by Lisa Mc Sherry
Creating your own wedding can be incredibly complicated, confusing, and frustrating. That said, any “wonderful wedding” experience does not happen without a lot of careful planning, and the rewards for creating your own can be immense.
This article presumes that you want to create a wedding ceremony that honors or in some way incorporates the Divine, but not in a way that feels typical (aka, “traditional”). So, let’s start with the basics: What makes a good ritual? At its most basic, a good ritual brings together the participants in a way that feels good, shares that positive energy all around, all the while accomplishing a stated purpose. I believe that by keeping this general definition in mind, you can create a wonderfully inclusive and special ritual to celebrate your relationship’s transition to a new level.
You’ll want to start planning your ritual as far in advance as possible, as having more time to pull all the pieces together will greatly reduce your stress.
Starting Points
Let’s start at the beginning. When do you want your ritual? As with traditional weddings, timing is a core factor that influences many other decisions. In thinking about the date, consider whether you want to hold the ritual on or near a sabbat, a day sacred to your Deity, or one linked to marriage. Ostara, Beltane, and Litha all have positive associations for relationships, and I think Mabon and Yule would work as well, although you’d be stretching the symbolism a bit. Deities associated with marriage might include Hera, Juno, Aphrodite, Venus, Demeter, Janus, Freya, Freyr, Frigg, Yue-Lao, Bes, Hathor, Hymen, Kamedeva, Innana, Oshun, and Sjofn. They all have days of particular importance, and a little research can produce a nice list of potential wedding dates.
Once you’ve decided when, you’ll want to choose where. The specific location is important, of course, but stay big picture for a moment: indoors or out? By temperament, we tend to prefer to worship in nature, but this may not be practical. Are any of your guests elderly or have special needs that make anything other than a smooth surface unusable? What is the typical weather around your chosen date, and how does it affect your planning? My fiancé and I wanted to hold our ritual on Beltane, which in the Seattle area is as likely to have heavy rain or sleet as sun. In addition, we both have elderly relatives who are not very mobile under the best of circumstances. In the end, we chose to have our ceremony indoors, but in a venue with a panoramic view overlooking Lake Washington to bring a strong sense of nature into the ritual. A friend held her ritual outdoors, but in a large park shelter in case of bad weather. Another friend held his ceremony in a civic building against tall windows that opened on to a splendid public garden. Selecting a date and finding a location are two of the biggest and most time-consuming decisions you’ll have to make, and I believe you can’t get them done soon enough.
Creating the Ritual
Having the timing and location decided will influence the style and format of your ritual. While not impossible, it feels dissonant to do an elaborate ritual with fifteen props and readings in the middle of a simple stone circle or field. Allow your surroundings to influence your ritual, and you’ll start the energy flowing in a positive direction. Similarly, decide early on how obviously nontraditional you want your ritual to appear. Personally, I felt that we were inviting people from diverse backgrounds (including my fiancé’s devout Presbyterian parents, my atheist father, and Pagan friends) and creating a comfortable atmosphere for all of them was a very important component.
One note, I do not recommend using your wedding ceremony as a “coming out” statement. People don’t expect weddings to include possibly painful surprises, so it’s far more respectful (and safer) to let loved ones know beforehand. A friend, the daughter of strict Catholics, sent Pagan-themed invitations, used the word “handfasting” instead of “wedding” and called her parents after they received the invitation. While they were very unhappy about her choice, she was straightforward and told them “I will understand if you choose not to attend, but this is my wedding.” (They chose to come, and they had a great time.) So be prepared to have honest conversations before the wedding if you want to be obvious about your spirituality.
Start tracking the symbols you feel support your theme. Some people avoid fertility images (eggs, rabbits, etc.) while others feel they are a necessary component. What energies do you and your partner want to bring into your new relationship? Wealth? Abundance? Joy? Use images from shared moments of your time together. Feel free to be funny or silly and even incorporate inside jokes. For us, the images of flying pigs were part of a long-standing joke, so we used them in various ways. Also, I met him when he was leading a D&D game, so our wedding cake “topper” was two minis, handpainted by us, of a witch and a paladin.
One often-debated detail that varies greatly is the length of the ceremony. Based on my decades of ritual work, I would say that anything less than twenty minutes will feel too short to your guests, and if it goes longer than forty-five minutes, they will start to lose focus. A thirty-minute ritual is enough to have opening music leading to a processional, a greeting from the officiant, quarter calls (if you have them), three readings, a speech by the officiant, an exchange of vows and rings, some kind of symbolic unifying moment, a kiss, and the recessional.
We felt that we needed to call a circle to make our ritual sacred, but didn’t need to get more obviously Pagan than that. We each took turns greeting the quarters, and worded them in a way that felt biblical (we were inspired by the “Song of Songs“), but were entirely our own.
His
I went to the east, to the crèche of the dawn,
and I heard my beloved calling my name.
Her voice was the singing of birds in the morning.
I went to the south, to the strike of noon,
and a great light appeared;
I saw my beloved clearly.
Her spirit was a bright flame that guided me home.
I went to the west, to the respite of evening,
and I found my beloved waiting for me by a cool river.
I took her hand and in it placed my heart.
I went to the north, to the home of midnight, and I made a place for my beloved and I to put down roots.
Her grace is the willow, which weathers adversity and returns stronger than before.
Hers
I went to the east, to the cradle of beginnings,
and I called out for my beloved,
and he answered.
His voice was the touch of a spring breeze.
I went to the south, to the bosom of passion,
and a great light appeared;
I saw my beloved clearly.
His spirit was the light of the sun itself, warming my path.
I went to the west, to the seat of emotions,
and I found my beloved waiting for me by a deep well.
I took his heart and gave him my own in exchange.
I went to the north, to the throne of abundance, and I found the place where my beloved awaited me.
His strength is the oak, with deep strong roots, unshakable in the face of adversity.
For those in the know, this was clearly a circle casting based on the four elements and in a typically Wiccan framework. For others, it was simply lovely poetry. (I later overheard my father telling my mother-in-law that he thought we’d borrowed from Kahlil Gibran, only to have her tell him that it was from the Bible. Success!)
We chose three readings that had great meaning for us and had other people read them. This allowed us to honor people who are special to us and gave us a bit of a break out of the limelight. Shakespeare is a wonderful resource, as are more modern poets. A Google search for “love poems” will give you a huge collection to choose from.
By the way, the only way to know how long the ritual will take is to rehearse it, complete with props. You don’t need to read the actual words out loud (if you want to keep your vows private, for example), but you should substitute something similar in length. You can estimate length by planning for about a minute for each 100 words spoken, but nothing beats having a rehearsal—so make sure you schedule one.
Writing Your Vows
Your vows are the heart of the ritual, the sacred intention you make public, the binding you will voluntarily take upon yourself. They are also damn hard to write. Here are a few things you can do to make the process easier and the final results better. First, you both need to be involved—this is crucial—and decide whether you are writing them separately or working together on one set. Will you want to share them with each other before the ceremony? You will want to agree on a basic format and tone. Should it be lighthearted or deeply romantic? Completely original or borrowed from other sources? Finally, you’ll want to agree on the structure: just vows, or perhaps a bit of a story to start?
It might be a good idea to schedule a date to talk about your vows. My fiancé and I enjoyed talking about our relationship and what marriage means to us both. Discussing the merits of traditional vows versus writing our own helped clarify what we were looking to say and hear.
A wedding is a performance, so remember your audience. Your vows cannot be so cryptic or salacious that people are confused or uncomfortable. Reading your vows out loud (to a mirror if not to another person) will help smooth your delivery, catch the places you might stumble, and let you hear the words that may not sound quite right when no longer confined to your head. When in doubt, be plain; the audience always loves genuine feeling.
Setting a deadline well in advance of your ritual for sitting down with your drafts and talking them through is a good idea. You don’t need to share the exact words, but you’ll want to check in with each other. If nothing else, make sure both of your vows are similar in tone and length.
Expect the Unexpected
Be flexible and allow for things to go wrong. A couple with a romantic dynamic of the knight and his lady found a gorgeous location in a local park, complete with a medieval-style stone tower and grove of oak trees surrounded by an acre of flowers. Two weeks before their wedding, a hurricane blew through and completely destroyed the area, uprooting the trees and destroying the flowers. They volunteered to be a part of the cleanup crew and were rewarded by being given an alternate location near that stone tower. It wasn’t ideal, but their wedding pictures are amazing, and you’d never know that they had to improvise at the last minute. More importantly, they are still together a decade later.
Creating your own wedding, especially one incorporating nontraditional beliefs, can be overwhelming, but doing so gives you the opportunity to make sure your guests understand why they were there in the first place—a point that can easily be lost in some traditional ceremonies. Crafting your own ritual can bring you the certain knowledge that what you and your partner have created is the perfect expression of your beliefs, your love for one another, manifested within the positive energy that any good ritual brings.