Congratulations and thank you for your interest in having the Ceremonies Department of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture assist you in your wedding or commitment ceremony.
The Society is a democratic fellowship and spiritual home for those who seek a compassionate philosophy of life without regard to belief or non-belief in a Supreme Being.
We ask that you read our introductory brochure from the ethical movement below and plan to meet with an officiant for at least one or two sessions. These sessions are designed to provide an opportunity for you to connect with each other and work out the ceremony plan to meet your needs. ____________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives Statements by the Ethical Culture Movement….third in a series of monographs
The Ethical Culture Marriage
I. The Philosophy by Jerome Nathanson
In the Ethical Culture Movement, we often say that what is to be prized most is the unique quality in people, the distinctively best, that which promotes the finest in all the relations of life. The effort to learn ever better what this means and to give ever better what this means and to give ever greater effect to what we have learned in the chief purpose of Ethical Culture.
This is not easy. We know how difficult it is to feel any sureness at all about what is distinctively best in anyone, including oneself. Yet we are dedicated to the effort to understand what it is and to help to elicit it. Because of the difficulty, we know that no one can prescribe ethical solutions to specific problems with any certainty. Since there is so much room for ignorance in all practical judgments, for poor judgment and for error, people similarity dedicated nevertheless often arrive at different answers to the same questions. Being sensitive to this, we stress how much we respect the right of people to differ in their proposed solutions.
We emphasize our respect for differences. However, we are not joined together in this Movement because we differ. We come together because we agree. We are joined in a common attitude.
The attitude is sometimes briefly summed up by our saying that we have faith in humankind. Or the same thing can be put differently by observing that ethics has to do with sensitivity to other people. If one is insensitive to what another person is undergoing, how can he or she genuinely be responsive to that person’s needs? Sensitivity to other people, and appreciation of their distinctive qualities is what we mean by ethics. To be appreciative of other people, to be sensitive to them and a stimulus to them is right; to be insensitive to them and unappreciative is wrong. To run roughshod over people, to stifle individuality, individuation of all experience, is good.
Over the years leaders in the Ethical Culture Movement have had occasions to talk with many people about their prospective marriages. We officiate not only at marriages of members of Societies, but at those of a great many others who, though not technically members, share our overall attitudes toward life. How many have asked themselves why they want to marry? This is a question that Leaders in our Movement have frequently asked. The most common response is: “ We’re in love. We love each other so much that we just want to share our lives.” And more often than not, there can be no gainsaying their sincerity.
Would not most of us, spontaneously and perhaps unthinkingly, say that this is indeed the best reason for marriage? When two people love each other, what could be more natural than that they should want to share their lives? Yet love alone is not always a good enough reason. It all depends on what these two people mean by love. Sometimes, perhaps unconsciously. “We’re in love” is simply a polite way of saying “We have a deep sexual desire for each other.” But sexual desire is not alone; sometimes a couple may simply be responding to neurotic needs, or it may be a case of sheer loneliness. Along comes someone that offers to take us out of our sense of isolation, and the easiest thing in our world is to fall “in love.”
But suppose two people are genuinely in love. What do we mean by genuinely? Essentially, we believe it means having a deep sense of identification with another person; in effect, living in the life of that person, feeling his or her joys and troubles as if they were one’s own and sharing in many other subtle ways. Yet even this is not enough. There should be not only a sense of sharing life, but the intention of sharing it with dedication and devotion, with the desire to do whatever one can to develop the finest qualities in the other person.
Given this commitment, there can be a true marriage even when there has been no religious ceremonial or observance of legal ritual, as in a common-law marriage. Without this commitment, not all the rituals or ceremonials in the world can forge an enduring marriage.
There has never been a marriage that did not have its times of tension and perhaps even anguish. Without a sense of commitment, there is nothing to see us through the stresses and strains that are inevitable in all intimate relationships. Even where a husband and wife have come to understand one another very deeply, to the point where each can instantly read the other’s thoughts or feelings in almost any situation—even with such closeness there are bound to be breakdowns of communication. For in every human relationship there is that which is not communicated, which cannot possibly be communicated. There are the silences. There are the misunderstandings. There are the hurts. This is only natural, but a great many people certainty do not seem to know it. Each of us is motivated by unconscious drives, and there are unreasonable personality traits which we must accept, including sometimes a spouse’s sheer stubbornness, answering some deep ego-need of which he or she may not even be aware, to say nothing of our understanding it. This is the way people are. This is how husbands and wives are. We are not paragons of reason.
One of the chief blessings of marriage is that we are able to be truly ourselves. Part of the sharing that is indispensable to marriage is a sharing of our limitations and shortcomings. “Whatever I might sometimes become, however better I might sometimes be, this is what I am now, and this is what I have to express now. Nor should I have hesitation, compunction or reluctance in expressing to you what I am now.” But in order to reveal one’s self, there must be no doubt about the outcome.
To be sure, each of us has thoughts which we cannot possibly express to another person, and sometimes not even to ourselves are afraid of what we think. By and large, marriage should be an interchange of innermost thought, of confidences that could not possibly be shared with anyone else. Home should be the place where the wounds of life are licked, the hurts mended, the frustrations and tragedies overcome. But this cannot be, unless husband and wife know each other to be truly committed.
With regard to sharing, we should remind ourselves that, from an Ethical Culture point of view, a good marriage is one in which the husband or wife does not try to make the other more like himself or herself. Marriage does not mean a merging of identities. One does not get married in order to lose oneself. On the contrary, only by having a self to give can there be any giving. Only by deepening and heightening one’s own identity can there be more to share. This, in turn, is achieved by a mutual protection of individual privacy. When one has thoughts or feelings which cannot be shared, as everyone has, there should be no sense of guilt. If even a small child has the right to privacy, surely a husband and wife have that right.
With our widespread fear of loneliness these days, we blur the distinction between loneliness and being alone. Islands of aloneness are irreplaceable in the geography of human experience. We need them. There may be some thinking we want to do, some writing, some reading. Or it may be that we want simply to do nothing, and do it alone. This desire should require no explanations and no apologies. It must be respected. For, aside form anything else, what each of us experiences in periods of aloneness can be one of the most valuable things we have to share with others.
We live in a troubled time, and this is the social context in which marriage and other relationships should be seen. Despite all the troubles of our time, or perhaps of any time, most people are trying as decently as they can to hold body and soul together, trying to realize at least some of their highest aspirations. Important as privacy is for this, we all need support, because no one can ever really go it alone.
There is no independence. There is only interdependence more supportive, as none could conceivably be more precious, than that of a good marriage.
II. The Ceremony by Khoren Arisian
It has been said that weddings are getting out of hand these days, which means that they are getting newsworthy. No longer is the dullest writing necessarily found in the Society pages of the newspapers. We hear of weddings in Central Park, of brides going barefoot in the grass, of grooms wearing garlands. It is really not that weddings are getting out of hand so much as that they are becoming much as that they are becoming radically different and colorful in form and in content. They are sometimes both symbol and instrument of the tension and hope and generational struggle surrounding us.
Many people who contemplate marriage today do not want their ceremony to be saturated with abstract, platonic statements that have no relationship to human reality and ability; they do not want merely to go through the expected motions. In short, they choose candor rather than well-meant hypocrisy. The more serious among them will avoid ceremonies containing such pointless language as is used by various “hi” clergy—for example, a vow that might go like this: “Do you promise to stick together so long as you both shall dig it?” Marriage is a serious business, however one approaches it. To approach it either flippantly or sanctimoniously are two sides of the same spurious coin. By “new weddings” we mean those ceremonies where the attempt is made, through words and gestures, to present an honest personal view of human relationships in today’s world irrespective of the fact that it may offend or delight anyone in particular. Often this is an assertion of the so-called liberated consciousness that refuses to be obediently bound to social conventions merely because they are conventions. More often it may be seen as an expression of the growing non-sectarian humanistic sensibility of our time. A Conscious sense of the personal is intensified in periods of history when social institutions are felt to be working more against human beings than on their behalf. So the new weddings are characteristically imbued with an unusual individualistic stamp and spirit. Marriage, to be genuine, must be a private, personal choice, and the two persons involved must accept and walk through whatever consequences the choice may bring. Parents should have relatively little to say about it, for marriage is one of the first major steps in the process of attaining maturity. We must admire the courage the courage of those young people who refuse to surrender their moral autonomy in order to make their more conservatively inclined families feet happy about the ceremony. Usually the reluctant parents will come to the wedding and are often at least half converted by the unaccustomed procedures.
Couples genuinely in love are already emotionally married to each other before they are finally wed. Therefore, a true humanistic ceremony will take note of this fact in a variety of ways. It must somehow be admitted that no ceremony creates human relationships; it can only recognize what has thus far developed. Living together before marriage, which is so common these days as to go unnoticed, may or may not help to advance the process of mutual understanding. In any event, such a practice cannot be dismissed with righteous moralism—it is far too complex fro that. Indeed, a few couples go so far as to state honestly in the ceremony itself that as a result of living together for a while they have now decided that they wish to legalize their union for an indefinite period. Be that as it may, a wedding ceremony is an important outward acknowledgement of a more important inward communion of mind and spirit. It connotes the end of a beginning and marks a new beginning. Neither the State nor religious institutions can make any legitimate moral claim to creating, sanctifying or annulling a marriage. The legal and the moral are never wholly identical: laws may perpetuate injustices while moral practices may not enjoy social sanction or legal protection.
The overt social act of union, the wedding ceremony, thus represents an opportunity to declare openly and coherently one’s personal feelings upon arriving at what is perhaps life’s most critical juncture—the juncture at which one promises to transcend one’s ego so as to enter into the experience of another and care for that other in exceptional ways.
“Doing one’s thing,” within the wedding context, means shaping the words and ambience of the ceremony itself with the professional aid of a clergy. A minister who performs a purely priestly role (defining that role as humbly doing what one is asked to do, whether it be requested by a religious institution of by an individual, without somehow putting oneself into it is violating her or his own integrity. Whenever couples come to an Ethical Leader to get married, we make sure they understand that, as humanist clergy, we will not perform a theological ceremony of any kind, nor a ceremony that sentimentalizes the human condition.
People who seek an Ethical Culture marriage ceremony have usually decided that they want neither the barrenness of a justice-of-the-peace ritual nor the predictable sanctification of one of the usual religious faiths. They want instead a ceremony that respects their personal feelings, that takes note of their distinctiveness and capacity for judgment. They are ready to admit that they will make their own lives and that their marriage will be shaped not in some heaven or utopia but from the resources of their own fallible humanity in space and time.
Many young people these days seldom exchange vows to stay married “till death do us part.” After all, they witness the high rate of divorce and the emotional wrenching it entails and wish to be more humble in both their initial and long-range expectations; they prefer, as it were, to take one year at a time. They are not ready to assume vast abstract obligations should increase naturally as people experience one another.
Clustering around the nucleus of the personal emphasis in the new weddings, are certain attitudes toward society and nature that deserve amplification. The affirmation of the personal in terms of simplicity and directness is bound up with either a neutral or a very enthusiastic attitude toward Nature and a more or less critical stance toward contemporary social institutions. Many of the new weddings have a natural setting—under the trees, on a beach, on a hillside, beside a lake. There is a renewed sense of the connection that ought to obtain between the human and the natural. It is felt that formal society does not provide genuine community anymore; one seeks social community largely outside traditional institutions to whatever extent possible, and finds further renewal and compensation in the community between people and Nature.
Much of the creative possibility of life today, much of “the action” is seen to be outside, around and despite institutions; the new weddings, with varying degrees of integrity and confusion, reflect this contemporary tendency. Some rather obviously radiate an attitude of indifferences toward most institutions and toward middle-class amenities and postures in particular. They represent an anti-authoritarian espousal of the right to fight one’s meaning where we can. We Ethical Leaders, among others, get called upon precisely because even though we, too, are institutionalists, we nonetheless are far from the social mainstream of popular acceptance.
How, then, do these various sentiments actually find expression in the humanist ceremony? The main ingredients cluster around two significant ideas: the enhancement of individuality as the continuing outcome of love, and the obligation of social responsibility as a healthy consequence of the desire to extend affection to others beyond one’s own immediate family.
Love at its best liberates; it is not possessions. Thus marriage is not a merger but a means of enhancing the individuality of each partner. No growth is possible without relationships and the marriage relationship is among the most intense. A vital marriage is always inducing growth; otherwise it may not be worth preserving. Marriage is a new beginning, a new creation and it should remain something of an adventure.
The second major point, as stated above, is that marriage does not absolve one from larger social responsibilities. A few young people who are socialist idealists sometimes will conceive of a lyrical socialist ceremony, stating that what they do together in the world for humanity is more important than what they do together privately or alone. But social existence has a personal side, and personal existence has a social side; this balance must be kept in view. Social responsibility should not be cheaply used as an excuse to evade love’s legitimate intimate demands, yet love is not love which is centered on itself alone.
So community, which is what marriage is all about, is conceived of as a communion of individual wills. Distance between people is a given fact; love must respect that distance. The partners to an approaching marriage are urged to be guardians of each other’s solitude, for without solitude no deeply satisfying social existence is possible.
Thus it is out of the tension between separateness and union that love, with its incredible strength equal only to its incredible fragility, is born and reborn. Marriage may be said to be ordained as a public recognition of the private experience of love and as a sanctifying of both parties to love’s purposes.
Issued by the Publications Committee of the New York Society for Ethical Culture 1972
2 West 64th Street New York, NY 10023 (212)874-5210 Adapted 1986
