I was at church and a wedding broke out

I'm sure most of you have had the experience: going to a wedding at a church where it seems like the soon-to-be married couple is the farthest thing from the mind of the officiant. Instead, the whole wedding is just one big church service sandwiched between a woman in an expensive white dress walking up and down the aisle and interspersed with the same woman and a sweaty, nervous guy exchanging rings and kissing; apart from those distractions, you might as well just show up to church Sunday morning and you'll get the same thing.

Over the weekend, I went to the wedding of a friend from undergrad. And you know what? This wedding was almost the opposite of the stereotypical church wedding. It was great, it was outdoors in nice weather - not a church in sight. The thing is, my friend, the bride, is from rural Ontario, but the groom is from Jordan. I can't think of a more opposite set of homes. The wedding itself was non-denominational. I couldn't even tell if the officiant was a pastor or something and his affiliation was never mentioned.

The ceremony did have some religious elements. The officiant read a passage from each of the bride and groom's "faith traditions," as he called them, not mentioning either by name. Surprisingly, the two passages, from the Bible (a psalm of some sort) and the Koran, did not mention God at all and instead focused on love and family. Secondly, a Unity Tree (I have never heard of this before, but I'm guessing it's a Muslim thing) was included as part of the ceremony, and it was supposed to be watered with spring water from Mecca and have rocks from each of their hometowns placed alongside. Turns out my friend left all of these at her parents' house so they used two rocks they found on the site and some bottled water. Oh well.

Anyway, wedding was good, reception was excellent (open bar, hehehe). The reception was actually held in my old university cafeteria that I ate in every day for almost all of first year. The food we got was never close to as good as the food at the reception.

One freaky thing was that we were seated at a table with a girl who went to elementary school with me. She was in french-immersion so I had no idea who she was. She remembered me though. Fortunately, she told no embarrassing stories to my wife, only saying that me and my brother were brilliant and won all the academic awards at graduation. Very true. Well, that and saying that I was a nerd, which is also true. Still true, actually; I'm not sure about the brilliant part.