What is Wedding Country?
When I decided to trademark my wedding officiating business, I wasn’t sure why I liked the name. I just knew that it resonated with me on a deep level. Marriage, in my experience, is about making vows of fidelity, hope, and joy to someone we deeply love. But it’s also a place of the soul—a creative, hopeful space that we enter the moment we are pronounced married, a place that exists in a world which so often teeters on the verge of despair.
As a kid growing up in the Midwest in the ’60s, I knew marriage as something that was always performed in a church, by a minister, and of course, between a man and a woman for God’s sake! For pay, the minister might be given today’s equivalent of $25 or invited over to dinner by one of the family members. This overwhelmingly dominant expression of marriage was primarily religious, with vows made between the couple and God, and family, friends, and community present as witnesses to a contractual agreement.
This understanding of Wedding Country has been and continues to be the gateway for millions of happy marriages over the decades and centuries. But just as our understanding of the world and the universe continues to grow and change, so does our understanding of Wedding Country. My challenge as a wedding officiant is to continue to hold all the models that people have of what Wedding Country is, with an equal amount of love and respect.
This challenge is also my joy. As an officiant, my role is to continually explore the vast landscape of Wedding Country, ensuring there is always room for you, and for you – for everyone.
I have come to see that I live in Wedding Country 24/7. It is more than planning a ceremony and creating a wedding that is just perfect for you. It is a place that lives on in my heart long after the wedding itself is over. If I cannot pass on my hopes, prayers, and love to you during your wedding, what, then, is the purpose of this moment? Just as the vows you made and the actions you took to help you remember and cherish this sacred day, I hope that there will also be a fire lit in you. These vows are logs in a fire that will burn with greater intensity and warmth as the years go by.
My assurance to you is that wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome in Wedding Country in whatever way you have come to know it. I can say this because being an officiant in Wedding Country is like being a park ranger in a beautiful, untrammeled wilderness. Everyone who comes to Wedding Country comes to be a citizen of the place. You can be assured that there is room for you here. Your marriage vows become your citizenship certificate. This beautiful place is filled to the brim with hope, joy, promise, and creative spirit.
To be clear, Wedding Country is not a fantasy land that will evaporate after the ceremony is over and the mortgage comes due. It is a place that will grow with all the challenges and struggles that life has to offer because it is alive. It is a place inhabited by a creator who does not pick or choose favorites, who does not condemn certain categories of people to hopelessness and despair while providing others with the keys to the kingdom.
I hope you can envision with me this place I am calling Wedding Country, and that you can come to call it home. It doesn’t matter whether I am your officiant or someone else has that lucky calling. What does matter is that you feel an opening to this place on your wedding day. May you truly enter into the country of marriage, this place I call Wedding Country.