“When you love someone a lot, they just look like love.”
how to pick a reading for your wedding
One of my favorite aspects of designing a wedding ceremony is identifying and integrating texts. There’s no rule that a couple has to include any readings, but they can enhance the experience of a ceremony by providing a glimpse into a couple’s relationship, their values, and the world they want to live in. It’s also an easy way to manipulate the emotions of participants…er, rather, to calibrate the emotional engagement of a ceremony. Some readings inspire deep reflection, some just make people weep, and some add a welcome dose of levity and even laughter.
Unfortunately, most online sites that recommend readings for weddings rely on a narrow range of cliché texts about love and romance instead of offering tools for discernment. I can’t blame those sites or their contributors — as a society, we generally lack a capacity for reflection because we’re taught that reflection is basically quiet opinionating. I tend to approach reflection with guidance from the great John Dewey. As Carol Rodgers summarizes, for Dewey, there are four criteria for authentic reflection: reflection is a meaning-making process that moves us between and helps us see the connections between different experiences; it is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking; it happens best in…
