Pastor Darrell Ross prepares to officiate a wedding at the Martinelli Event Center in Livermore.
Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle 2018
Some people like to surf, fix up old cars or shoot photographs in their spare time. But me? I officiate weddings.
I’m neither religious nor a strong advocate for state-sanctioned monogamy — just a writer with social anxiety who’s been ordained by the online Universal Life Church. But ever since I formally became a “minister” in 2011, I’ve officiated six weddings, which I have a strong feeling is more than the average layperson has. I’ll likely do more once this column comes out and friends realize that I’m an option. (Though I’m never going to catch up to Santa Rosa’s own Guy Fieri, who once presided over 101 gay weddings at the same time.)
Universal Life Church, a nondenominational religious organization with a branch in Sacramento, has made the process of becoming ordained just a matter of filling out an online form. To back up its mission of advancing marriage equality and religious freedom, the church has ordained over 23 million ministers free of charge.
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George Freeman, presiding chaplain of the church’s Seattle headquarters, credits the popularity of the service to a downward trend of religious belief in younger generations of Americans.
“Gen-Zers don’t do church,” he told me. “Their church is football, soccer and Sunday brunch.”
The data backs his claims: According to the General Social Survey, a large nationwide social science survey, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated U.S. adults rose from 5% in 1972 to 29% in 2022.
Most officiants are one-hit wonders who register to do a single event. Freeman, who has done about 20 weddings, estimates that only 10% to 15% of officiants have done more than one ceremony.
“I know a lot of people that perform weddings because they like it,” he said. “They enjoy rooting for two people in love.”
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I’ve done this in front of a tiny group of co-workers in a backyard and shared the stage with plastic skulls at a murder-mystery-style wedding. I’ve stood in front of my friends’ extended families, holding my scripts nestled in dictionaries or cookbooks (anything weighty) and making bold pronouncements about love and what forever really means with the confidence of Dr. Drew.
Like any good hobby, I do it for free.
It’s strange because weddings never sparked much joy for me. Growing up, I thought of them as just another boring day at church — except worse, because I had to wear a scratchy, tulle-lined dress and eat chicken that had obviously sweated in a chafing dish for way too long. It was great to be there for my family, but did the whole thing have to be so excruciating?
Weddings also had too much gender stuff going on for my taste: the frenetic bouquet tosses, the on-the-nose songs played during father-daughter dances, all that “man and wife” tripe. Personally, I never dreamed about my own wedding, and I certainly never aspired to be a bride.
But at my own wedding more than a decade ago, I realized that I could change anything I wanted. I spent $200 on my dress, and our officiant was my friend’s landlady, a Universal Life Church minister. I wrote the ceremony, a freewheeling treatise on how there are so many ways to make a life with another person. The whole wedding felt right in a way that I’d never imagined it could.
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Officiating now means that I get to help my friends and family do things their way, too.
And the romantic in me loves getting such an intimate glimpse.
You can see firsthand that heavy space created when two people stand in front of their loved ones to perform a task as humbling and strange as taking an hour to tell the world that they love each other. It’s humiliating for a couple to expose themselves that way, to, god forbid, kiss in front of their grandparents. In that space, we are all vulnerable and usually a little lost, clinging to the guardrails of ritual in order to get us through to the other, more fun side of things.
To see people that I know in that state is such a wonderful thing. From up close, I can see the tiny beads of nervous sweat peek through curls paralyzed by hairspray. I can hear the tremors in their breaths as they finally make their way down the aisle and wobble together in the potent and awkward few seconds before the ceremony begins. Sharing that small pocket of air with them, and being able to calm any tension with a few winks and funny faces, feels like such a gift.
In the liminal zone of the wedding ceremony, rituals like locking padlocks together or pouring sand into glass vases make something as intangible as a relationship visible: It manifests the ultimate abstraction into a physical, poetic act. For many people, those gestures are among the few opportunities to bring a touch of surrealism, and even mysticism, into their public lives. An officiant, who is part hype man and part emcee, gets to be part of whatever sort of happening folks want to put on during their ceremonies. And being an officiant allows me to take back the wedding from traditions that can feel pretty outdated. I can use whatever names and pronouns people want, without question. I don’t have to call anyone a wife or a husband if that doesn’t work for them.
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It’s the balm I needed for the part of me that felt trapped in those church pews all those years ago.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
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