Pem's Wedding Prayer

Pem's Wedding Prayer is the culminating public utterance of Thomas Pemberton's Christian life, spoken not from a pulpit but at the wedding reception where he is about to marry Sarah Blumenthal. It is his "final act as a Christian and an ex–Christian priest," a phrase that frames the prayer as both a farewell and a transformation. The prayer is remarkable not only for its content—a sustained, furious address to God that catalogues the genocidal cruelties of the twentieth century—but for its occasion: a celebration of union that becomes a reckoning with mass death. It is the moment when Pem's long theological crisis, his questioning of whether faith must be blind, resolves into a public declaration that God must be remade, and it is the speech that completes his conversion to Judaism in the eyes of his community.

The Occasion and the Setting

The prayer is delivered at the wedding reception of Thomas Pemberton and Sarah Blumenthal, an event that brings together the couple's families and friends in a room that has just been filled with music and dancing. The band has stopped playing, and Pem stands before the assembled guests, his double-breasted blazer hanging open, his tie loosened, his forehead "triumphantly cowlicked." He grasps a cordless microphone, swaying slightly as the room goes silent. The scene is one of intimate celebration abruptly turned to solemnity. Pem's opening words acknowledge his personal happiness—his "prayerful thanks to the Lord" that Sarah has found him worthy of her attention—but he quickly moves beyond the personal. He announces that he will soon be a Jew, and that he will find "the joy of a hallowed life," before launching into what he calls his final act as a Christian and an ex-Christian priest. The guests, including the bishop, who has turned pale and sits "as if roped to it," are riven by the speech, which they had not expected from a man who had spoken from pulpits for years but whom few had ever heard deliver a sermon.

The Address to God

Pem's prayer is structured as a direct address to God, whom he names "Dear Lord, blessed be Your name," but whom he immediately challenges. He speaks of the "monstrously evil mortifiers of humanity" in the historic generations of every adult in the room, and of the "exponential murder of souls" that has occurred in wars and genocides, with the violently dead of the century consigned to "anonymous oblivion." He insists that these dead "are not resurrectable, they cannot and will not resurrect even in the imagination of your Christian faithful," a direct assault on Christian doctrines of resurrection and atonement. Pem then turns to the problem of theodicy, asking how a supposedly omniscient God could allow such catastrophes, and declaring that the "relentless and unimaginable genocidal cruelties" of the age have brought God "into disrepute." He accuses God of being "part of the problem," noting that men use God "at will for their most hideous purposes" and that God does not resist—that anyone who wants God, "for whatever foul, murderous reason, can have You." He compares God to "the lowest, most pathetic streetwalker," bought and embraced by the murderous rulers of tribes and nations.

The Vision of Hell

In the most extraordinary passage of the prayer, Pem offers God a conditional hope. He declares that if God were to give evidence of a real hell—"not the invention of our inflamed imaginations, but a real one, with the right people in it"—he would have some hope for God as traditionally conceived. He then conjures a grotesque, baroque vision of Satan, devised of such mass and gravity that nothing could escape him, "as into one of the black holes of the universe," made of "physical self-contradiction, ice and flame," with "multiple eyes cataracted with congealed blood" and "slimy claws and tendrils." Into this hellish embrace Pem would cast the "headline killers of our century": the "gibbering, bug-eyed, teeth-gnashing asshole of the German national religion," the "steely slit-eyed peasant shitbrain of the Russian revolutionary religion," the "little colonialist bastard exterminator-king of the civilized Belgians," and the "stonefaced rouge-cheeked killer cretin of the South Asian jungles," along with "all the torturers of the banana republics, island tyrants of the Caribbean and Pacific seas, tribal thugs of Africa, and ethnic-cleansing goons of the Balkans," and their bankers, arms suppliers, and legions of rapers, impalers, beheaders, bludgeoners, bayoneters, machine gunners, machete wielders, death squad kidnappers, crematoria designers, and slave camp administrators. He imagines these figures clinging to Satan's suppurating skin, tormented by their own pollutions, absorbed cell by cell into his icy guts, "alive and screaming in the hell of his black icy being, forever and ever." And he concludes: "well then, well then, Lord, I think I could remain your priest."

The Declaration of Remaking

The conditional hope of the hell vision collapses into its negation. Pem, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, speaks almost in a whisper: "But as it is, I think we must remake You." He argues that if humanity is to remake itself, it must remake God, for "we need a place to stand." He describes human weakness and puniness, the tottering of civilization, and the insufficiency of love alone—"our marriages, the children we hold in our arms"—as a footing that "keeps us from plunging out of the universe." This love, he says, is "not enough." The prayer ends with a plea: "I ask for reason to hope that this travail of our souls will find its resolution in You, Lord, You of Blessed Name. For the sake of all of us on this little planet of Yours I ask this. Amen." The ambiguity of the closing—asking for resolution in a God he has just declared must be remade—leaves the prayer suspended between faith and its abandonment. After he returns the microphone to the bandleader, Sarah rises and crosses the floor to hug and kiss him, and as he holds her around the waist, she leans back in his arms and brushes the hair from his forehead, a gesture of tenderness that answers the theological fury with human intimacy.

The Prayer in the Context of Pem's Crisis

The wedding prayer is the culmination of a crisis of faith that has run through Pem's entire narrative. Early in the book, he reflects on a scene in a hospital, where "good and righteous folk" pray at the bedside of their minister, and he feels a longing to share their trustfulness, only to ask himself: "Must faith be blind? Why must it come of people's need to believe?" This question—whether faith can be anything other than a need-driven blindness—is the seed of the prayer's theological assault. The prayer also echoes Pem's earlier meditation on sacrifice, delivered in his remarks to the bishop's examiners, where he invokes the scholar Burkert's account of the lizard that leaves its tail in the mouth of the predator and the fox that chews off its foot to escape the trap, seeing in these "programmed biological responses" the idea of sacrifice: "You give up a part to save the whole." Pem's prayer performs a kind of inverse sacrifice: he gives up his God, his priesthood, and his Christian identity in order to save something—his love for Sarah, his hope for a hallowed life, his place in a community that will remake God. The prayer is thus not merely a farewell but a ritual act of self-transcendence, the kind of act that, as Pem himself reflects on the tailor Srebnitsky, "once realized brings one to the end of life." For Pem, the end of his Christian life is the beginning of his Jewish one.

The Prayer as Performance and the Question of Remaking

The wedding prayer is also a performance, and its performative power is central to its meaning. Pem is described as knowing "what he was doing," a man who has spoken from pulpits for years and who commands the riven audience with the timing of a master. The prayer's grotesque hell vision, with its scatological and bodily excess, functions as a kind of carnivalesque inversion, temporarily overturning the decorum of the wedding celebration and the solemnity of religious address. Yet the performance is not mere rhetoric; it is a speech act that accomplishes what it declares. By announcing that he will soon be a Jew, Pem performs his conversion; by declaring that God must be remade, he begins the remaking. The prayer's insistence on remaking connects to the novel's broader meditation on the possibility of new forms of the sacred, from the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism to the artist who wraps the Reichstag and dreams of stapling Central Park with steel gates flying nylon flaps of gold. Pem's prayer is, in this sense, an act of "out-of-scale" art, a planetary embrace that seeks to reconform the sacred itself. It is the moment when the novel's central question—whether God can survive the century's murders—is answered not with a doctrine but with a demand: "We need a place to stand."