Wedding Blog

Last night Mr. Spider and I met with our officiant, Pastor April Gismondi. I am Buddhist but Mr. Spider and his family are not religious, so we were looking for a flexible officiant willing and able to incorporate some Buddhist philosophies. I found Pastor April on the Long Island Weddings forum among raves about her personalized and natural style and her ability to make couples (okay, brides) cry. When we pulled up to her house in Long Island, she was sitting on her front steps waving at us with her gentle giant of a basset hound, Sebastian, at her feet.

With Sebastian in tow, we settled into her backyard and began what would become a 2-hour long chat. In those 2 hours, Pastor April helped us structure our ceremony to reflect our personalities, our values and most importantly, our own words. She gave our ceremony a soul defined not by generic fill-in-the-blanks but by the love we have for each other. Nearly every word spoken at our ceremony will either be written by her for us or by ourselves.

Pastor April has a way of making you feel so at ease. She asks you questions not so she can fill-in-blanks but as a way to allow our words to find each other and evolve themselves into vows. She asked us to talk about one another and I started crying when Mr. Spider told her what he loved about me. He said he also had to hold back tears when I spoke about him. It was a truly fulfilling and affirming experience.

Sometimes things feel so right, you’d think it was meant to be that way. Mr. Spider said it felt like we had just asked an old friend to officiate for us. He said if she were our neighbor, he could imagine spending Sunday afternoons chatting with her in her backyard. He said, “she was meant to do this.” And I said, “she was meant to do this for us.”

Pastor April Gismondi
516.785.4191 or 631.893.1241
http://www.churchofancientways.org/
(serves the Tri-State area)