Henna and the Art of Matrimoning

My dear friends are to be married this coming weekend and I am so blessed as to be part of the preparations. This included a bridal gathering last Sunday for teatime British style, complete with tea cookies and cakes (there was a small pie called a "Bridesmaid") as well as some decadent Indian sweets. I was given a box to bring home as a party favor and spent the rest of the evening tasting the varicolored sugary goodnesses with my roommate. Sweet!

The main event of this tea party was to have the women close to the bride decorated with henna tattoos. The bride, Nina, is half East Indian and will be donning a special made sari at the ceremony. She herself will be decorated in henna art up her arms and legs. I at first assumed this was in reference to Hinduism's predominance in India and a way for Nina to embrace this part of her cultural heritage. However, as it turns out, bridal henna is a ritual in several religious traditions. There is even reference to ceremonial henna in both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. This marks my cultural expansions and learnings for the week ...
Above I've included an image of the henna tattoos I received at Nina's party. Natasha from Kent was the artist and she has crazy tattoo skills. She mentioned that she'd done over one hundred hands last week! While painting me with the all-natural plant paste (it was dispensed from what looked like a cake frosting tube in small, dark fecal-esque lines), I asked Natasha what the significance of the design was. She said none, that she'd just made it up. It was awesome watching her work her creative magic over all our arms, each of us presenting hands with our age or youth, soft and dry, a rainbow of complexions. None of us received the same design from Natasha, and yet the honor of coming together to be adorned in honor of Nina and Joe's wedding was touchingly unitive.

The stains supposedly last two weeks and will be their near darkest this weekend at the wedding. I've been walking through my regular week routine with hands that invite glances and comments, and tell the story of ritual, celebration and love. But I must admit that after three days of henna hands I have come to wonder a few things about the meaning of it all. And I mean that in the loosest sense. To what extent is this white lady committing cultural appropriation? Certainly there is no harm in honoring the heritage of a bride and partaking in the ceremonial adornment. I believe the significance will be felt fully at the wedding. In the meantime, I fear that I am rocking some quasi-offensive hand gear. It's mostly my whiteness that brings me pause, but admittedly it is also my Christianness.

I once took a spirituality course that touched upon the question of meditation and yoga as a Christian practice. A guest speaker visited us and we prayed the Lord's Prayer with coinciding yoga postures. Aside from feeling like a child in a school concert that performs hand motions to corresponding song lyrics (skid-a-marink a dink a dink), I felt a little adulterous. Here I was moving through the sun salutation with my body and the Our Father with my words. It was confusing. We repeated this several times and it did begin to feel less uncomfortable, but the questions remained. Traditionally, yogic practice is preparation for prayer. It is prayer. So perhaps there's greater error in doing yoga as an exercise regimen than as a prayer exercise. Regardless, the union of East and West in this white Seattleite feels always a bit dishonest and forced. Which then leaves me with one practical and boiled-down version of all these questions: Do I wear my cross with my henna?