In the past few weeks, I've been thinking about how hard it can be to make your wedding service feel meaningful. Last week I wrote about how to take a traditional service and make it something that feels really personal for the two of you. Today I wanted to tackle the same problem from the opposite direction - how do you create a meaningful and truly secular service? Because let's be realistic: it can be effing hard to create a secular service from scratch.
Many of the options for secular services run the gamut from bizarre to generic, with fake wedding industry 'tradition' lurking in the background. You've got the rent-an-officiants that will sing your service like opera (um, maybe you could just say it?). You've got the re-written religious texts that often sound like essays written by a third grader (David and I have a secular version of the Jewish wedding blessings that we like to read out loud for hilarity, that starts with something like, "Nature is good. Everyone loves nature!" Um. Thanks.) And then you've got the Apache Wedding blessing, which was, you know, written by white Hollywood screen writers. (Oops.)
So I decided that it was high time to come up with a bunch of secular wedding resources that don't suck, and that APW-ers were just the people to tackle the project. To start things off, I asked Rachel (DDay in the comments, and you can read her full wedding graduate post right here) to write about creating a totally secular wedding service. (Side note: the picture above is the AMAZING moment of her husband looking at the officiant when she referred to their wedding as a fairytale. Apparently the service ended up being great, but I feel like it's such a great pictorial sum up of how disappointing secular wedding resources can be. And it totally slays me. Also.) Then, I wanted us all to pitch in, in the comments, with the best secular wedding resources we had. I'll cull through them, and we'll put together an APW Secular Wedding Resource. So let's do this thing!
I am always surprised when Meg talks about being accused of being anti-tradition, because of how umm, traditional, her own wedding was. Even though there are aspects of her advice I can relate to, it’s still a wedding I could never have had. And what is her response when we ask for diversified content? “Write it your [damn] self.” So this is meant to balance her recent post about making a traditional ceremony your own. This post is about how we made our ceremony our own, when we didn’t really have a tradition that felt 100% right to us. There are aspects I might tweak if I had it to do over, but it married us, so it was perfect in its way.
Our Context
First of all, I’d like to clarify where we were coming from. We come from families with varying degrees of adherence to Catholic and Presbyterian faiths, but my husband and I are not religious. And by that I don’t mean, “well we’re sort of [insert denomination] but don’t go to church or anything.” We don’t believe in god, period. I don’t even like the words atheist or non-believer, because it makes me feel like I’m deficient in some way. But this is just to provide some context; nothing in what I’ve said or am about to say is intended to be any kind of judgment on those who do have faith and follow a religion, or have faith but don’t necessarily follow a religion, or don’t have faith but still plan to include biblical or other religious aspects in their ceremonies.
I’d also like to say that YES, the obvious has been pointed out to me, that as far from religious as we tried to make our ceremony, the shell of it comes directly from Christian roots. Yes, you can groom a dog to look like a panda, but it’s still a dog. (I’m not sure if that metaphor works but I'm excited about the excuse to share that link) Continue reading Writing a Non-Traditional Wedding Ceremony



































































