Wishes for the Ceremony

When you get the most important people in your life together, the place is full of good wishes.

We are making that idea tangible in our ceremony, but we want to ask you to participate, too, if you’d like. At the wedding, we’re going to stand before a backdrop made up of small flags strung between trees. We’d like to have your wishes written on them.

Some of you have already written one or two of these.

We borrowed the idea from the Buddhist tradition of printing prayers on flags. When the wind stirs, according to the Buddhists, the wind prays the prayers. At our wedding, your wishes will wash over us as the breeze passes our flags.

We’ll also ask some of you to invoke those wishes for us during the ceremony. They’re emblematic of the way you - the community of people that loves us - uphold us with hope and friendship.

For those of you who grew up in Episcopal churches, you may also recognize a similarity between the wishes of the community and the multiple blessings pronounced as the penultimate step of holy day liturgies. This moment always stirred me. It culminates the ceremony and points the way to tomorrow. It calls on God to act, and on worshipers to appropriate the mystery they've participated in. And because the words are crafted to rise like a musical crescendo, the moment of stillness after the last blessing rings with hopefulness. That's why I wanted to emulate that moment in our ceremony.

If you choose to write a wish for our wedding backdrop...

You can email us your wishes and we’ll transcribe them.

Or,

If you’re attending the rehearsal dinner, we will have paper and pens there for you to write your wish.

Or,

If you arrive early at the ceremony, you will have an opportunity to write a wish for us there. Of course, we’ll need a little time to hang them up. (Latecomers' wishes may not all be hung on the backdrop. This is purely a practical matter, you understand, given the limits of time and space.)

We want to give everyone the opportunity to write a wish, but this is request and an offer, not requirement. We just don’t want you to be left out.