Wording For Wedding Ceremony
Weddings in the many churches of the various faiths differ widely. Not only the procedures prescribed by the particular church but the training and beliefs of the individual minister andthe preferences of the couple play a part in determining the nature of the wedding ceremony. An occasional couple write a part of their own wording for wedding ceremony, incorporating their own convictions and commitment with the traditional vows.
Some ministers have developed their own introductory statements that precede the usual vows in the wedding cere-
mony. The following is used by permission as illustrative.
Wedding Ceremony Wording
Wedding Address to the Congregation
There is an ancient story which contains a profound insight: It is not good for man to be alone. We rightly approach a wedding ceremony with reverence and with awe. For marriage has welled up out of the depths of personal and social need. In it the fundamental impulses of the individual and the race, biological, personal and social, come to an overt focus. The
ceremony itself is the public avowal of a new relationship, the most basic which can exist among men.
It signifies that two people stand at one point along the unending stream of human development, a point at which count-
less others have stood before and countless more will stand in ages which are to come. Yet it is for the human race, as for them, unique in the totality of timeless aeons. The centuries of the past have looked forward to this occasion.
Those of the future should have good cause to regard it with respect and gratitude.
It is meet and proper that so awe-inspiring an occasion, when Eternity emerges as a visible point in the present, should be celebrated with dignity and solemnity. All races, tribes and cultures, from the most primitive to the most advanced, have made of this step an occasion for rejoicing and an expression through ceremony and rite of profound social concern. So today, society expresses its legitimate and inescapable interest.
For a wedding is more than the joining of two persons to each other. It is the closing of a link in the endless chain of human relationships, a link which binds the present to the past and out of which the future can most advantageously emerge.
The wedding is properly a religious ceremony. For in marriage, basic forces which determine human destiny find their richest and most creative expression. The noblest sentiments and highest ideals of the human soul stand by In expectant concern for their future. The God who sustains all which is, ultimately presides.
Wedding Ceremony Wording Address to the Couple
For you, this ceremony will mean entrance into new relationships which will affect many aspects of your lives. Your legal status will be altered in important respects. The merger of names will symbolize an extensive change in your social status and relationships. Changed personal relationships, some of which may prove onerous, will remind you that things are no longer as they were.
It will mean for you a new security in your personal lives. For marriage is an oasis of refreshment and renewal in an often arid world, a point of stability amid the bewildering and often alarming changes of a rapidly shifting social scene. Your marriage will mean that each of you will have one whom you know and can respond to as a whole personality. In all the welter of mass humanity and whirling shifts of friendships, you can find stability.
Marriage will mean for you that intimacy which is necessary for the best satisfaction of the deepest needs of your souls. You will find a new security in acceptance, a security which is freely yours without the need for pretense and dissimulation.
For you there will always be one situation in which you can be as you really are, without risk of rejection. Marriage means in part, the weaving of a rope of relationships upon which each of you can put the full strain of your own worst, without fear that it will break.
You will find a new security and richness of love. Among the greatest needs of all is a two-way flow of affection. Marriage will increase and enrich this for you, unimpeded by conventions and unspoiled by fear of its loss. Such married love is above and beyond all other forms of human love.
In it alone are intermingled the depth, intimacy, and permanence essential for your greatest satisfaction and growth.
Your wedding means a recognition and acceptance of new social obligations. To marry is to enter into partnership in a building enterprise. It means the construction of a social relationship which inevitably involves others. To marry is not only to establish a center of emotional security for yourselves. It is to create a basic unit of society.
And in so doing you find your own greatest fulfillment.
The vows which you are about to take pledge you to fidelity, one to the other. This does not merely mean fidelity to taboos, or even to a person.
The man and woman who live together secure in each other’s love are being faithful to far more than each other. They are being faithful to a social situation which can produce people who can live without fear, who are sufficiently mature emotionally as neither to seek nor to need dictatorship and aggression. They are being faithful to the basic foundations of the social structure in which all are formed and nourished.
They are being faithful to the provisions which society makes for the protection and the development of the deepest needs of persons. When you marry you do far more than to take unto yourself a spouse. You take a piece of the social future into your hands.
Then follow the usual vows and prayers.
Read more about planning a wedding.
I hope this is helpful in your search for Wording For Wedding Ceremony.
Related Articles:
- Name Change Guide CD for PC and Mac
- Viva el amor: The Latino Wedding Planner, A Practical Guide for Arranging a Traditional Ceremony and a Fabulous Fiesta
- Wedding Ceremony Wording
- The Wedding Ceremony Planner: The Essential Guide to the Most Important Part of Your Wedding Day
- Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette, 5e
Tags: Planning A Wedding, wedding ceremony wording, wording for wedding ceremony, words for weddings
