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Overview
Many couples today feel uncomfortable with the rituals traditionally associated with getting married. The old ceremonies can feel too overtly religious and out of step with the complexities of contemporary relationships. In response to this dilemma, The School of Life has rethought the ideal wedding day and redesigned the entire process from scratch.
The book begins by proposing new methods of psychological preparation, providing practical advice on how to prepare not only for the day of the wedding, but for the long marriage that follows. Also included is a practical and thoughtfully redesigned wedding ceremony, covering everything from picking a venue to writing vows and selecting readings.
With their trademark wisdom and warmth, The School of Life presents a bold rethinking of one of humankind's most important and popular rituals.
- AN OUTLINE FOR A NEW KIND OF WEDDING CEREMONY: based on psychological theory rather than religious traditions.
- INCLUDES PRACTICAL INSTRUCTION: for marriage preparation, as well as advice for married life.
- INNER POCKET CONTAINING ORDER OF SERVICE BOOKLET: (including suggested vows and readings) and emotional prenuptial contract.
- GENDER NEUTRAL: and non-heteronormative.
- BEAUTIFULLY PRODUCED: high end gift format. Royal-blue cover and page trim, gold foil embossed title, blue endpapers and gold ribbon.
- ILLUSTRATED: with full color images.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781999917951 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The School of Life |
| Publication date: | 07/30/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 132 |
| Sales rank: | 722,802 |
| File size: | 910 KB |
About the Author
The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment.
The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.
The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.
The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.
Read an Excerpt
3. The Ceremony
In the past, invoking God was the most impressive and powerful way of signalling the importance of anything: a battle, the collection of the harvest, the start of work on a new building. Weddings were also emphatically religious events. A couple weren't just promising things to one another; they were making a promise in front of a divine being who, on their death, would judge the worth of their efforts. Religions helped us properly recognise the gravity and strangeness of the act of marriage.
Today, we probably don't see marriage in explicitly religious terms, and this presents us with a conundrum. If we are interested in marriage ceremonies, we have little choice but to use a set of rituals drawn from religion - although their original meanings are liable to leave us cold. We may want to capture the noumenal meaning of getting married, but the only people offering us this possibility wrap it up in a lot of deeply implausible theological speculation. Our conundrum is the result of a historical process that we might call 'bad secularisation'.
Traditionally, religions did two distinctive things. On the one hand, they preached ideas about life after death and the creation of the cosmos. On the other hand, they provided potent rituals for marking the great events of our lives. They continually invited us into noumenal time: in baptism, in marriage, at funerals, on certain special holy days. They commissioned art and architecture specifically designed to take us out of the present moment and to give us a perspective on our existence as a whole. Secularism proceeded by disputing the big theological claims. But at the same time - and without thinking about it very much - secularism also stripped away the psychologically helpful rituals that happened to have become embedded in the faiths.
When secularism threw away the bathwater of theology it threw away the baby of ceremony. It supposed that because religions had been the guardians of ceremony, we couldn't any longer need or legitimately want profound and elevated rituals to help us at the great moments of our lives. But at its heart, ceremony isn't essentially tied to religious faith; noumenal time - in which we see our lives as a whole - doesn't have to rely on convictions about God speaking to Moses or the soul surviving the death of the body. The task of good secularisation is to steal from the ceremonial techniques of religions while disregarding their explicit theological content. Religions have intermittently been the holders of many genuinely helpful, creative, interesting and wise ideas that shouldn't be left only to those who happen to believe in the surrounding theology. The priority is to rescue what is still inspiring and relevant from all that is no longer easy to believe.
In this book, we will describe in detail a wedding ceremony that uses unusual language, special actions and peculiar rituals to place it outside phenomenal time, in order to help us enter the noumenal space of a life-changing event. Crucially, it contains no theology. The ceremony seeks to learn the underlying insight of religion without leaning on its superstitions. We believe that a wedding should use unfamiliar words; it should (ideally) be in a building that speaks of eternity; the celebrant should be a little imposing; we should wear clothes distinct from our normal attire; we should admit our failings and grasp the failings of the other (and yet still both be willing to share a life). We should, in short, be reminded that we are doing something out of the ordinary, which is at once potentially very good for us, for society and for future generations, yet genuinely terrifying and grave as well.
Table of Contents
ContentsIntroduction
Before The Marriage Service
After