the priest, but his weak defence of legal confidentiality protection was half-hearted at best.

“What was agreed to by Jane’s family and mine can’t be talked about without the consent of everyone….”

“Young man, hear me when I say that what happens in this church is 100% my business,” Father Henry cut him short before he could develop his weak argument any further, “…and if it’s not my business it certainly the business of who I and this church works for! So, one more time…what happened in this prenuptial meeting?”

The groom gulped audibly and looked up into Father Henry’s stare before he, in technical terms, “spilled his guts”.

“There was a major sticking point when Jane’s parent refused to let any of her family holdings in their bank be included in our matrimonial assets in the event of any divorce proceedings,” the groom admitted, “as a result of which my dad refused to give his consent to our wedding.”

The groom paused as if to stop, but one look at Father Henry quickly dispelled any notion that might have had that what he just said was enough to satisfy the priest. So, he added, “this wedding was about to be called off until Jane’s parents threatened make things ‘difficult’ for my dad because he had some problematic loans outstanding in his loans portfolio with the bank.”

This was more than the groom had intended to say, but it was clear that even this amount of information was not enough to satisfy the priest.

Then Father Henry asked directly, “I still don’t get it, why did Jane’s father not just accept your father’s refusal to give consent to your marriage?”

Years of listening to confessions equipped Father Henry with the ability to know when a confession was fully finished. He had developed a nose for "beans-only-half spilled" moments, so he knew right away that what he had been told so far was not the complete story.

Even at this stage, the couple in front of him was holding something back. So, Father Henry performed lesson one of the interrogator’s handbook, and he stared at the groom in silence, using force of will to squeeze the redacted part of the young man's story out.

After a pause, Father Henry asked again, “why did Jane’s family not just accept your family’s refusal to go on with the wedding? I am still waiting because you have not told me everything?”

“We have to get married…and we had to get married now,” was the reply.

“Why?”

“Because…in a little while…Jane is going to start showing…”

“Oh”, muttered Father Henry quickly glancing at the bride’s midsection and realizing that the folds of white material that met his eyes hid a dark secret.

In the past, the priest prided himself for being able to spot such situations earlier in the proceedings. But he clearly failed in this case. He surmised that he must be getting old.

Father Henry then asked his one final question, “so why was there an objection from the back of the church? Who was that from and what was that about?”

The groom looked down and admitted, “my father signed an agreement in the lawyer’s office to the wedding on pain of having his company loans being nullified. So, he’s not able to do anything personally to stop this wedding. However, he’s still dead set against our marriage because of Jane’s family’s refusal to include the relevant banking assets and interests in our prenuptial.

“However, he was not the one who made the objection just now. Who did it?”

“That’s right it was Maude who shouted that out.”

“Who is Maude?”

“Great aunt Maude, who was not going to come to this service because the nursing home said she’s prone to say whatever comes into her mind,” the groom said meekly, “she is 96 so I guess there is the onset of senility…but I guess dad made arrangements for her to be here today regardless of the advice that had been given.”

Father Henry rolled his eyes and thought to himself, ‘this wedding has everything; commercial disputes; contractual obligations; Mexican standoffs; premarital sexual consequences; Machiavellian moves to escape liability; and now even ‘plausible deniability’ being deployed using an old lady who was not well….and it’s not even midday yet.”

The mind of the old priest produced without any deliberation an exclamation in breach of several holy commandments. The exclamation was bad because it contained names that should never be used in vain, but thankfully, he managed in time to stop his vocal cords from giving worldly expression to it.

As he finished his interrogation of the couple in front of him, Father Henry’s eyes surveyed the church beyond where the three of them stood. Standing in a cluster to one side were the prospective in-laws arguing loudly about the text of legal documents and prospective court actions. In the body of the church sat a crowd of nicely dressed people sitting in silence but immersed in a pool of awkwardness so thick it could have been scooped up by the spoon-full.

Then, in the back of the church, Henry saw an old lady being helped slowly out of the building. As she was moving slowly toward the entrance, he saw that she was waving at him and shouting that she objected to the wedding of her grand nephew was too young for marriage, as he was only 12 years old.

Father Henry turned to the groom and asked, “I thought that you were 21 years old, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am, but great aunt Maude is dyslexic as well as suffering from senility.”

Father Henry sighed and thought to himself that this, in its own way, was perfectly in line with the way the rest of this whole ceremony was unfolding.

Now that he had a better understanding of the events he had just witnessed, the priest decided to start dealing with this mess by talking to the warring in-laws in the corner, so he started walking towards them. However, before he could move past the bride and groom, they stopped him and asked, “what do we do now?”

Father Henry looked at the couple in front of him, then he took a hard look at their bickering families to the side, and then after a long few seconds of deliberation, he said in his most sober and ministerial voice, “surely, I say unto you that madness runs deep in both your houses. For the sake of your soon-to-be offspring…elope now whilst there is still time….the side door to the church is over to the left.”

And with those words, thus endeth the lesson.