I
continued to officiate at weddings for several years after I left the parish ministry.
A few of these weddings were for family and friends of family but many were
'mixed' marriages—each of the partners were of different communions or
different races or different socioeconomic backgrounds and their ministers,
pastors, priests, rabbis would not officiate because of this. Also many were
second or third marriages for one or both of the couple and refused the
services of their religious leaders for this reasons. And there were those
couples that wanted to be married in some other venue than in a church and
those couples neither of whom had an association with a preacher.
Regardless
of the circumstances, I had three rules that the couple had to accept before I
would agree to officiate. First and foremost the couple had to write their own
service, especially their vows. Many brides that I worked with in and out of
the ministry had already chosen their music and some their musicians but found
it much more difficult to collaborate with their intendeds to create an order
for their service and agree to what they wanted included in it. I provide
numerous aids in the form of services other couples had designed and many
couples 'cut and pasted' from these. What was important to me was that this was
to be their wedding service, not mine, not the churches laid upon them. For
almost all, this proved to be more meaningful even though the process was
sometimes fraught with disagreements.
Writing
their vows was almost always the hardest part of planning their wedding. I countered
their resistance by explaining that their vows were the very heart of the
service. These were the rules for the behavior of one toward the other during
their life together, and I wanted the bride and the groom to own, understand,
and accept these rules. Some couples made unusual promises to each other, most
elected to use some variation of the standard vows but hopefully in the process
took time to discuss what 'richer and poorer', 'sickness and health', 'faithful
unto death' and so forth meant to each.
The
third rule was I would not tolerate any micro management of the wedding service
by 'well-meaning' parents or friends. Brides' mothers were the worst offenders
and on more than one occasion I interrupted a rehearsal until the offending
mother promised to cease her interference or left the premises. To my way of
thinking, this was one of the most dramatic life-altering events in the lives
of the bride and groom. I wanted it to be their event from start to finish, not
someone else’s vicarious wedding. Most often, although the process was
sometimes difficult and contentious, the results were much appreciated by the
newly weds.
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