BEFORE THE WEDDING DAY
The wedding industry is big business. Couples are bombarded with ads for photos and favors, trips and tuxes, car rentals and cakes. Couples negotiate guest lists for the church and the reception. Size eight people imagine that they can get into a size six. The spiritual meaning of the wedding day can get lost. Couples can begin to feel the pressure.
Too many details and high anxiety cause stress. Stress can be alleviated when couples do good planning and solid preparation. Here's how.
1. Put Christ into your planning. Spend fifteen minutes each day in quiet time with Christ. Ask him for guidance and insight. Pray for support and courage.
2. Try to balance two equally important values. First, this is a big event for every couple. Second, this is a big event for the people of your parish. When a couple marries, their marriage gives them a different status and a new role in the parish. Let the people of the parish in on the wedding. Invite parish people to the wedding. Let them rejoice, pray, and participate in one of the loveliest liturgies we-church celebrates. I know a number of parishes where the Saturday afternoon Eucharist at 4 or 5 is a time for weddings. It works, too!
3. Weddings are both personal and public moments. Couples get publicity in wedding columns of local newspapers. They get blood tests and a license. They dress up and go to church. The wedding is public prayer. The underlying principle that every couple can work from is this. Liturgy requires full, conscious, and active participation. This means that the wedding congregation prays through body postures such as standing, sitting and listening attentively, and walking in procession. In addition to these ritual actions, all pray by singing and speaking the prayer responses throughout the Liturgy.
4. Consult church personnel who are responsible for wedding music and the marriage ritual. People will sing at a wedding when invited to do so and assisted by skillful cantors and musicians. We no longer hire singers or soloists and cocktail lounge musicians to do the music for us or to replace our role in making melody before God. Hire these people for the reception.
5. The wedding congregation needs to be seated together and up in the front half of the church so that people can sing and see the ritual action. A worship aid or booklet can assist congregational participation. People come to weddings to be part of the joy and the festive prayer.
6. A big hassle involves the kind of music selected for the wedding liturgy. Follow this principle: choose wedding music that is fitting for public prayer and community participation. Leave the other music for the wedding reception. Pastoral musicians are trained to know the difference. They are assisted by diocesan musical and liturgical guidelines.
7. Do not give in to the consumer culture. No wedding should put people into hock. Nor should big spending obscure the relationship that we responsibly have to the poor and the needy. Good habits of stewardship suggest that 5-10% of the cost of the wedding go to help poor couples celebrate their weddings, or go to shelters for the homeless, or go to support places where abused women & children find shelter and safety.