Sunday was our first wedding anniversary, and as I reflected on the (much more stressful) day one VERY short year ago, I also reviewed the readings we'd struggled to select for the ceremony.
We got married in a semi-traditional Episcopalian ceremony, and when tasked with selecting readings, I felt like we were supposed to choose something biblical. While I grew up in the church and still attend -- probably (definitely) less frequently than my Mom would prefer -- the bible is just not a book that I often reference. And in the months preceding the wedding, as I tried to thoughtfully consider marriage and all that it meant, it wasn't among the literature I looked to and found most compelling.
Including biblical literature for the sake of including it felt inauthentic, which was the last thing I wanted to feel that day. So finally, we embraced the most obvious idea ever: Include the things you read that affected you most.
We had a sweet reunion with these words on commitment today, so I thought I'd share them with you guys:
From "The Secret of a Happy Marriage," by Adam Gopnik
"Marriages are made of lust, laughter and loyalty - but the three have to be kept in constant passage, transitively, back and forth, so that as one subsides for a time, the others rise.
Lust, I suppose, needs no explanation [...] Nor does laughter need much annotation. The greatest joy in life is to discover that the same absurdities of life seem absurd to you both, creating that lovely moment of breakage when the masquerade of courtship you have been enacting becomes suddenly a backstage embrace: We're on to each other, and to the world, and will forever be in cahoots. The trick is that marriage is played upon a tilted field, and everything flows downhill towards loyalty."
{Note: This essay resonated more with me than probably anything I've read on the subject. I encourage you to click through for the full text.}
"Prayer for a Marriage," by Steve Scafidi
When we are old one night and the moon
arcs over the house like an antique
China saucer and the teacup sun
follows somewhere far behind
I hope the stars deepen to a shine
so bright you could read by it
if you liked and the sadness
we will have known go away
for awhile – in this hour or two
before sleep – and that we kiss
standing in the kitchen not fighting
gravity so much as embodying
its sweet force, and I hope we kiss
like we do today knowing so much
good is said in this primitive tongue
from the wild first surprising ones
to the lower dizzy ten thousand
infinitely slower ones—and I hope
while we stand there in the kitchen
making tea and kissing, the whistle
of the teapot wakes the neighbors.
(That's the one that got Mitch, in the end.) Do you have your own favorite work on love, marriage and commitment? Share it!
