The bride of the wedding that I'm performing later on this year sent me a link to an article from Slate about the increase in popularity of secular cermonies.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2107004/ Selected quotes:
Quote:
What sets these secular celebrations apart from traditional rituals is their focus on the individuals. In the past, people didn't need ritual to speak to them personally; if it was part of their religion, it was inherently meaningful. Today, with confidence in our institutions eroding, authority and belief come—for many people—from self and personal experience.
...
These days, anyone with Internet access can be legally ordained by the Universal Life Church. The challenge, then, is to create ceremonies that rise above the cliched and hokey and to fashion ceremonies that are meaningful, personalized, and imbued with a strong sense of community and history. Given that many people have fled religion in part because of rituals that seemed hollow, secular officiants need to keep what they do original and not allow anything to become routine. If they can manage that, they'll have made a valuable contribution to the new religion of personal spirituality.
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Should someone actually be crazy enough to want to spend the rest of their life with me, I'm pretty sure that I don't want to get married in the Catholic Church (and I'm not sure that they'd accept me as a qualified bride at any rate) and I wouldn't really be comfortable with another denomination, I think. I could see going to a JP or Vegas or whatever and getting it over and done with, but I'm sort of attracted to creating a simple, short ceremony that's a little more personal to me, my putative spouse, and our friends and family.
The bride sent me a sort of run down of what she's looking for in the ceremony that I'm performing, and given who she is and what we're doing, I think it will be lovely. There will be a lot of involvement from the rest of the attendees, and I think it will end up being a very nice (short) community celebration of their marriage.
