Wedding Pictures Part 6: The Processional

First-- I went through and edited our photos with iPhoto, so pictures should look loads better now. Yay!

So, on with the rest of this post. It's about our "non-traditional" (but actually quite orthodox) processional. It' s a long one, but I guarantee that at least reading about the Perasas will make it worthwhile. (Scroll down to the long quote if you'd like to skip right to it.)

The Catholic Church doesn't give couples much room for creativity in their wedding ceremonies. You won't see this happen at a Catholic Church. But, the Church did give us a couple of options for our processional. One, that is the traditional one-- the one that you've probably seen at every other wedding. The other, the one we did. We chose option two for lots of reasons:

1. I'm a big ol' feminist. (No one is shocked by this, right?) I know the symbolism has changed over the years, and nowadays, a dad walking his daughter down the aisle is just a way to honor the dad for raising the daughter and supporting her over the years. Yet, I still couldn't get over where symbolism of it comes from... I just couldn't get past the visual of my dad "handing me off" in marriage. (Btw-- Catholics don't have that "Who gives this woman..." part of the wedding ceremony. This also warms my feminist heart.)
2. I didn't want my moms to be excluded. My step-mom and mom both had a big part in raising me, and I didn't want them to be left out of this experience. And then, if they were all to walk me down the aisle, how does it work with dad, mom, and step-mom? And my mom's husband... how would that fit in? This was not something I was looking forward to figuring out. 
3. I didn't want it just to be about me. The processional is supposed to be a big deal for most brides-- that's why the congregation usually rises at that point in the ceremony, right? But I wanted the focus to be on both of us, not just me, and also on our families and friends. 
4. The Church actually encourages the version we did over the other kind. The reasoning is that it honors both sets of parents (not just the bride's), it symbolizes the combining of families and the start of a new one, and it emphasizes that the bride and groom are the ministers of the sacrament and they give themselves to each other. There's more here if you're curious. I loved the symbolism of this option. AND-- best part--- both of our parents would be included, not just mine. Kenneth's mom and dad would get as much prominence as my parents. How cool!
5. Finally, this couple sealed the deal. Mr. Perasa had been diagnosed with a quickly moving terminal cancer, but he went on the radio via StoryCorps to talk one more time about his love for his wife. Here's what the Perasas had to say (get some tissues ready):

"Ms. PERASA: The illness is not hard on me; it's just, you know, the finality of it - and him, he goes along like a trooper.

Mr. PERASA: Listen, even downhill a car doesn't roll unless it's pushed and you're giving me a great push. The deal of it is, we try to give each other hope and not hope that I'll live, hope that she'll do well after I pass, hope that people will support her, hope that if she meets somebody and likes 'em, she marries 'em.

Ms. PERASA: Yeah, he has everything planned, you know.

Mr. PERASA: I'm workin' on it. She said it was her call. She wants to walk out behind the casket alone. I guess that's the way to do it, because when we were married, you know how your brother takes you down, your father takes you down? She said, well, I don't know which of my brothers to walk in with, I don't want to offend anybody. I says, I got a solution. I said, you walk in with me, you walk out with me. And the other day, I said who's gonna walk down the aisle with you behind the casket? You know, to support her. And she said nobody; I walked in with you alone. I'm walkin' out with you alone."'

And so, like the Perasas, we walked down the aisle alone. 

I'm grateful that Ken was on board for this. He really left this part of the wedding to me, and when I laid out why I wanted to do the 2nd processional option, he didn't mind not seeing me walk down the aisle towards him because he knew just how much it meant to me to walk in together. (God bless him!)

On our wedding day, I loved holding Kenneth’s hands and having a (very brief) moment to take a deep breath together before we walked down the aisle.  It felt so right to go down the aisle, the two of us hand in hand, starting our wedding ceremony TOGETHER.  The thought that kept going through my head was “Yes! This is the way we are supposed to be always, entering every big event life will throw at us – children, sickness, new adventures, grief, a home of our own, all of it-- together.”  It was wonderful, and it was just what I hoped it would be.

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But here’s what I didn’t anticipate: how I felt moments before, when the rest of the wedding party had gone down the aisle and it was just us and our parents lined up in the vestibule of the church. 

I was hit with the idea that it wasn’t just our parents’ roles in raising us, and helping us make our wedding possible that was honored in this procession, although that was the point.  Rather, they displayed the legacy marriage creates, and were visible reminders of what we had ahead of us.  When Ken’s parents walked down the aisle, my mind was on their 30+ year marriage, and what it would be like when Ken and I got there (seems so far away!). When my dad and stepmom walked in, I thought of their marriage, and ran through my memories of their wedding 20 years ago. When my mom and her husband walked in, their 4 years of marriage, and how my mom has set an example of what being a newlywed should be like. And with the thought of our grandparents’ long marriages also in mind, I caught my breath and felt my heart swell.  What a powerful thing that was to witness, to see our parents symbolize the creative force that love is—the institution of marriage, and the families that spring from it. And we were about to follow our parents into our own marriage, and the creation of our own new family. I know this post is getting to be so darn sappy, but watching our parents be sent down the aisle, husband and wife/father and mother was one of the most emotionally powerful moments of my life.  

I know my parents probably would've preferred some other option (certainly my dad would've-- sorry, dad!), but that moment in the back of the church made it all worthwhile. 

(NOTE: This is not to say that the traditional processional doesn’t work beautifully for other people. Who walks you down the aisle is a personal choice and what works for me may not work for everyone; I'm not knocking anyone else's wedding in this. Just explaining why we did what we did, and how it all felt. I'm sure for others, the more traditional procession can bring up similarly powerful emotions, it just wouldn't have felt that way to me.)