Love, All Things Considered

I am helping my friend find readings for her wedding ceremony and I've been going through "The Knot guide to Wedding vows and traditions" trying to find the least trite readings. My personal guidelines are that the line must not make me cringe from sentimentality and it should be something I would incorporate into my own wedding. Not, of course, that I will ever be married at the rate I'm going. All my sisters met their husbands by the time they were 24. Hunh.
Moving on.
My friend isn't religious so that knocks off a lot of readings I might select. I believe that God is love and the ability for human beings to love each other is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit.
First I think the readings should celebrate love and marriage and recognize the distinction between the two. I think people can get so caught up in the hoopla of weddings that the people that the reality of marriage - hard work, constant attention - gets lost. It's like a garden, wherein if you don't tend to it, weeds take over and the lovely herbs and tomatoes choke and die. The lilac and magnolia trees begin to rot and then have to be chopped down and you are left with a broken heart at the sad sight of your garden which was once so beautiful. 

Which is why we have our community of friends and family to help us when we get lazy or overwhelmed. The participation of the congregation is so important in a wedding service. I have been to a wedding where the bridal couple had everyone sign their marriage contract. I like that tradition. I could also do the calligraphy for those!
Alright.
The exchange of vows that I like best are the Episcopal ones:
"In the name of God, I , ____, take you, _____, to be my husband/wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.
I give you this ring as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." So if you aren't religious, cut off the first and last clauses.
I also like the Quaker vow, "In the presence of God and these our friends I take thee, ___ to be my husband/wife, promising with Divine assistance to be unto thee a loving and faithful wife/husband so long as we both shall live."
My favorite Bible reading for a marriage has to be from the Song of Solomon 8:6-7
"Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. If one were offered for love all the wealth of one's house, it would be utterly scorned."I suggested that passage to my sister and she used it for her wedding service. Hot.
It has been suggested that God gives special blessing to marriages because in the Gospel of John, Jesus performs his first miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee.

For their 25th wedding anniversary my parents had a Celebration of Marriage service at our church. In her sermon the priest said something profound:
"Joan and Michael show us a lesson today: that life is not a game to be won but a gift to be celebrated. That marriage is not just a legal way to maintain property and provide for children, but a gift of abundance. And that no matter who we are, when we find that person, or when we answer that calling, we know that we are again in that garden from which we can never be expelled."
She is, of course, referring to the Garden of Eden from which God expelled Adam and Eve.
I found something about marriage vows that either my Dad wrote for his niece's wedding (or he retyped from somewhere):
"The marriage vows are the Rules of the Road for a marriage. To take a vow is an honorable thing to do. It is a giving of one's word. The sanctity of one's word and its importance to civilization is of ancient origin. To many, marriage is a psychological state of feeling good. But the vows require one to honor their word, not their feelings. To others it seems only a contract that can be broken when the other party does not perform or their performance is not up to par. Nevertheless, marriage is not a contract as lawyers think. The vows-taker assumes responsibility for his or her independent of the performance of the other. One has given their word; one has assumed a vow on their own honor. This is why marriage is an honorable state."
My father was a religious man and added a reflection to the above: "In the beginning was the Word." The Word was the creative power that laid the foundation of the world and any security in it. A portion of that same power to create anew is given to us when we solemnly consider and give our own word in marriage. we offer the one receiving our word respect, reliance, and repose. We offer them the dream that their struggles, their passions, and their energies, although not ours directly, will not, with us, have been undertaken in vain. Our word is a light to this world."
So wise, that.
Excerpts:
The three readings from the Knot Guide which I liked are from "Captain Corelli's Mandolin"
"And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then it subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of every day, it is not lying awake at night…Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is bot an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."
(page 281, Vintage Books, New York, NY, 1994)

AND

Sonnet 17
by Pablo Neruda
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way
because I don't know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I nor you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep
it is your eyes that close.

AND
Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a Young Poet"
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough."

AND

TO MY DEAR AND LOVING HUSBAND

by: Anne Bradstreet (c.1612-1672)

F ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence.

Thy love is such I can no way repay.

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let's so persever

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

I looked through one of my favorite books, the Great Gatsby, for quotes on love but since the grand love of that story is doomed it isn't quite right for wedding services.
Then I looked through another favorite book, All the King's Men, and found some awe-some passages. I love this one:
"So maybe she was up in the room trying to discover what her new self was, for when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect adjustment." (p. 298)
On re-reading it, I'm not sure I love it so much, but the sentiment is right - that when you fall in love or when someone loves you - you are made all over again.
Later in the novel, Anne Stanton tells her fiance Jack, "Oh, it's just that getting married isn't like jumping off a cliff. Love isn't either, isn't like jumping off a cliff. Or getting drowned. It's -it's-oh, I don't know how to say it - it's trying to live, it's having a way to live." (p.320)
Maybe we will just hand out copies of the book as party favors at my wedding.

Then, I read through some quotes on marriage and love to be incorporated into toasts at weddings. These are the ones I like:

• "Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more." - Erica Jong.
• "Success in marriage depends on being able, when you get over being in love, to really love...You never know anyone until you marry them." - Eleanor Roosevelt.
• "A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person." - Mignon McLaughlin
• "Doubt thou that the stars are fire; doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I love." - Shakespeare, Hamlet Act II
• "I'm gonna love you till you don't hurt no more." - Kanye West

There are a couple other books I want to go through to find passages on love and the poems of Margaret Atwood as well. That will have to wait until tomorrow tho, because it is past 1 a.m. and I must rest!