Our Wedding Ceremony
Just a thought from 15 August 2004 about Love.

When Heather and I got married, my uncle Harry officiated. Harry, dad's little brother, is a judge and a great guy. So Heather and I were lucky to be able to be married by family.

But here's the thing about wedding ceremonies: They suck. I mean, all of them. They're either so traditional as to be painful ("honor and obey" would have made everyone in our audience laugh out loud) or so new agey you'd hardly know a wedding was going on.

So Heather and I rolled our own. We each wrote our vows and we collaborated on the entire ceremony. As a writer, it was a challenge I'd never even considered. What would a meaningful, emotional, sincere yet irreverent wedding ceremony sound like?

Basically, I cribbed a lot from Chris Stevens.

But there was one part that I was particularly proud of. When it comes time for the rings, there's usually some dreck about perfect circles. No beginning and no end. A metaphor for love. Blah blah blah.

But we all know that's hooey. Rings, like love, don't just appear all shiny and new and perfect one day. They both take work. They're both the result of a lot of trial and error. So when it came time for the rings, this is what I wrote for Harry to say.

This is the point in the ceremony when I usually talk about the wedding bands being a perfect circle, having no beginning and no end. But we all know that these rings do have a beginning. Rock is dug up from the earth. Metal is liquefied in a furnace at a thousand degrees. Hot metal is poured into a mold, cooled, and then painstakingly polished. Something beautiful is made from raw elements.

Love is like that. It’s hot, dirty work. It comes from humble beginnings, made by imperfect beings. It’s the process of making something beautiful where there was once nothing at all.

Harry said he liked it so much he might use it in other ceremonies.

If you'd like to read our whole ceremony, and you promise, yaknow, not to laugh, you can see it on our wedsite.