The Quaker Marriage

The Quaker wedding may be listed as one of the peculiarities of a peculiar people, but it takes on a beautiful significance as well as a solemn and spiritual aspect. The Quaker wedding as conducted in a typical Friends meetinghouse in country or city has no minister or priest present as the officer to conduct the wedding, or pronounce the couple man and wife. There is no altar before which as before a specially holy place the prospective husband and wife stand to answer questions and make promises about the Marriage obligation. While the Friends minister may have received legal permission from the court to pronounce a couple man and wife, such a proceeding is entirely superfluous and now legally unnecessary in a wedding ceremony undertaken according to the long-established custom of Friends. The Friends began this practice very early in their history and for a long time they ran the risk of having their children called illegitimate. They took the risk, however, for "conscience sake", and in the long run, because of their evident sincerity, the legal opposition faded away, and then the courts declared that the Friends had a right to marry in their own way so long as a record of the marriages was made in the courts. Their meeting records have been so wonderfully kept that they are the source of much genealogical data.

As a matter of fact, in this Quaker service the man and the woman concerned speak their own vows and give their own promises of love, loyalty and devotion, each to the other in a meeting for worship. Before the marriage takes place, how ever, a painstaking series of requests, examinations and reports is carried on between the young people concerned and a meeting committee. The whole active membership of the meeting shares in the solemn and holy undertaking.

Specifically stated, and as generally practiced, the steps in this process are as follows. When the young people on the basis of their love for each other have decided that they want to be married they make a formal statement of that fact to the meeting where they are members. The meeting makes a record of the expressed wish and appoints a committee to confer with the prospective candidates for marriage, and with their parents, if they are underage. When the committee is satisfied that there are no hindrances in the way of the marriage it reports its conclusion to the meeting. The meeting then appoints another committee to have charge of the arrangements for the wedding service. A time and place, usually the meetinghouse, are chosen. A carefully prepared certificate of marriage is written which contains among other things statements of the mutual obligations which the parties to the marriages will assume.

A meeting for worship is called unless the parties wish to marry themselves in the regular meeting at the usual time it is held. After the meeting settles into a period of real worship the young couple, who have taken seats on the front row of benches, rise and, taking each other by the right hand, pledge their love and loyalty to each other in the presence of God and before the members of the meeting. When the vows have been taken and the worship is over the committee escorts the newly married couple to a table where the. sign the wedding certificate.

Afterward as witnesses of this marriage ceremony, most of those present sign the certificate.

Such a ceremony takes weeks and sometimes months for preparation; it sympathetically centers the eyes of all members. on the young people concerned; it is jointly shared in a devout and solemn meeting for worship. All of this is a supremely important religious affair for the young couple and the whole membership. It infuses highly significant spiritual meaning '' into the holy business of the initial steps in homemaking. Such a marriage service is not a guarantee that home development will never run into stormy waters or meet with ship-wreck, but the small proportion of Quaker homes that resort to the courts for a release from marital obligations is indicative of the fact that in search for the best in wedded life the Quakers have found a way which in the great majority of cases carries the wedded union through to the hour when only the summons from God in the death of one calls for separation.

Taken from : QUAKERS FIND A WAY, THEIR DISCOVERIES IN PRACTICAL LIVING, by Charles M. Woodman, former pastor of West Richmond Friends Meeting Richmond, Indiana Published in 1950