About

Maureen & The Soulful Wedding

I’m Maureen Cotton, an Interspiritual minister. It would be my honor to be your guide. Together, we’ll harness all the power and potential of this transformative moment.

Whether you spend one minute or one hour here, I hope you leave feeling that more is possible. Especially for your wedding and engagement. It can be more meaningful, joyful, and transformative than you yet know.

I believe…

In the mystic heart found within the world’s religions. Directly engaging the experience of love and interconnectivity that can be found on any spiritual path (and without a “spiritual path”) was coined as “Interspirituality” by Brother Wayne Teasdale.

There’s layers and layers through which the sacred scriptures of the world echo each other. They all call us to compassion. They all invite us to fully embody grief and bliss. They help us embrace paradox and uncertainty. They offer structures, ritual, and language to help us through life’s great and challenging thresholds.

But what happens when we grow up secular and our community does not know how to rally around us in death and grief, or prepare us for passing over the threshold into adulthood, parenthood, or married life?

Interspirituality is a movement that answers this question. I believe that everyone has access to divinity through countless doorways: sometimes we trip upon them, some of us consciously cultivate them, some open through communal experience, and sometimes it bursts into our life through a moment of bliss or sorrow (I share about one such personal experience in the podcast below).

I have visited almost every house of worship that will let me in and felt a profound sense of love, support, and interconnectivity no matter if I was bowing my forehead to the floor, or lifting my arms up high in praise. I have come no closer to “choosing my path,” but I have come to understand how spirituality works in our lives. I’ve seen—in countless diverse forms—the ingredients for connection within a community, a gathering, and even within a single heart.

This is the understanding that animates The Soulful Wedding, whether I’m guiding a couple to articulate their values in the premarital counseling, or brainstorming the right ritual to express their connection to each other and their families in a Ceremony Design Session.

The path…

In 2011 after my grandfather died a peaceful death with good palliative care, I discovered a call to become a hospice chaplain. The experience echoed back to the sudden and early loss of my dad when I was a kid. I felt how there’s a void. I saw that—without religion—we don’t know how to be intimate with death and other kinds of loss.

This led to my ordination at One Spirit Interfaith Seminary in 2015. However, I was already working in weddings as a photographer and I noticed the same thing playing out. Without the guidance of religion to make meaning of the moment, many weddings were… not meaningless (things aren’t that dire), but, meaning lost. People a bit adrift on all the wedding elements made standard by blogs and Pinterest. Whether or not a couple was having a meaningful experience of the event, or even present in the moment, almost seemed up to chance.

I never planned to officiate weddings but people who knew about my spiritual-but-not-religious path started asking. I said yes without ever following a “how to” guide. I had literally seen what worked and didn’t work a hundred times over. Taking everything I knew about spirituality, ceremony, the human heart, and weddings I crafted my own discovery process with my couples.

I hear the same thing every time, not just from the couple but from guests, “I’ve never experienced anything like that.” In a multifaith world, and here in the NorthEast US an especially secular culture, people are not accustomed to being enveloped in sacred space in a large semi-public gathering. But, when invited, they embrace it and never forget it.

Me on the morning of my ordination in 2015.

“The truth is one, the paths are many.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

More About Me

♦ My wife, kiddos, corgi, cat and I live in Beverly, MA, just north of Boston on the coast.

♦ I did my formal chaplaincy training, known as CPE, at Beverly Hospital with Sister Sara-Ann Buckley, S.N.D. de N.

♦ I graduated from Emerson College ‘05 with a degree in Visual Communication, and went on to work as a photographer for 15 years.

♦ I’m a certified Kripalu yoga teacher.

♦ I discovered Interspirituality (though I didn’t know the word yet) and ministry through making this short film about The Little Brothers of Saint Francis in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.

♦ I was ordained by One Spirit Interfaith Alliance in 2015.

I’m ready for our journeys to intersect. Are you?

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Pride, identity, and politics

Oh, how I wish we could talk about love without talking about politics. But as a woman who married a woman when my marriage was not federally recognized, I see what politics has granted and can take away. So it must be said.

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Love is Love, and it’s always a special honor to celebrate my queer family. Read about my POV on LGBTQ weddings >>

✊🏻✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿Black Lives Matter, and I endeavor to understand my unconscious biases, and my role in forming a just society. I give special thanks to Dra. Rosales Meza, who has shown me how decolonial work starts with inner spiritual work.