WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:06.400 --> 00:00:10.580 I think your guests in a humanist ceremony are very important. You're not 00:00:10.590 --> 00:00:13.880 holding yourself accountable to a deity, you're not holding yourself accountable, 00:00:13.880 --> 00:00:18.119 sadly, at the moment, to the law. You are actually holding yourself accountable to 00:00:18.119 --> 00:00:22.470 those people who really mean something to you, and in doing so what you are 00:00:22.470 --> 00:00:29.820 publicly declaring has real weight and you are being supported by the people 00:00:29.820 --> 00:00:33.840 who you have gathered. And so that exchange between you and your guests it 00:00:33.840 --> 00:00:38.010 reaffirms community, it reaffirms why they're important to you, that they're 00:00:38.010 --> 00:00:42.140 not just bums on seats making up numbers, and they're also letting you know that 00:00:42.140 --> 00:00:48.989 these are your support network. You don't require god to observe and keep you on 00:00:48.989 --> 00:00:53.010 the straight and narrow, you're actually asking everybody around you to just have 00:00:53.010 --> 00:00:55.040 your back, which i think is a really special thing. 00:00:55.040 --> 00:00:57.030 A symbolic action that I 00:00:57.030 --> 00:01:03.030 have used, not every time, but on a number of occasions in planning wedding 00:01:03.030 --> 00:01:09.630 ceremonies with couples is a little ritual called 'ring warming', and the idea 00:01:09.630 --> 00:01:15.300 here is that the rings that are ultimately going to be, end up on the 00:01:15.300 --> 00:01:22.619 hands of the bride and the groom, are passed through the hands of all of those 00:01:22.619 --> 00:01:28.619 who are gathered, to publicly witness this exchange of promises and what I 00:01:28.619 --> 00:01:33.390 would set up at somewhere near the beginning of the ceremony is that before 00:01:33.390 --> 00:01:39.840 the rings reach the couple's fingers, we're going to pass the warmth or 00:01:39.840 --> 00:01:44.940 communicate the warmth of our hands, but by the time the rings come back to me 00:01:44.940 --> 00:01:50.429 and I am then passing them to the couple, who are marrying each other, for them to 00:01:50.429 --> 00:01:54.149 put the rings on each other's fingers, they will have passed through the hands 00:01:54.149 --> 00:01:59.849 of everybody who is gathered. So instead of being cold metal, symbolically, that 00:01:59.849 --> 00:02:04.619 metal has been warmed with the wishes, the goodwill, the love, all of the best 00:02:04.619 --> 00:02:09.239 that those people want for the couple is passing on to their fingers when they 00:02:09.239 --> 00:02:10.440 put the rings on. 00:02:10.440 --> 00:02:15.360 So I recently took a wedding for a couple who had been living together for some time, 00:02:15.360 --> 00:02:20.220 they weren't particularly young. They didn't want their guests to be spending 00:02:20.220 --> 00:02:25.230 their money buying them traditional wedding presents, so what they did 00:02:25.230 --> 00:02:31.860 instead was that they asked all their guests to get them their favourite book and 00:02:31.860 --> 00:02:37.200 bring it along and to write in the front of the book why they'd chosen that. Some 00:02:37.200 --> 00:02:45.660 were novels, some weren't. But what it gave that couple was a real library, different 00:02:45.660 --> 00:02:48.780 things for them to learn about, different things for them to be inspired by, 00:02:48.780 --> 00:02:54.030 probably plenty of books there that they were never going to get on with. But it 00:02:54.030 --> 00:02:59.280 gave them some insight into the friends and family around them, into their taste, it 00:02:59.280 --> 00:03:02.790 gave them more things to think about it. But it also meant, in a very real 00:03:02.790 --> 00:03:08.440 sense their home was now going to have the influence of all the people around them. 00:03:08.440 --> 00:03:13.380 What I personally like so much about the humanist approach is that there 00:03:13.380 --> 00:03:19.260 is no discrimination in who shall choose to marry, who shall choose to make 00:03:19.260 --> 00:03:24.040 those vows, it's a fact that they have chosen each other, that's what matters. 00:03:24.040 --> 00:03:27.260 It's very interesting when you have a couple who come, for example, from two 00:03:27.270 --> 00:03:30.140 different religious backgrounds, especially if they're not necessarily 00:03:30.140 --> 00:03:33.600 practicing but it's still a very important part of their heritage. That's 00:03:33.600 --> 00:03:36.980 when I find humanist ceremonies being at their most inclusive. 00:03:36.980 --> 00:03:41.610 Understanding that if we're there based on the people that we care about rather 00:03:41.610 --> 00:03:45.480 than the contexts or the backgrounds that they may have come from that's 00:03:45.480 --> 00:03:49.350 where you discover all the things that we have in common. So a humanist ceremony 00:03:49.350 --> 00:03:53.060 for me has always been so rewarding because it's about focusing on what 00:03:53.060 --> 00:03:58.780 everybody in the room has in common, which is their love for the couple. 00:03:58.780 --> 00:04:05.580 I did a wedding a couple of years ago in Spain at a venue that's well known for 00:04:05.580 --> 00:04:10.770 weddings and a beautiful location. But it was the first time they had ever had a 00:04:10.770 --> 00:04:14.400 same-sex wedding there and it was the first time they'd had an interracial 00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:20.650 wedding there. It was two English guys, one from a typically white English 00:04:20.650 --> 00:04:25.419 background and one from a typically Pakistani English background. There was a 00:04:25.419 --> 00:04:29.889 point in the ceremony where they had decided to do a traditional thing for an 00:04:29.889 --> 00:04:34.419 Asian ceremony, which was to take sweets from a plate, pass them round the 00:04:34.419 --> 00:04:36.850 couple's heads and feed them from the same sweet. 00:04:36.850 --> 00:04:41.770 I said yeah that'd be great, let's do that. Everybody in both families did it 00:04:41.770 --> 00:04:48.100 apart from the father who was from the Muslim background and he was just sat 00:04:48.100 --> 00:04:52.360 there not moving and eventually we got to the point where he was either gonna 00:04:52.360 --> 00:04:56.320 come or he wasn't and the best man went over to him whispered something to him 00:04:56.320 --> 00:05:01.780 and he got up and everybody, I didn't see this as I'm too focused on what I'm 00:05:01.780 --> 00:05:07.389 doing but apparently everybody including the photographer was in tears, as this 00:05:07.389 --> 00:05:12.940 man walked across picked up a sweet from the plate and fed them both it's almost 00:05:12.940 --> 00:05:17.380 making me cry now thinking about it, because it was so incredibly intense and 00:05:17.380 --> 00:05:24.220 to see that beautiful acceptance of the situation from this man was to me the 00:05:24.220 --> 00:05:26.600 definition of humanism.