Hello Bye Bye, Bitters readers! I’m Jessica from Faith Permeating Life, and I’ve been married for 2+ years to my wonderful husband, Mike. Helena asked me to talk about how my faith played a role in planning for our wedding.
Mike and I are kind of weird. I think people have trouble putting us into a box sometimes. For example, we’re both practicing Catholics, so naturally, we had a Catholic wedding Mass. But we threw out all of the traditional readings, picked a priest with a tendency to swear, and were each walked down the aisle by both of our parents.
Let’s back up.
Mike proposed to me on Holy Thursday, which is the Thursday before Easter, when we remember how Jesus had the Last Supper with his disciples and washed each of their feet as a model of how to serve one another in love. There’s a song called “The Servant Song” (you can find lyrics here if you’re so inclined) that we often sing in the Catholic church on Holy Thursday, and Mike used this song as his proposal, concluding by talking about how he and I would serve each other for the rest of our lives just like Jesus did.
Oh, I know. I caught a good one.
We knew we wanted to use that song during the wedding, but I don’t think we consciously decided to have a theme of “service” for the whole wedding until we sat down to try to pick out the readings.
Catholic Masses have three Scripture readings: one from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament (usually from Paul’s letters), and one from the Gospels. After our first meeting with the priest, he sent us home with a book of traditional wedding readings.
Mike and I read through them and agreed that none of them resonated with how we wanted our marriage to be. It’s understandable that there’s not a lot to pick from, since most of weddings recorded in the Bible were back when women were property to be handed off from father to husband, and they were expected to be submissive and obedient to their new “master.” Not exactly the model we were going for.
We eventually settled on these readings:
- Deuteronomy 6:4–9 Also known as the shema or “Hear, O Israel,” it’s a prayer central to the Jewish faith, and we wanted to honor Judaism as the root of our Christian faith, just as we wanted our Christian faith to be the root of our marriage.
- 1 Corinthians 12:4–13 This verse talks about how all of the members of the Christian community have different gifts to offer but are working for a common purpose. We wanted to acknowledge that Mike and I would each be bringing different gifts and strengths to our marriage, something that has remained very important to us in the time we’ve been married.
- John 13:1–15 This is the Gospel story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet on Holy Thursday. It ends thus, “If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you.”
We also chose, rather than processing out to some background music, to join everyone in singing the song “We Are Called,” which has the chorus, “We are called to act with justice; we are called to love tenderly; we are called to serve one another, and walk humbly with God.”
At our reception, one of our guests (a friend’s mother’s husband) came up to us and said that he was a very traditional Catholic and that he usually disapproved of anything deviating from the traditional wedding readings, but that he had been incredibly touched by the message of serving one another that we’d woven into our ceremony. That was probably the highest compliment we could have gotten in how we’d planned our wedding.
Mike and I approached planning for our wedding the same way we approach our marriage and our faith: We don’t play by other people’s rules about what’s “traditional” or “correct.” We just put our focus on God, love, and service and let everything else fall in place.
Read more about Jessica’s wedding on her blog.