Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services by Michael P. Foley (review)

147 Book Reviews Book Reviews Michael P. Foley Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008 xvi + 194 pages. $20 Many engaged couples planning to marry in the ordinary form of the Roman Rite are handed copies of the late Msgr Joseph M. Champlin’s booklet titled Together for Life, first printed in 1970. This booklet is reminiscent of catechetical books published during the same period: it offers non-dogmatic pastoral or spiritual reflections on marriage and family life interspersed with serene black and white photographs of couples with flowers, in fields, and on sparkling shores. As pathetically dated as it must appear to the young couples who receive it, Together for Life also includes something of ongoing relevance that ensures its continued usefulness – the texts of the revised rite of marriage. Champlin encourages the engaged couple to prepare their wedding service by choosing from the various opening prayers, scriptural passages, prayers over the gifts, vows, nuptial blessings, and other formulae prescribed as options in the translation of the revised Rite of Marriage approved in 1969. How better to promote the couple’s active participation in their own marriage liturgy than by inviting them into the very process of planning the texts for the service? Michael P. Foley and the team of authors responsible for Wedding Rites – Alexander E. Lessard, Angela Lessard, and Alexandra Foley – belong to a younger generation than Champlin. They have seen how the do-it-yourself liturgy can descend into frivolous, laughable, or even pernicious excesses. These excesses go far beyond the options of any religious rite of marriage. Today a couple can be married by an Elvis impersonator who promises “your wedding your way” – which might be preferable to the “Halloween Graveyard Wedding” advertised in one Las Vegas “wedding chapel.” Yet Foley concedes Champlin’s basic point: the couple can and should be actively involved in planning their marriage service. The question is: Where can they find models in order to avoid ridiculous elements that will make their wedding look “contrived or dated” in the years (or days) that follow? The couple planning a wedding is hampered by a general lack of resources for arranging the service itself, at least until now. Wedding Rites addresses this lacuna 148 Antiphon 14.1 (2010) regarding the marriage service with a collection of nuptial music, readings , vows, ceremonies, and blessings that in many cases have been used for weddings among Jews and Christians for centuries. Foley gives three brief but formidable arguments in favor of adopting or adapting the elements of a “traditional wedding”: the ceremonies and texts are beautiful; a wedding is a reminder of the past as well as a hope for the future, and therefore should hearken to family and faith traditions; traditional symbols are of permanent value, as opposed to trends that come and go (xiv-xv). Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services proceeds to present texts and ceremonies with which weddings have been solemnized in the past and present by Catholics, Eastern Churches – especially the Byzantine – Protestants, and Jews. The book’s eight chapters address, in turn: betrothals and banns; music and flowers; allocutions and readings; vows; ceremonies; blessings; post-nuptials; and, finally, “putting it all together.” The first appendix, a companion to the second chapter, is an exceedingly helpful annotated bibliography of wedding album recordings for those who would like carefully to consider the music to be played at their service. Appendix B relates the meanings of certain flowers and colors as elaborated in Victorian tomes on the topic. A final appendix lists the options for scriptural readings provided in the Rite of Marriage revised after the Second Vatican Council (first in 1969; second edition, 1990). Aside from this appendix, one notes rather little attention given to the revised Catholic rites. The book ends with a select bibliography three pages in length and a two-page index. The sixth chapter, on blessings, illustrates the book’s general approach and some of the unexpected treasures that it contains. The chapter first presents the notion of a blessing of the bride by her father and...