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Authentic Celebrant-Led Wedding Ceremonies

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Authentic Celebrant-Led Wedding Ceremonies

Your celebrant can help you make your ceremony truly and uniquely yours by helping you find your authentic voice

From planning to creativity:
what are the questions to ask?

As you start the planning phase of your wedding, you will be considering your budget, deciding on the date and venue, booking your suppliers, and worrying about all those thousands of pesky details that never seem to go away.

Once you have chosen your celebrant and start creating your ceremony, however, you will enter into a more creative phase, and your personalised wedding ceremony will slowly begin to take shape. Your celebrant will ask you questions that will probe more deeply into your motivations:

  • Why are you getting married?
  • Why do you want a celebrant-led wedding?
  • How do you see yourselves as a couple?
  • How do you envision the ceremony?
  • What tone do you wish to adopt?
    What meaning would you like to imbue the ceremony with?
  • Do you have a symbolic ritual in mind and what is its significance to you?

“Creation is not about giving the ceremony meaning or what it should mean; it is about uncovering what it means to you.”

Thinking about these questions together will help trigger a process that gets the creative juices flowing. The answers will be a clue as to what to look for when the time comes to start thinking about what will make your ceremony truly yours and truly authentic.

The ceremony is you

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 authentic meaning for you will make the ritual more significant for everyone involved. If the venue you choose has some meaning for you — because perhaps it is where you had your first kiss — then your celebrant will make sure this information is deftly woven into the ceremony. If the vows you write for one another come spontaneously from a place inside you and from your experience as a couple, you and everyone participating in the wedding ceremony will feel that they resonate because they are truly yours. It is always important to trust your gut instincts and find the source of your meaning from inside yourselves rather than from outside sources.

The celebrant helps you express your emotions

In a ceremony, simplicity and spontaneity convey meaning more effectively than complexity and appearances. Complexity can create confusion and take people’s attention from you, who are at the centre of the event, while concentrating too much appearances and what people might think will make your ceremony more self-conscious and less genuinely yours.

Your celebrant will find a way to include your personal ideas, create a context, and write a narrative that conveys the essence of who you are and why you are celebrating while, at the same time, modulating the emotional impact of the various moments of the ceremony. Similarly, if you choose a symbolic ritual of some kind for your wedding (sand ceremony, wine ceremony, handfasting, etc.) your celebrant will illustrate why you chose it, and in what way the ritual belongs to you rather than being “borrowed”. You may even come up with a completely new ritual with a completely new meaning and build it into your ceremony.

In a wedding, you and your relationship are the central focus, but the participation of all the special people in your lives is a multiplying factor: the more actively they join in, the more the ceremony will resonate for them and for you.

(The quotes are from Jeltje Gordon Lennox, Crafting Secular Ritual, 2017)

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