IT'S the season for weddings again. We use the real Prayer Book at St Michael's, so we don't go in for any of that crooning sentimental guff you find in the new Common Worship - hideously mawkish phrases such as "All that I am I give to you", what does he give her his indigestion and bad temper? Then there's "Let them be tender with each other's dreams", which sounds like a schmaltzy song title by Lord Lloyd Webber.

There's no limit to the banality and paucity of imagination of those who devise new church services. I mean, consider this. For hundreds of years the bridegroom said "With this ring I thee wed". Those words go back to the time of Chaucer when they were spoken at the church door. I have heard them at weddings for 30 years and I can't think of a more moving utterance: six words of one syllable which exactly fit the movement of the placing of the ring on the bride's finger. This is lucid, luminous poetry of great beauty. So what have the revisers done? Replaced those six enchanted words with eleven in the tedious, tin-eared phrase "I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage". The revision is an act of cultural vandalism, barbarism and sacrilege.

Sometimes in these exciting modern times of ours, couples come and ask if they can be allowed to make "alternative vows" - though I've not yet been asked to replace "Till death us do part" with "until a week on Tuesday". For the lesson the favourite always used to be the wonderful chapter from St Paul ending with "and the greatest of these is love". Or else something sensual from the Old Testament's Song of Songs.

Recently I was asked by one couple if they might read the bum-clenchingly awful Invitation by someone with the preposterous name of Oriah Mountain Dreamer which hopes that the bride has not been "shrivelled and closed". I should think the bridegroom hopes not too! It goes on to wonder whether the couple have "touched the centre of their own sorrow". This is at a wedding, mind you!

And then, "I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me". But won't her dress melt? And "I want to know what sustains you from the inside". To which the only possible response is "Tripe and onions, love!" But the best line must be "I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone". Good heavens! All I can say is that it doesn't bode very well for the honeymoon.

The marvellous thing about the Prayer Book's Solemnisation of Matrimony is that it gives the lie to the accusation that the Christian faith is puritanical and anti-sex. In an ecstatic phrase the bridegroom says to his bride, "With my body I thee worship". And, as my mother would say, "You can't say fairer than that".

The marriage service is largely the creation of the 16th century Archbishop and literary genius Thomas Cranmer. Priests and bishops were not supposed to marry in those days - though the apostle Peter, the first pope, was a married man - but it was rumoured that Cranmer had a secret wife and that he carried her around in a box. Somewhere amid the corny jokes about letting them have any hymns they like apart from Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow and Fight the Good Fight, there is unconscious humour. I remember, for instance, standing in my place on the chancel step and hearing - and watching - the biggest bridesmaid since the aircraft-carrier Ark Royal boom out that line in Praise My Soul, "Well my feeble frame He knows". Well, I'm sure He does. Thankfully, I've never had anyone come forward with an objection to the words, "If any man can show any just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak or else hereafter forever hold his peace". What would you do? It would certainly put the mockers on the reception, wouldn't it?

I try to give them sound advice and also make them smile a little. So I've been known to say, "Don't go too far on the first night". That gets a titter from the choirboys, and the maiden aunts in the congregation look as if their corset elastic has snapped. You have to pause for just the right number of seconds, so they wonder what the devil is coming next, and then add very solemnly, "My wife and I went as far as Whitby - and it was far too far".

Published: Tuesday, April 24, 2001