Ceremony - Act I

As you probably know, Carlos is Catholic and I am Jewish.  So when deciding what type of wedding ceremony we wanted, we knew had to incorporate both religions.

The family priest is a bit old.  Carlos wanted a younger, more open priest.  A few recommendations led us to a young Colombian priest.  He was great.  He explained the rules to us, which I found to be very complicated.  He was able to marry a Catholic and a non-Catholic only because the non-Catholic was a foreigner.  If the non-Catholic was Ecuadorian, the church (not the state) would not sanctify the marriage between the non-Catholic and the Catholic.  But that wasn't a problem for us.

He was really laid back and modern, his office was furnished with both paintings and statues of saints as well as a laptop and cell phone.  He made a copy of the ceremony for us to go through and choose the readings that we wanted.  And I don't mean bible verses.  There were two or three different prayers for every part of the wedding ceremony, i.e. statement of intent, exchange of vows, etc.  Some were stronger than others.  We basically chose the versions that didn't mention Jesus and wherever the reading said "the church" we changed it to "the community".  Basically, it reflected what we believed.

But for me, the most interesting part of the ceremony was the blessing and exchange of the Arras, or Dowry.  Apparently, it's an old Jewish custom based on 13 coins, symbolizing the promise of future care of family property.  The Catholic church adopted this practice and uses 13 coins to symbolize the goods that the new couple will share.  However, the priest had told use that we don't have to use coins (even though I was thinking of using international coins to reflect where we had traveled together).  We could use anything that had value to us.  We could even use seeds.  Carlos's face lit up.  He loved that idea. 

That look of concentration on my face is because I was trying not to mess up the Spanish (which I did).

I would like to take this opportunity to give a special thanks to Mijail (whose side you can see in some photos, unfortunately I don't have a good shot of him).  We had a slight coordination problem and were not able to have the professional translator that we had planned for the ceremony.  Mijail accepted our last minute request to translate the Catholic ceremony for us.  We were so grateful for his help and think he did a great job.

But the Catholic ceremony came to an end with a kiss...

...and the crowd was now waiting for the second act.