We have been attending a lot of weddings since Sarah and I were married. At some level it begins to feel like an anthropological survey of the rituals across cultures of modern American culture. It would be nice to sneak in a few ceremonies in India involving grooms riding in on elephants and I would have enjoyed that ritual in the Carvey backyard had it been feasible. The last two weddings we went to were church weddings. I was surprised by the amount of focus that the priests give towards the relationship between the married couple and Jesus. The Jewish weddings that I have been to don’t focus that much on having a trinity of the bride, groom, and God working together as much. But in a Christian wedding I hear statements like “Todd and Jessica and Jesus together are an unbeatable team” or “The key to a successful marriage is to let Jesus be the glue that binds you together”. It is a little hard for me not to have visions of a TV Funhouse team of the groom, bride, and Jesus fighting off the many evils of the devil, Saddam Hussein, the Joker, and prostitutes using a combination of clever Yankee/McGyver inventions combined with divine bolts of lightning and Jesus turning water into wine. But when I think deeper about this philosophy it makes sense as a working model for consensus in a family. The challenge in any organization being successful, at least according to the Jim Collins disciples who wrote Good to Great and Built to Last, is cultural unity and consistency. As an atheist I am not likely to be able to glue much together with Jesus. But I can effectively glue together my marriage and my family by first finding someone, Sarah, who shares in my cultural belief system. This wasn’t going to work with prior girlfriends either because they were too religious or didn’t believe in the same goals for our lives. So I do take something meaningful out of these different ceremonies we are attending despite not taking the literal meaning from the advice given. The important thing to do if you don’t have a Jesus is to create one, something even if it is embodied in a lawn gnome or just bedtime chatter that is a solid and clearly identifiable set of our shared system of beliefs, expectations, objectives, and to keep those things as the glue that bind us and our growing family (including the little one likely to be named Madeline Eve Housman) together.