Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Pudding and I completed our Pre-Cana classes this Sunday. We opted not to do the weekend long “Engaged Encounter”, and went to classes on Thursdays and Sundays for two weeks instead. Although we were both a little hesitant about the classes (Mr. P in particular), we actually thought them to be quite enjoyable.

Our sessions were mostly centered around group discussions. They were monitored by five married couples who took us through the material by sharing their personal experiences. We were often asked to share our thoughts with a small group, and than with the whole class. The questions up for discussion ranged from “what values do you and your partner have in common” and “how will you ensure that your marriage is a spiritually healthy one” to “how comfortable are you discussing sexuality with your partner”.

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One of the best planning decisions we made was not actually by choice.

We knew we wanted to get married in a Catholic Church because it is important to us, both spiritually and emotionally. We also knew it would make my mom happy since I’m “her only hope” of having a child to have a Catholic wedding. We kind of joke that we’re doing it for her, but in reality, we both want to raise our children in the Catholic faith and hopefully they’ll share in our values and beliefs. We want to start our Catholic traditions and family values right from the start. And I say right from the start, although we already have these values, because I want it to be an important part of our lives as a family—which truly begins on our wedding day.

Having a Catholic wedding wasn’t easy for us, at first. We aren’t actively participating members of a church. When we called churches in Rhode Island, we were told by all of them that our priest would have to sign off. This is not easily done when you don’t have a priest.

At first, I complained and thought it would be impossible, but then we decided to take action.
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This past weekend, Mr. Pudding and I visited the priest from our parish in order to take the FOCCUS test. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Catholic getting-to-the-altar process, FOCCUS stands for “Facilitating Open Couple Communication and Study”. The purpose of the test is to pinpoint the areas of life where you and your partner might experience conflicts.

Now, I would like to preface this by saying that I was expecting a scary, right and wrong test. A test that would ask uncomfortable questions about our sex life, our devotion to the faith, and our desire to procreate. A test very much like one of the many Hollywood portrayals of said practice:

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When Mr. Pudding and I began taking the test, we were both a little worried. We were separated and handed a Scantron sheet, and some number two pencils. GULP.

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I have heard over and over again how complicated it is to get married in the Catholic Church. We somewhat experienced this, but later realized, it’s probably only hard if you don’t regularly attend church or are marrying outside your own church.

It literally took us months to find a church in RI that was willing to marry us. We had to agree that our hometown church would sign off on the paperwork, which we were worried about since we no longer attend on a regular basis. We kind of pushed this off for a while. But when we did start the process, we met with the pastor at my childhood parish.

He was so welcoming and friendly. I explained that I had attended the church growing up. He didn’t really ask too many questions. He let us know he’d help with whatever we needed. All he asked was that we start attending regularly and stay for the entire mass. His biggest pet peeve is parishioners leaving after communion, which is about 2 minutes before the whole service ends. That’s a pretty small requirement after all the troubles we were expecting.
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UPS delivery is always a race against time ’round these parts. We’ve had the delivery person walk away in the amount of time it took me to run from my living room couch to the front door (a distance of a whopping four feet). Since I got the notice from Ketubah Ketubah that my order was on its way, when I heard the knock on the door I was on my feet and running like a bat out of hell (in my bathrobe and sweatpants, no less) hoping that would be it.

I hadn’t ordered anything else poster-shaped, so I knew what I was looking at, and I patiently waited for Mr. Spaniel to get home from work to rabidly tear into it to see the goods. Just kidding; I did wait for him to get home, but I opened it without him when he left for the gym.
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I’ve been bustin’ out the wedding decisions left and right lately. We got the groomsmen’s ties, ordered the bridesmaids’ jewelry and now… our Ketubah. And it’s so damn pretty.

Also, it is funny how all these decisions are basically glorified shopping. I guess I subconsciously decided that now that it’s the “year of our wedding”, it’s time to spend some greenbacks.

Anyways, back to our Ketubah. I actually discovered the artist through a reader here on the ’bee, 2dbride. She had posted a picture in the boards of her Ketubah, which led me to the artist’s website. The artist’s name is Amy Fagin of 20th Century Illuminations and you can see all of her work here.

I loved that she offered a selection of smaller, or mini Ketubahs, since the vast majority of the ones I had found elsewhere were all huge (24″x17″ seems to be the standard, which when you add the several inches of matting plus the frame, is huge!) I really wanted something smaller, and ours is 12″ x 17,” which will look lovely matted in a simple wood frame.

I spent about 2 months scouring online all possible options before coming back to the very first place I had looked. Ain’t that always the way, huh? I guess I really should take the phrase “when you know, you know” a little more seriously and save myself a lot of time and effort.
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I was raised Catholic, then Episcopal, and Mr. Pencils attended a Protestant church until high school. I would classify myself as spiritual, and Mr. P… well, he’s not sure what he believes. A church wedding was out, to say the least.

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The question remained though: who should marry us? It took literally 30 minutes of being engaged to name one person:
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Our current wedding-related mission is to find the “perfect” ketubah. That means two things: finding the artwork we like, and then hoping that it either comes with the text we like as an option or that it can otherwise be customized. The original orthodox text is actually written in Aramaic and transliterated into Hebrew (no English appears on the document), and is only signed by the witnesses and the rabbi—not the bride or groom.

On __________ [day of the week], the __________ day of the month __________ in the year __________ since creation of the world, the era according to which we are accustomed to reckon here in the city of __________ how __________ son of __________ said to this virgin __________ daughter of __________ ’Be thou my wife according to the law of Moses and Israel, and I will work for thee, honor, support, and maintain thee in accordance with the custom of Jewish husbands who work for their wives, honor, support, and maintain them in truth. And I will set aside for thee 200 zuz [traditional money], in lieu of thy virginity, which belong to thee (according to the law of Moses), and thy food, clothing, and necessaries, and live with thee in conjugal relations according to universal custom.’

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When I told the hive about our officiant-choosing dilemmas, I got a lot of helpful suggestions, like finding a non-denominational minister or having a friend get ordained to perform the ceremony. How did you all get so smart?

After a lot of discussions and meeting with a Reform Rabbi from a Los Angeles synagogue that we really liked who was willing to do just about anything we wanted in a ceremony except co-officiate (which I didn’t want anyway), Mr. Spaniel and I finally were able to agree… to find a non-denominational officiant! The truth is that neither of us are religious people, and while he liked the rabbi in general, Mr. Spaniel wasn’t really comfortable with the concept of being married by a rabbi at all. Although it was a difficult compromise to make at first, I realize now that a secular wedding really suits us much better.

We began the search for our officiant where we begin all wedding-related searches: online! After asking the lovely ladies on the boards for some recommendations and doing a few Google searches of my own, Mr. Spaniel and I shot off some emails to a few prospective officiants and talked to our parents for more ideas. We liked the idea of a Unitarian Universalist minister (there are two UU churches in our neighborhood!), since we didn’t expect to find anyone already in our lives to do our wedding. But—serendipity!—it turns out Mr. Spaniel’s family knew the perfect guy, who is a good friend of his parents’, has a nice speaking voice, and is already ordained by the Universal Life Church. Seriously, when do the stars align this easily?
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I have mentioned before that Mr. Pudding and I will be married in a Catholic Church. Couples that choose to go this route quickly realize that there are quite a few hoops to jump before getting to the altar.

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The first and most important one is to make sure that both parties have been Baptized, have had their First Communion, and have been Confirmed in a Catholic Church. I know that the strictness of this rule depends on the priest of a particular parish, and there are priests out there that will agree to marry a Catholic and a non-Catholic as long as they promise to raise their children as Catholic. This is not the case in my church. Luckily, Mr. Pudding comes from a Catholic family, and has all three sacraments (despite not being super religious), so this is not something that we have to worry about.

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For me, the most important aspect of wedding planning, after finding a venue and caterer, is selecting an officiant. This is particularly difficult for Mr. Spaniel and me because of our multicultural backgrounds, and MINE in particular.

So I was kvetching to my MOH that I wanted to have a “partially Jewish ceremony”, but there were five obstacles to finding a rabbi who could perform the ceremony: (1) I don’t really consider myself to be Jewish anymore (except culturally), (2) I am not joining anyone’s congregation, (3) Mr. Spaniel is not Jewish at all and will not consider conversion, and (4) we don’t plan to raise our children Jewish (um, except culturally… they will know their backgrounds, but we won’t be taking them to synagogue on the High Holidays or anything…), and (5) we’re getting married on a Saturday, and possibly before sun-down. I guess any rabbi who was willing to let the first four obstacles slide, though, would probably not be terribly concerned about the fifth! Wonderful helper that she is, my MOH offered to call on some of her connections (the rabbi who did her wedding, and people at the Jewish day school where she works) to see if she couldn’t find me some referrals anyway. I can’t even tell you how helpful it is to have a MOH who has already been married.

I know this would make my family happy.
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I’m blogging live from our new house as we finish a long day of painting and house projects. Being here is solidifying the very real move that I am going to make to live with my Lamb Lover after we’re married. I’ll leave my old city and embrace the new.

This reality has reminded me a lot of the words that Ruth spoke in the Old Testament. They are a favorite at weddings. Mrs. Cheese used them, and they’ve been suggested on several wedding websites. They’re beautiful and the bond described is so representative of the marriage relationship.

The words, however, were not about a marriage relationship at all. The short story is that Naomi, her husband, and her two sons moved to a new town to find food during a famine. Naomi’s husband dies and her sons marry two local women, one of them Ruth. Then the sons die. Naomi cannot support herself and tells her daughters-in-law to go back to their families and remarry. One daughter-in-law goes back, but Ruth says to Naomi:

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

The story of Ruth, of course, doesn’t end here.
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So, I’m a 2-wedding bride. We had our first ceremony July 25th of this year at Point Dume in Malibu. We’ve lived (or at least have been on leases) together for the past 2 years and always knew we’d get married, just not when. However, upon moving to Los Angeles and being unable to find a job with the same kind of benefits I had in Seattle, or even being accepted for private insurance, it became kind of necessary to get married. (Don’t ask me why a 26 year old female who has run a marathon, rarely drinks and doesn’t smoke can get rejected. Sorry that’s a bit off topic.)

Now, to answer some of the questions that came up after my previous post.

Being legally married before a Catholic ceremony is probably frowned upon in general, but I think there’s a good chance that a reasonable priest will be open to this, and from what I understand, all discretion is left to the priest. I kind of lucked out in this department, because our priest has been a friend of my family since well before I was born and is known to be more ’inclusive’ than some priests. His thoughts on the matter are that it’s good to have people marry in the Church and being overly prohibitive isn’t going to really help anyone. He knows that the two of us aren’t as religious as we could be, but we were both raised in Catholic families and this felt right for us. Being raised Catholic, I had mostly been to Catholic weddings and they always felt like they had more ’weight’ to them. Once we decided to get married, I knew Fr. Paul would be involved.
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After my mini-ceremony tantrum, Mr. Joey and I sat down and selected readings for our ceremony. We each picked one and agreed on the third. So, here are our picks.

My pick: Reading 1

Wherever you go, I shall go,
wherever you live, I shall live.
Your people will be my people,
and your God will be my God.
Where you die, I shall die and there I shall be buried.
Let Yahweh bring ills on me,
if anything but death should part me from you!

– Ruth 1:16-17

Mr. Joey’s pick: Reading 2

Strive for the greater gifts.
And I will show you a more excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels,
but do not have love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

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Before we got engaged, before we even had “the talk“, we talked one evening about how we didn’t want a priest to marry us. Mr. Bear Cub and I are not religious, and this tends to confuse a lot of people (especially my family). Luckily, those that don’t agree with our beliefs at least respect our right to live our lives the way we want to, and believe what we want. Mr. Bear Cub and I are both humanist.

Happy Human, the Humanist logo

I say that we have differing “beliefs” than those who follow religious sects because normally those who are religious believe that atheists don’t believe in anything.
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