person or event in our consciousness. We have ceremonies to acknowledge personal achievement, to celebrate national victories and heroes, even to mark our sorrows and losses; but of all our traditional ceremonies, the wedding is the sweetest, because it is a celebration of love. It celebrates possibilities; its attitude is joy; its mood is hope.
But, unfortunately, for all too many of us the beautiful possibilities of the marriage ceremony become gradually eclipsed by the demands of organizing the wedding itself. The endless phone calls, decisions, arrangements, and expenses involved in planning such an event can leave a bride and groom feeling like the frazzled producers of an off-Broadway musical about love and romance instead of participants in a sacred ceremony that celebrates the power of love and the meaning of their particular relationship.
Indeed, weddings can get so bogged down in the endless exigencies of organizing and planning that the experience itself, when it finally occurs, can seem as though it has very little to do with the love that inspired it in the first place. You can get so involved with the rehearsal dinner, the wedding bouquet, and the band at the reception that you forget that the most important part of the wedding is the ceremony itself—the words that are spoken, the promises you make to one another, the bond you create as you enter into marriage.
Everyone wants their wedding to be beautiful, and of course you also want your wedding to flow smoothly—and it will. But all this requires a great deal of effort. Don't lose the spirit of the day by getting so overwhelmed with endless details that you allow yourself to get disconnected from what your wedding is really about—the love you have for the person you're going to marry and the life you want to share in the future.
Keeping these deeper things in mind at every step of the process is what will make your wedding unforgettable, an occasion which, when you call it to mind in the future, or relive it through the photographs or videos, will remind you of the moving, exuberant, tender, passionate, and life-changing feelings that caused you to fall in love in the first place. For long after the champagne bottles have been taken away and you've polished off the last piece of frozen anniversary cake, it is the essence of your ceremony—the words that were spoken, the atmosphere you created through them, and the love and joy you generated through all its special moments—that will take root in your hearts and form the foundation of a love so strong that it can span your life.
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.
—Simone Signoret
If you want your wedding to be unforgettable, you will want to fashion it in such a way that it truly reflects the uniqueness of your relationship. Because a wedding, whatever its form, symbolizes and celebrates an emotional and spiritual bond, you will want yours to reflect the love that has affected you so deeply that you have decided to change the whole color and texture of your life by getting married. For just as you love the person you're about to marry because he or she is in some way different from all others in your eyes, so you will want to make your wedding unforgettable by creating a ceremony that is as special as the two of you, one tailored to express not only the quality of your love, but also your wonderful quirks, your touchingly special attributes as individuals, and the feelings, wishes, and intentions that you share as a couple.
Thus, although the classic image of a traditional wedding—the bride in white and the groom in a tuxedo saying vows of “‘til death do us part”—may be indelibly imprinted on your mind, it may neither fit your particular circumstances nor embrace the range of feelings you want to evoke as the memento of your love. You may want a wedding that resonates with tradition yet includes opportunities for departures from custom, a wedding that truly expresses your own uniqueness.
BUILDING ON TRADITION
Traditional weddings are generally based on the values of society and the church. In addition to honoring the bond between the bride and groom, they invite the new couple to surrender their union to the care and approbation of the larger community. In such ceremonies, marriage can be construed to be somehow at the service of society or the church. The bride and groom are saying, in effect, “through this ceremony we submit our relationship to a larger, more commonly held notion of what marriage is; we will live by society's or the church's definition of what's right.”
Because you have purchased this book, you obviously want something other than the strictly traditional ceremony available through your church or synagogue. By providing you with a selection of elements both traditional and contemporary, this book is a gift to that purpose. It invites you to consciously create the wedding ceremony that will have the profoundest meaning for you. For in deciding to create a wedding from the heart, you're saying that you are interested in a more personalized definition of marriage, one that includes a very specific reflection of your love and of what your relationship means to you. You know that love is a feeling—it's what's brought you here; but you also know that marriage is an undertaking that will ask you to mature your love in a way that serves, delights, and challenges you; and it's this that you are wanting to express in your departure from tradition.
Weddings from the Heart encourages you to expand the definition of marriage by reshaping traditional elements in such a way that you can acknowledge time-honored values while creating a highly personalized wedding ceremony. By studying the various components of the ceremony, choosing those that suit you exactly and working together so that what you include reflects what both of you feel, you can create a truly beautiful wedding. Your wedding will be a personalized expression of your values and experiences, as well as of the hopes, dreams, and intentions that are so precious to both of you. Above all, it can become the blueprint for the life you intend to live when you are married.
USING THIS BOOK
The book opens with an essay, Reflections on Marriage, which is just that—a discussion of the meaning and attributes of marriage, its emotional and spiritual dimensions. Although this is meant to be a reflective meditation on the undertaking of marriage, a way for you to prepare yourself for creating your ceremony, a great many people have found it such an inspirational statement about the meaning of marriage that they have chosen to use it, virtually unmodified, as the “address” in their wedding ceremony. I have included the essay so that whether you're using it as inspiration for planning your wedding or as part of the wedding itself, its message it will open your heart to the deeper meanings of your marriage ceremony. The book then discusses the meaning of the various parts of the wedding ceremony so you can begin to determine which ones you wish to include.
It next offers five complete contemporary ceremonies, which reflect most accurately, I believe, what a wedding and marriage itself mean in the emotional and spiritual environment we are living in at the close of this twentieth century. They can be used by any couple who choose to honor their union by getting married, no matter what their sexual or lifestyle preference may be. Although none of the ceremonies has been written specifically for the gay or lesbian couple, all have been used, with slight variations, in gay and lesbian weddings. It is relationship itself that we are celebrating here, not the specific configuration of it. The focus is on the power of love to bind us together; to transcend the differences that all too often divide us, and I have chosen, therefore, not to “ghettoize” gay and lesbian relationships by creating a categorically different ceremony for them.
Although each ceremony stands complete in itself, as you study them all you may find that you'd like to use a single one in its entirety or combine selections from several. To assist you in the process, I also have included a civil ceremony, as well as an array of vows, benedictions, and readings from a wide variety of traditions. Those that bear no specific attribution have been written by me. These, too, you can use as is, or modify to accommodate your taste and circumstances.
