meridian_rose

Oh I don't care. If you're interested, here you go:

My husband and I aren't really very religious for various reasons I'll not get into, though part of it is that we live in the Bible Belt of the U.S. and all the religious 'options' here are just various types of Christianity, and they're all heavily patriarchal and intolerant and just no.

When we decided to get married, we initially wanted a justice of the peace, but the only one within 100 miles had very few dates and charged A LOT of money for performing the service anywhere but his office in the court house. So we started looking into religious options. All of the various denominations of Christian preacher we talked to wouldn't marry us unless we converted to their religion and let them baptize us and we paid to become members of the church. We thought about just lying and saying we were the right religion, but in the end we were too uncomfortable with it.

So it looked like it was going to be the justice of the peace we couldn't really afford, because we were pretty poor at the time. My husband was talking about it with a professor he worked with, because at the time he was a graduate student, and she casually mentioned that she was pagan and a High Priestess. In the U.S., you can get married by any religious official so long as they are in "good standing" in their congregation. So we asked her about it, and she said that she would love to.

Now this is what really stuck with me, and has endeared me to the pagan faith ever since: She gave us a book to read, and told us that she didn't care if we didn't share her beliefs, she would still perform our handfasting because it was a celebration of life and it didn't matter if we didn't believe in her goddess, it didn't make the ceremony any less meaningful or her goddess any less present.

So she registered online as a religious leader and filled out all her paper work so the ceremony would be binding in MS and everything.

We got married on the Summer Solstice, in a gazebo in the center of the local zoo because we like animals and it seemed appropriate for a pagan ceremony to have all these representations of nature. And the zoo didn't charge us anything so long as we didn't ask them to close, which we didn't. So that was kind of neat, because there were like families and little kids just wandering by our wedding and watching, and one little girl pointed and shouted "Look mommy, a princess!" Which of course, made me feel awesome.

We were fastened with two cords: I brought white to our marriage, for strength and truth, and my husband brought pink, for friendship, romance, and happiness.

And then we did the pagan vows, which talk about circles of life and death, but most importantly to me they say "I am only yours for as long as I wish to be" and "this is a union of equals" in sharp contrast to the Christian vows.