[.ca] Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology: Poetry and Prose ... (ISBN 0060924691)

an excellent and varied collection, not Christian centric:
This is the most useful book I found among many I looked at for writing our ceremony, which will incorporate buddhist and taoist ideas and language. The only readings collection I've found so far that goes beyond the Judeo-Christian/Western emphasis to incorporate Islamic, Buddhist writers and some poets beyond the usual suspects. The anthology features both long and short readings and sample ceremonies from a variety of traditions. I found it indispensible.

an excellent and varied collection, not Christian centric:
This is the most useful book I found among many I looked at for writing our ceremony, which will incorporate buddhist and taoist ideas and language. The only readings collection I've found so far that goes beyond the Judeo-Christian/Western emphasis to incorporate Islamic, Buddhist writers and some poets beyond the usual suspects. The anthology features both long and short readings and sample ceremonies from a variety of traditions. I found it indispensible.

Helpful when writing your own ceremony:
This book was invaluable to my husband and I when we planned our wedding a few years ago, though you will need other sources as well. I was finishing up college and he had begun his graduate program, so we were already extremely busy. With the help of this book we were able to write our entire wedding ceremony ourselves. I didn't have much experience with weddings, and I didn't know anything about the usual structure or components of a wedding ceremony. In the back of this book are many wedding ceremony examples for different religions or for a non-religious ceremony. I highly recommend taking the time to write your own ceremony. It is such a wonderful time before marriage that you can spend together exploring deeply what marriage means to you and what kind of ceremony you want to celebrate your union with. It helps to have lots of poetry anthologies and books of poetry by your favorite poets. This book is great because it has so many poems about love and marriage. We used many poems from this book in our ceremony. We also used a lot of Rumi poems. We even combined a few Rumi poems to create a beautiful reading that felt personal to us. We began the ceremony singing a Sanskrit prayer that meant "May all beings be peaceful and happy". It was nice to have a ceremony that was personally very spiritual and combined many different religions. We also had two friends compose music to two of "The Dances of Universal Peace" using Indian instruments. During the ceremony we also planted a rose tree. We always say our vows to each other because they are so beautiful, and on our anniversaries we read through our entire ceremony, and sing the songs. "The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you not knowing how blind I was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along." Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne) Have Fun