From the authors of the Sunday Times bestseller The Little Book of Humanism
A humanist wedding ceremony allows couples the freedom to express their love in a completely personal way - and choose what marriage means to them.
In a beautiful collection of insights from humanist celebrants, plus quotes, poems and meditations from humanist writers and thinkers throughout history, The Little Book of Humanist Weddings is filled with inspiration to complement your unique celebration of love and commitment.
It was the last book I turned to in my preparation to step into the role of a celebrant at my best friends’ wedding. That’s because I’m an ‘insufferable know-it-all’ and reluctant to allow anyone dictate my paths. And that is likely also why I haven’t found an awful lot of use out of it – as I had nearly everything ready and planned and written down by the time I decided to check this one out.
It is a little book indeed – not much text in it, to be honest. It’s a collection of literary quotes and of impressions written by a number of humanist celebrants, joined together by loose commentary from the editors. It’s all very sound advice, very appropriate texts were chosen and very relevant quotes selected, though from my perspective it felt a bit simplistic and, well, just too little.
Nevertheless, I did find one very useful tip and one amazing quote which I just have to include here to give the editors due credit for finding it for me (they took it from Isaac Asimov’s autobiography, It's Been a Good Life):
The soft bonds of love are indifferent to life and death. They hold through time so that yesterday’s love is part of today’s and the confidence in tomorrow’s love is also part of today’s. And when one dies, the memory lives in the other, and is warm and breathing. And when both die (…) it remains, indestructible and eternal, enriching all of the universe by the mere fact that once it existed.
I got bored of the many many specific stories of ceremonies like ?? A story about J and A meeting at work 10 years ago doesn’t help me write a ceremony lol thanks