How a celebrant can help
When you are planning your wedding ceremony together, the first questions you will be asking yourselves are: Who should we invite? When should we do it? Where shall we do it? These questions are part of the planning phase.
With your celebrant, you will enter into a more creative phase, when your personalised ceremony will begin to take shape. The celebrant will ask you questions that will probe more deeply into your motivations: how did you arrive at the decision to get married? How do you imagine your ceremony? How will you give the ceremony meaning?
An infinity knot with three colours, two strands representing the couple’s past and one symbolising their future
Photography: Sofia Rebicek and Massimiliano Esposito, Light & Dreams
““Creation is not about giving the ceremony meaning or what it should mean; it is about uncovering what it means to you.””
Once you have found the answers to these questions, with your celebrant’s guidance, you will be ready to start thinking about what will make your ceremony truly yours and truly authentic.
Every element of your ceremony should have a real connection with you or your lives. You are at the centre of your ceremony, and anything that has meaning for you will make the ritual meaningful.
If the venue you choose has some meaning for you, and the personal promises you exchange come from inside you and your own experience, you and everyone participating will take that meaning away with them.
Trust your instincts and find the source of your meaning from inside you.
“The creative process grows out of our human need to mark an occasion or a life event as being special. Primal ritual materials include people, participation and place; from these three sources come the words, gestures and objects that anchor ritual in reality.””
Your celebrant will advise you that in a ceremony, simplicity conveys meaning more effectively. Complexity can create confusion and take people’s attention from you, who are at the centre.
Your celebrant helps you relate your personal content to the form of the ceremony, so that the essence of who you are and why you are celebrating is always clear.
Bride reading her vow to her bridegroom with them wearing crowns, which derives from the bridegroom’s background. Photo by Sotiris Tsakanikas
Similarly, if you choose a symbolic rite for your wedding (sand ceremony, wine ceremony, handfasting, etc.) your celebrant will help you create a context for this choice to show how this rite belongs to you and your ceremony rather than being “borrowed”, or she or he will help you to create a new one.
In both these ways, your ceremony will be authentic and unique. Yours and yours only.
In a wedding ceremony, your relationship is at the centre of the ceremony, with your family and friends participating actively with their presence (and sometimes in other ways).
A professional celebrant is essential to preside over the ceremony and keep you and your partner “in the frame”, leaving you both free to concentrate fully on one another and to relax and enjoy this highly significant and emotional moment in your life.
(The quotes are from Jeltje Gordon Lennox, Crafting Secular Ritual, 2017)
