Our Quaker Wedding

Описание: What's it like to be at the center of a Quaker wedding? We talked with 5 couples about their experience.

Thanks to this week's sponsor, Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting: https://fdsj.nl/chestnut-hill
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Filmed and Edited by Jon Watts
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Music by Jon Watts
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Transcript:

Barry Scott: If you would imagine the most comfortable you’ve ever been in your life, the most comfortable time you’ve ever had in your experience as a human being... that is the space of being that couple at the center. I felt loved, affirmed, held, challenged... and at the same time I was feeling that from a bunch of folks, I was also sharing that with the person that I was most caring about in the world. So it was like, “Oh please don’t have this stop! I don’t want this to stop. This could just go on.”

Our Quaker Wedding

Hannah Mayer: My name is Hannah Mayer, I live in West Philly, and I got married on May 26th, 2018 in a Quaker wedding.

Eric Peterson: My name is Eric Peterson, I live in West Philly, and I got married on May 26th, 2018. We had a Quaker wedding.

Ruth Morisson: We got married on September 21st a few years ago, 2013, here in Richmond, Virginia at the Richmond Friends Meeting and I think there were probably just over a hundred people.

James Hickman: Little over a hundred people in attendance.

Michael Crumley-Effinger: We were married on July 2nd, 1977. Our wedding day was at Stephanie’s dad’s church. She’s a preacher’s kid.

Barry Scott: We got married in the worship room at the Race Street Meetinghouse at Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting on May 26th, 2001.

Wendy Wadsworth: In the Fall of 1991 we decided we wanted to commit to each other at Richmond Friends Meeting, our home and we wrote a letter to our families stating that our oversight committee and we decided to commit to each other together on July 4th, 1992 at our spiritual home, the Richmond Friends Meeting.

Frances Stewart: I think she said it all.

The Quaker Approach to Weddings

Frances Stewart: The simplicity of it really spoke to me. You don’t have to have a big reception, you don’t have to decorate a huge hall. Those kinds of things I appreciated. But the heart of what we Quakers do in a marriage, in a memorial service, is we speak inspired by God out of the silence.

Hannah Mayer: I think there are a lot of different things that can set a Quaker wedding apart. The thing that is most exciting to me is that there’s nobody in charge. A Quaker couple is married by themselves and the whole community gathered there together. There’s nobody saying, “I declare you spouses.”

James Hickman: As we invited our friends and family to the ceremony, Ruth sent links to information so that they would understand a little bit of what was going on. I talked to some folks as they were reading it and they were really struggling to understand how this was going to be a ceremony without someone leading the ceremony. I think 90%, I would guess, of our attendees had no idea, had never experienced anything like it.

Inviting Friends and Family into a Sacred Space

Vanessa Julye: When we sent out invitations, for people who were not Quakers we got a little brochure that talks about Quaker weddings so that they could have some idea of what was going to happen in addition to the explanation that happens from the person who has “care of meeting” during the wedding.

Frances Stewart: We each wrote our parents and families a letter trying to explain what we wanted to do, where we wanted to do it, how the Quakers fit it and sent it around Thanksgiving time, expecting that we were going to have our wedding all the way around in July, July 4th… so we thought we would give them lots of time to get used to the idea.

More: https://fdsj.nl/our-wedding

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The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.