With this ring I promise...
For your morning amusement, a funny (but a bit sad) piece by a Church of England vicar on the bizarre vows and readings people want to use for their weddings these days, in place of the poetry of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
He, with the David Beckham haircut and clothing hanging about him in like manner, wanted to stand at the chancel steps and begin his lifelong vows with the immortal words,Ever since we met last year in the disco…This is the sort of degraded demotic that ought to qualify this bloke for a place on the Liturgical Commission. We didn't get as far as her reply. They took kindly enough to my advice -Sorry dears, this is the Church of England. Have you tried Blind Date?- and shoved off.
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From William Butler Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter:
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
The traditional words of the wedding ceremony are so beautiful they make me shiver.
Thanks for the comment, Miriam, and the apt quote. Mikki and I used the BCP service for our wedding ceremony. Even though we were being married in a Baptist Church, we wanted to draw on the heritage of Christianity in the English-speaking world, and found the words of the traditional service far nobler than anything we could hope to write ourselves. Having attended a number of Jewish weddings before ours, I was envious of the thousands of years of tradition upon which the Jewish ceremony draws, and to the extent we could we tapped into our own tradition.
I found the article to be mildly amusing, but sad? No.
If folks want to write their own vows, let them. I respect some traditions, but I refuse to be embalmed by them.
That's why I read the newer translations of the Bible. It's bad enough that the Bible is often contradictory, but there's no sense making it more hamstrung by archaic language.