Weddingbee Blog

I can’t wait to walk down the aisle, but the big question is: which one?

I love my Church. Love, love, love. It has a pretty unique layout, especially for a Catholic Church. For weekly Mass I find the layout interesting but for our wedding I find it frustrating. After months of contemplation, I think we have finally figured out a solution but at times I felt like I was working on a logic problem.

Back in December, Mrs Lamb’s post 1 Aisle, 2 Aisle, Bride Aisle, Groom Aisle inspired me to thoroughly document (in PowerPoint) the layout of my Church and the different options that we had for seating and processional. At first glance you might say that my Church is in the round, except there is nothing round about it.

Looking more closely, it is in a cross shape, with the altar at the center of the sanctuary. Each “arm” of the cross faces the center and has its own center aisle. For ease of discussion, lets call them North, South, East and West, although I doubt that they face those directions.

The organ and choir stand take up a fair portion of the east of the arm, leaving very little room for guests, so that section was immediately out. The altar faces West and the crucifix hangs on the South wall. The main church entrance is through the doors on the South wall. Making things more interesting, the dotted line on the South end represents a raised up area. The seats in this area are 3-4 steps higher than the rest of the church. Hard to imagine? I took this video to show the church to my future MIL.

When I first started attending Mass at this church I always sat in the North seats so I would have a clear view of the crucifix. Later I started to sit in the raised section of the South end. More recently, Mr Pretzel and I have started to sit in the West section so that we are facing the Priest when he stands at the altar. Which section would work best for our wedding? I’ve hemmed and hawed over this for the past 4 months.

It took a lot of counting chairs and estimating how many guests could fit in a pew but I think we’ve determined that our guests will only take up one section. I originally thought we might require more seating and that alone was giving me a headache. We weighed the pros and cons of the different sections and determined that it was important for our guests to face the altar.

Because the church, like the sanctuary has multiple entrance points, I figured I should take it one step further and figure out how guests, the groom and groomsmen, and I would enter the sanctuary. Notice that the girls will actually exit the church and re-enter it in the northwest corner. I will have a short walk behind the our guests before turning up the aisle to meet my groom.

Don’t you just love a good map? I felt a little obsessive making these maps but last week my hard work paid off. When I spoke with my church-assigned wedding hostess for the first time I showed her my maps and told her our plans for seating and processional. Not only did she think this was the best possible layout, she really appreciated the visual so we were on the same page. Whew!

Does your church have more than one aisle? How did you select which aisle to walk down?