And through it all ...

One of the more irritating aspects of the civil wedding process is the dire warning about including religious content of any, and I mean any kind.

Fr'instance, in your choice of readings they would look seriously askance at Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee", for its line "if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death." Comes across suspiciously like a prayer, dunnit? However, Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" has the line "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines," but that's acceptable because it's a poetic way of talking about the sun. It took a phone call to the Senior Registrar to establish that we could have Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet," which isn't at all religious but is about, you know, a prophet. (Not the synthesiser, either.) I would love to see the looks if we wanted Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell," or anything by Genesis or Black Sabbath. Robbie Williams' "Angels" is acceptable because it's about his mum – so that’s our entrance music sorted, then. (Not really.)

I had always assumed this was some legal thing because religion was like grit in the wheels of the civil process and got in the way, possibly casting doubt and ambiguity on the proceedings. Not at all, it turns out: the reason is because it upsets the religious authorities, who don’t like the civil authorities muscling in on their privileges of marrying people.

This comes over as a little rich, as many people (e.g., to pluck a random sample out of thin air, us) only have a civil wedding in the first place because the religious authorities won't let us do it in church. For the religious authorities to then start whining ... Gaah.

Of course, it doesn't really upset them - not most of them. No one from our particular church would raise an eyebrow, and surely if you think that one of your guests will be offended by something then you simply don't invite them - but that doesn't work here because in principle any clergyman (or imam / rabbi / shaman / lama) could wander in off the street without invitation. In other words, the people most likely to be upset are the people who will deliberately go out of their way to gatecrash and be upset. Why exactly do we care what these people think?

But that's my usual irritation at irrationality, not because I feel hard done by. Friends who went through a similar civil+blessing process last year told us they wouldn't have done it any other way even if they could, and I see what they mean. Both services are extremely flexible and almost infinitely customisable to your precise wishes (homeopathic traces of religion aside), and having two just gives us all the more opportunity to include the songs, poems, passages etc that really mean something to us. Even if one particular relative by marriage has said he'll only do a reading if he gets a lectern like in Police Academy. Yes, it's shaping up to be a good day and no, we wouldn't do it any other way either.