By Rowan Clarke
The Quaker marriage ceremony is a uniquely informal occasion without the scripted, rigid
format of a traditional wedding. It places an emphasis on the link between faith, love and
friendship.
Faith in marriage
If there is just one moment that asks you to questions faith, it is when you decide to get married. Making that decision is leap of faith in itself. Do you believe in the institution of marriage? Do you have faith in the longetivity of your relationship? But supposing you do, the big question is how do you do it?
I certainly didn’t want my matrimonial union to take place on God’s stage. The traditional church wedding held no charm for me; heaven forbid that I might be trussed up in a stiff, white frock and thrust towards my future up a marble aisle. Besides, my experience of the church was occassional childhood visit with my grandparents, and this hardly demonstrated sufficient faith in which to base a marriage.
The Quaker way
My family are Quakers, and it is the Quaker faith that has formed many of my ideas about religion. For the benefit of those who had thought Quakers were entirely responsible for the production of porridge oats, or were those funny folk in stiff bonnets who are never allowed to cut their hair, I shall explain:
The official name for the Quakers is The Religious Society of Friends. It is on this concept of friendship that the Quaker wedding is built. The ceremony takes place in a meeting house, often a large plain room and sometimes a room within a house, but always with a circle of chairs that face a central table. Friends and family fill these seats and sit together in silence. The couple arrive together, hand in a hand as friends; and, having made their declarations, leave as husband and wife.
The bit to get your head round
There is no priest or vicar. Family, friends, other Quakers, even the couple themselves provide the ministry. But that is the principle of the Quaker faith: that there is no formula for God or for people, that God cannot be represented by any human and that the marriage of two individuals is wholly organic and entirely personal.
The vows
Friends, I take this my friend [name] to be my wife/ husband, promising, with divine assistance, to be unto her/ him a loving and faithful husband/ wife so long as we both on earth shall live.
These vows surmise the Quaker philosophy for marriage: that a couple are equal, that a marriage is a mutual arrangement based in friendship, a philosophy on which we both concur. And divine assistance; so open to interpretation, so utterly non-prescriptive and in no way imposed.
Spoken by friends
Arriving in a room filled with pretty much every person you care about who are gathered not just to witness, but to participate in your marriage is an awesome feeling. You listen to the words spoken for you and about you. It is not staged, it is not formal, it is exactly how a wedding should be, personal, reflective, and poignant. You sit amongst the congregation, and shake hands when the ceremony ends.
My Quaker wedding reflected the importance that my husband and I place on friendship as the basis of our relationship. It brought together friends and family in an informal setting that contravenes all the trite, starch conventions of the Christian church. In simplicity and free, reflective thought we placed ourselves and our marriage. It may sound a bit hippish and new age, and some of our guests could only say “Well, that was different”, but Quakerism is 400 years old and is the only religion outside the Christian Church that is liscened to perform marriages.
