Misreading the moment at weddings

Feuding photographers and clergy need to understand what makes the moment special.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A screen grab of a news report; a priest looks angry turning away from a wedding couple. The caption reads: Wedding couple's nightmare. Priest stops wedding, scolds photographer

A special moment, caught on camera.

ABC News.

Petitions are ten a penny these days. It seems that everyone and their dog wants you to sign their petition. They run the gamut from immensely serious – ‘Call a general election now', to downright daft - ‘Deport Erling Haaland on the grounds that he’s not human’; I nearly signed that one. It can be very easy, then, simply to see every new petition as yet another drop in the increasingly large ocean of people demanding change that’ll likely never come.

I was, however, struck by one petition I saw recently, entitled: ‘Improve working conditions for wedding video/photographers in churches’. Launched by photographer Rachel Whitaker, the petition details the harassment faced by wedding videographers and photographers in the course of their jobs documenting one of the most important days in the lives of happy couples. Who could possibly be harassing wedding photographers? Demanding couples? Disgruntled in-laws? Drunken uncles? Nope: vicars and ministers of the Church.

This particular petition struck me because I’m in the unusual position of having some insight into both side of the dispute. In my day job I’m a theologian and biblical scholar who trains people entering ordained ministry as clergy. But, I have also been a semi-professional photographer who has been the sole photographer for a number of weddings. I can, to some degree, sympathise with both groups.

What photographers don’t need, then, is clergy making their lives harder. Again, unfortunately I can speak from experience here.

Let me start off by saying something about being a wedding photographer. It is unbelievably stressful. Although I’ve had a fairly comfortable life, it has not been without moments of stress. I have moved house, planned a wedding, failed (and later passed) driving tests, prepared for my PhD examination. I even lived through Liverpool’s 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul. But none of these compares to the stress of being the sole photographer for someone’s wedding.

Weddings are full of irreplaceable moments. The bride only enters the church once. There is only one exchange of vows, or first kiss, or first dance, or set of speeches. As a photographer, if you miss them, you miss them. What if your memory card stops working? Or the files corrupt? Or the focus is out just enough for the bride to be blurry? Or that uncle steps in front of you just as the first kiss happens? Tough luck; no happy memories for you.

What photographers don’t need, then, is clergy making their lives harder. Again, unfortunately I can speak from experience here. At one wedding I photographed, the vicar told me I could only take photos from behind the last pew. (“But I left my telescope at home!”) Another said I couldn’t use a camera with a shutter noise. (“I guess I’ll just take the pictures with my mind, then?”) Yet another told me I couldn’t use a flash because it would damage the old brickwork of the church walls. (I’m still trying to work that one out).

And yet, as a theologian, I kind of get it. Because marriage is a sacrament. Marriage is not simply a commitment between two people to love each other for the rest of their lives. Or, at least, this isn’t all it is. Instead, marriage is also an outward sign that points to an inward reality in our lives. Marriage is also a performative re-enactment of the way in which Jesus loves the world.

I mean that marriage is not done for marriage’s sake; it points to something outside of itself and, in doing so, marriage finds its meaning.

In the Gospels, Jesus is asked why his disciples don’t fast (like some others do). He responds: “The wedding guests cannot fast when the bridegroom is with them, can they?” At the end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation, were learn who it is that Jesus is marrying: “the bride … the holy Jerusalem,” a city filled with Jesus’ followers. This is whom Jesus is set to marry.

Human marriage points to, and is grounded in, this marriage between Christ and those whom Jesus loves. It is not a literal marriage (lest we wade into some very sticky theological territory). We are not to understand this marriage in the same terms as a human marriage. Rather, we are to understand human marriage with reference to this marriage between Jesus and the ones He loves.

All this is to say that marriage is intrinsically meaningless. (NB. To my wife: please keep reading). This isn’t to say marriage is meaningless. Instead, I mean that marriage is not done for marriage’s sake; it points to something outside of itself and, in doing so, marriage finds its meaning. It has, in other words, extrinsic rather than intrinsic meaning. Marriage is grounded in something outside of marriage: Jesus’ love for the church.

And so, when clergy get a little frustrated when they perceive photographers and videographers to be introducing upon marriage services, I get it. None of this is to say that aggression from clergy towards people doing their job is ever warranted. It’s not; there’s never an excuse for that. But, for clergy, the frustration underpinning this emerges (I hope) from a perceived lack of respect towards what is really happening in the marriage service.

In the moment of wedding two people to each other, the marriage service points towards Jesus’ love for His Church; and that simply can’t be captured by the photographer. Something more important than any picture is happening here. The people exchanging vows are being made into a living embodiment of Jesus’ love for the church.

Of course, it is not only in marriage that Jesus’ love is displayed. Jesus himself wasn’t married. It’s likely the apostle Paul wasn’t either. They both did a decent job at embodying the love of God (even if Paul did so in a slightly shouty way from time to time). None of this is to say that marriage is the only way where Jesus’ love is displayed in human lives.

Let’s return, for example, to the dispute between clergy and wedding photographers. Sure, some photographers might intrude upon wedding services in ways that downplay the magnitude of what’s happening. However, to respond with aggression and abuse is a bigger afront to the love of God from members of clergy who really ought to know better. Instead, clergy might consider such moments an opportunity to display and embody the very love that the marriage service itself seeks to point towards.

The love of Jesus is only detracted from, and not embodied, when clergy begin to overreact to those employed by the (human) bride and groom to capture the events of the day. There may well be ways in which clergy, photographers, and videographers can work together to better preserve and capture the sacred nature of what is being pointed towards in the marriage service. This cooperation will always be a better embodiment of Jesus’ love for the church than any needless antagonism.

Clergy would also do well to remember that photographers can use photoshop. Upset them at your peril.

Article

Belief

Creed

20 August 2024

4 min read

We’ve been seeking that festival feeling for millennia

Why else do we endure discomfort, queues, and sleep deprivation?

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A singer on a stage holds out his arms to conduct the crowd.

Chris Martin enchanting Glastonbury.

Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do we go to festivals? It was something I contemplated at 4am while trying to stop a marquee from setting sail into the air during a quintessentially English late July storm. Thankfully we pinned it down, but sometimes it seems we can't get a handle on something until it's been taken away from us. Lockdown allowed us to indulge in some soul-searching about our appetite for summer festivals. A Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee survey of 36,000 people showed that what people most missed about festivals during the pandemic was 'the atmosphere'. The atmosphere, much like that airborne marquee, is something difficult to put your finger on, but whatever it is, you do want to soak it up.

So, what contributes to that ‘atmosphere’? Harry van Vliet from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences compared over 20 studies into motivations for festival-going. He distilled them into: escape, family togetherness, socialisation, and novelty. Other researchers, such as Rippen and Bos, cite realising significance, giving meaning and giving shape, and deploying, developing and maintaining competencies. As abstract and ethereal as our motivations are, at festivals we want to ram the tent peg into the ground, staking the opportunity to escape or to imagine the future. Why else would you endure discomfort, questionable cuisine and sanitation, queues and sleep deprivation? We endure little inconveniences because we have bigger thirsts.

Then there's the gap between what people hope to get out of a festival and what the organisers are aiming for. Spare a thought for those who booked onto the FYRE Festival, which promised ‘a new type of music festival that would ignite the energy and power of its guests’. Instead, they ignited fury, lawsuits, and six years in prison for the founder. The driver here was greed. If festivals are an immersive experience, what the festivalgoers unsuspectingly immersed themselves in was the sad fruit of that particular rotten orchard. Instead of the gourmet meals and luxury villas, the staff ate sandwiches in styrofoam boxes and guests who’d spent up to $100,000 to attend fought over a limited number of mattresses and tents. One legal document from a guest claimed guests were lured into ‘a complete disaster, mass chaos and post-apocalyptic nightmare’.

The performer, therefore, is like a prophet or a priest. We get to enter little portals to the divine.

We know if we’ve immersed ourselves in something more hopeful. I’ve spoken to several people who’ve been to Taylor Swift gigs, all still ‘buzzing’. Cities and countries keep reporting the bounce, the economic uplift they’ve all experienced from a Swift visitation. Deep down, at concerts and festivals alike we all probably know that we’re not there to ignite the energy and power of us as the guests, but to spectate the energy of the maestro at work. They are the ones who plumb the depths of creative introspection for us. They are the ones who concoct, via musical alchemy and a large support team, something reaching transcendence. If we can immerse ourselves in that, then, however fleetingly, all the inconvenience will have been worth it.

Festivals, therefore, are a pick-n-mix of artistry that we can come up close to. And therefore, the thought goes, their creative genius. Which is almost as elusive as the atmosphere of an immersive festival itself. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, says it was a mistake when we placed the human at the centre of the universe, and the pressure that comes from having to be a creative genius. In her 2009 TED Talk she spoke about Socrates believing he had a daemon that spoke to him, and the Romans believed that they had a ‘sort of disembodied creative spirit’ called a genius. The performer, therefore, is like a prophet or a priest. We get to enter little portals to the divine.

Maybe Coldplay can be right, when on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury they sang to tens of thousands, ‘you’ve got a higher power.’

But what if the founder of the FYRE Festival was actually right? What if the guests themselves at festivals have energy and power, and not just Chris Martin? Millenia ago, this idea was once also floated at the festival of tabernacles, or Sukkot, where the Israelites made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem and would camp in tents for seven days.

The gospel writer John says that Jesus spoke to whatever it was people had pitched up tents by the temple for:

‘On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’

John goes on to explain that ‘By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.’

Where the Holy Spirit had previously been given to specific people, for specific times and purposes, including creativity, here the Holy Spirit was promised to anyone who would believe in him. And as well as their own fulfilment, the divine creative energy would flow through them to others.

More than a mere atmosphere or nebulous spirit, Jesus claims to be one with the creative energy who hovered over the waters at the start of the Bible, the dwelling place at the end of the Bible where God will be with his people, and drove a stake, or a cross, into the ground to enable this to happen.

Maybe Coldplay can be right, when on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury they sang to tens of thousands, ‘you’ve got a higher power.’