You say this. Now you say this. Choreography at its best.
Finding an officiant to officiate is easy when you’ve got strong ties to a particular faith. If you and your sweetie belong to a church or are members of a synagogue, you may spend no more than a couple of seconds asking yourselves who will perform your rites. Those who are either unaffiliated or nonreligious don’t have it so easy.
What’s an officiant good for? Unless you’re in Colorado, where you can legally perform your own ceremony with the right forms, you need someone to sign off on your wedding to make it official. What are your options? You could hit up the Yellow Pages and pick some random minister or JP. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous search engines for this sort of thing. You can find interfaith officiants, Humanist officiants, Pagan officiants, and freelance rabbis.
Or you could have a friend hit up one of the many, many, many online ordination services out there. Before the Internet got hot, the Universal Life Church ordained folks via mail. Nowadays, you can pick and choose between nonreligious online ordination or heavily religious online ordination. Do a search for “online ordination” and you’ll have more opportunities for ordination than you can shake a stick at.
Know, however, that it’s usually a clerk who determines whether an officiant can legally officiate, and some clerks are not down with the ULC. There are very few laws that dictate who can and who cannot be called a licensed minister–an officiant usually needs to be an ordained practitioner of some spiritual organization, which could mean just about anything. Before you let your newly-ordained brother perform your ceremony, check with your county clerk to make sure they’ll be cool with it. Form what I’ve heard from friends who went this route, most clerks don’t care, though NYC has laws on the books that shut out anyone ordained online.
YMMV–personally, the opposition to online ordination sticks in my craw because it looks a lot like the government trying to legislate religion. I’m a strong advocate of separating the civil from the religious where marriage is concerned. If you want to be married in the eyes of the state, you can do that lickety-split at city hall. If you want to be married in the eyes of your favorite deity, you can do that, too, with no state involvement required. And if you want to do both, you could do each consecutively. There are Latin American countries where this is the standard way of orchestrating a new marriage.
Did any of you guys have a friend or relative officiate? Are you yourself ordained?
Because of it’s Quaker roots, Pennsylvania has an option for getting married without any officiant — just two witnesses. And the right forms and proof, of course.
A friend of mine did this at her wedding-she’s a lapsed Catholic, he Jewish, but nonreligious. They had specific readings, and wrote their own vows, including his dad doing a Hebrew reading that’s typically included in jewish services. It was really them, and was much better than if they’d found some random rabbi just because he’d do an interfaith service.
Here in California, we have the option to have someone designated as licensed to perform weddings for a day by the county clerk’s office. Some friends of mine went this route and had the groom’s brother perform the ceremony. It turned out to be even less expensive than having the county clerk come perform the ceremony, and no religious affiliation – internet or otherwise – was involved.
As for me and Mr. Twistie, we didn’t want to go the religious route, either, and did want a more formal wedding than a courthouse ceremony, so we asked the county clerk’s office for an officiant. They checked who was on wedding duty for our date, and so it was that while we’re not religious people, we were married by Odin himself…well, a guy whose last name was Odin, anyway. I love to tell people we were married by the top man in the Norse pantheon. God’s blessing? We were married by a god!
I was ordained through the ULC several years ago, and I’ve performed about a dozen weddings. It has been a real pleasure for me to help people wed eachother, and they have enjoyed having wedding ceremonies that are uniquely theirs. I meet with the bride and groom about a half dozen to a dozen times before the wedding to ensure that their ceremony will be uniquely theirs. My ordination is valid in Washington, DC and Maryland, but not Virginia, where I live, as I do not have a ‘congregation’ of my own.
I have heard that it’s not a good idea, depending on your state, of course, to get married by someone ordained just for that purpose. Because if it comes down to a contested will, or a nasty divorce, someone might try to prove that the marriage never really existed. The only place where such a thing happened is…the very county where my husband and I live and were married. Check it out, there’s an article about it in the New York Times online wedding resources pages. But before I had read about this, I was told by a lawyer acquaintance not to do it, when we were going through our options for officiants. (We ended up being married by a rabbi to honor my husband’s mother, who passed away shortly after we became engaged. She would have loved to see her son married in a Jewish ceremony.)
Our friend was the officiant…but I guess that’s not really what you mean since he happens to be a minister. However it was nice having someone perform our ceremony who actually knew us, our story, and all of that jazz.