Posted by
But when we're doing our wedding profiles, we noticed some trends in nontraditional readings… readings that clearly Offbeat Brides tend to adore.
Here are a few that we've seen used that we absolutely and completely love (and can't wait to see used again!)…
Serious, sweet, wedding readings about love… sans gag-reflex
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
On Marriage
Then Almitra spoke again and said, “And what of Marriage, master?”
And he answered saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
Love
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise on your lips.
Union from The Beginning to End by Robert Fulghum
You have known each other from the first glance of acquaintance to this point of commitment. At some point, you decided to marry. From that moment of yes to this moment of yes, indeed, you have been making promises and agreements in an informal way. All those conversations that were held riding in a car or over a meal or during long walks — all those sentences that began with “When we're married” and continued with “I will and you will and we will”- those late night talks that included “someday” and “somehow” and “maybe”- and all those promises that are unspoken matters of the heart. All these common things, and more, are the real process of a wedding. The symbolic vows that you are about to make are a way of saying to one another, ” You know all those things we've promised and hoped and dreamed- well, I meant it all, every word.” Look at one another and remember this moment in time. Before this moment you have been many things to one another- acquaintance, friend, companion, lover, dancing partner, and even teacher, for you have learned much from one another in these last few years. Now you shall say a few words that take you across a threshold of life, and things will never quite be the same between you. For after these vows, you shall say to the world, this- is my husband, this- is my wife.
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then 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 eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.
For the sci-fi lover in all of us
You know what the first rule of flying is? … Love. You can learn all the math in the ‘verse, but you take a boat in the air you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurting ‘fore she keens. Makes her a home.
More sweet and silly readings
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.”Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
A Lovely Love Story by Edward Monkton
The fierce Dinosaur was trapped inside his cage of ice. Although it was cold he was happy in there. It was, after all, his cage.Then along came the Lovely Other Dinosaur.
The Lovely Other Dinosaur melted the Dinosaur's cage with kind words and loving thoughts.
I like this Dinosaur thought the Lovely Other Dinosaur.
Although he is fierce he is also tender and he is funny.
He is also quite clever though I will not tell him this for now.I like this Lovely Other Dinosaur, thought the Dinosaur. She is beautiful and she is different and she smells so nice.
She is also a free spirit which is a quality I much admire in a dinosaur.
But he can be so distant and so peculiar at times, thought the Lovely Other Dinosaur.
He is also overly fond of things.
Are all Dinosaurs so overly fond of things?But her mind skips from here to there so quickly thought the Dinosaur. She is also uncommonly keen on shopping.
Are all Lovely Other Dinosaurs so uncommonly keen on shopping?I will forgive his peculiarity and his concern for things, thought the Lovely Other Dinosaur. For they are part of what makes him a richly charactered individual.
I will forgive her skipping mind and her fondness for shopping, thought the Dinosaur. For she fills our life with beautiful thoughts and wonderful surprises. Besides, I am not unkeen on shopping either.
Now the Dinosaur and the Lovely Other Dinosaur are old.
Look at them.
Together they stand on the hill telling each other stories and feeling the warmth of the sun on their backs.And that, my friends, is how it is with love.
Let us all be Dinosaurs and Lovely Other Dinosaurs together.
For the sun is warm.
And the world is a beautiful place
Check out our other wedding reading posts:
About the Author: Offbeat Weditors
Working tirelessly to bring you stimulating content day after day, the Offbeat Wed editors will not sleep until you've gotten your offbeat fix.
I’d love a post on Offbeat Brides’ favourite poems read at ceremonies! My own wedding ceremony will be in church, so any poetry will be, as it were, by-the-Book, but I like seeing what others choose. I notice E.E. Cummings crops up quite often in profiles!
We had some e e cummings in church! i carry your heart was the one – http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179622 (the other reading was the road to Emmaus at the end of Luke, because it’s about home and family and hospitality and community and all that good stuff…!)
Nice! 🙂 I don’t think my priest would be very down with it, which is fine. I have plenty of other places in my life to put poems 🙂
We had “i carry your heart” too. It was at a non-secular venue with a Unitarian minister (who turned out to be the same woman who married my parents!). She had never heard of it before I had it as a reading, but I heard from her recently and it’s now on the list of readings she suggests to couples!
We used the Thoughts on Marriage by Kahlil Gibran for my mother to read and we used A Wedding Day Poem by anonymous for my mother in law, they were perfect! The first excerpt was more relaxed and the poem was a tear jerker! Perfectly balanced. 🙂
What’s the Wedding Day poem? It sounds like you found the perfect balance between not overly soppy but still celebrating love and marriage!
probably not to everyone’s taste, but here’s what we used! my brother (my man of honor) read from still life with woodpecker by tom robbins:
“When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, especially when it seems superfluous or redundant, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.”
and my husband’s best man did a surprise reading (we didn’t know the content beforehand) from thich nhat hahn. i don’t have the exact reading, but it was very similar in content to this quotation from thich nhat hahn that i found by googling — just with a little more emphasis on how this works in relationships, if i remember right:
“Flowers and garbage are both organic in nature. So looking deeply into the nature of a flower, you can see the presence of the compost and the garbage. The flower is also going to turn into garbage, but don’t be afraid! You are a gardener, and you have in your hands the power to transform garbage into flowers, into fruit, into vegetables. You don’t throw anything away, because you are not afraid of garbage. Your hands are capable of transforming it into flowers, or lettuce, or cucumbers. The same thing is true of your happiness and your sorrow. Sorrow, fear, and depression are all a kind of garbage. These bits of garbage are part of real life, and we must look deeply into their nature. You can practice in order to turn these bits of garbage into flowers. It is not only your love that is organic; your hate is, too. So you should not throw anything out. All you have to do is learn how to transform your garbage into flowers.”
it ended up being completely perfect since his reading came directly before our “compost-bearer” distributed some compost at our feet and our officiant talked a bit about how we should cultivate our relationship, etc. 🙂
This is beautiful! I pulled several readings and almost wrote up my entire ceremony. =) its hard to find excerpts from favorite books or movies, with there was an archive online somewhere for it! Maybe its just the writer in me who loves stuff like this..I even made up my own poem for the invitation too! it went like:
“This love story had started on the shores of the sea
Then grew into something only God could bless
Till one day Matthew got on bended knee
And Ariel had happily cried “YES!”
So now we round our family and friends
To join us on this special day
Celebrating love that never ends
In our own special way!
Come to Alley’s Chapel in the Georgia mountains
In a little town of Clarkesville, my dear!
When love runneth over like nature’s fountains
On June the Ninth of the Two-Thousand Twelve year!
At 1 o’clock we will try to tie the knot
If successful, we will share the cheer
And if hunger for more of this you fought,
A reception to follow will be quite near.
So please join us and watch the hilarity ensue
Share the good times and smile with us as well
And pray for our future to be bright and new
and add another chapter to our little tale. ”
Its GREAT to be able to do something like this yourself and know in your heart its something personal that no one can just pull out of the air themselves and do an exact copy. I’ve learned on this website, it doesn’t even matter what readings you have, what is important is that each wedding is its own event, never can be duplicated the same way. Its such a beautiful thing. Thank you so much for posting this!
We used a reading from the marriage ceremony in Owlsight by Mercedes Lackey
This bond, this joining, is not meant to be a fetter. A joining is a partnership, not two people becoming one. Two minds cannot fuse, two souls cannot merge, two hearts cannot keep to the same time. If two are foolish enough to try this, one must overwhelm the other, and that is no love, nor is it compassion, nor responsibility. You are two who choose to walk the same path, to bridge the differences between you with love. You must remember and respect those differences and learn to understand them, for they are part of what made you come to love in the first place.
Love is patient, love is willing to compromise – love is willing to admit it is wrong. There will be hard times; you must face them as bound warriors do, side by side, not using the weapon of your knowledge to tear at each other.
There will be sadness as well as joy, and you must support one another through the grief and sorrow. There will be pain – but pain shared is pain halved, as joy shared is joy doubled, and you each must sacrifice your own comfort to share the pain of the other. And yet, you must do all this and manage to keep each other from wrong actions, for a joining means that you also pledge to help another at all times.
You must lead each other by example. Guide and be willing to be guided. Being joined does not mean that you accept what is truly wrong; being joined means that you must strive that you both remain in the light and the right.
You must not pledge yourselves thinking that you can change each other. That is rankest folly, and disrespectful, for no one has the right to change another. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that there will be no strife between you. That is fantasy, for you are two and not one, and there will inevitably come conflict, and it will be up to you to resolve. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that all will be well from this moment on. You must come to this joining fully ready, fully committed, and fully respectful of one another.
Besides the Velveteen Rabbit passage you have up there, we also had my godfather read the definition of Anam Cara, something we felt defined our relationship.
“According to Celtic spiritual tradition, the soul shines all around the body like a luminous cloud. When you are very open ~ appreciative and trusting ~ with another person, your two souls flow together. This deeply felt bond with another person means you have found your anam cara, or “Soul Friend.” Your anam cara always beholds your light and beauty, and accepts you for who you truly are. In Celtic spirituality, the anam cara friendship awakens the fullness and mystery of your life. You are joined in an ancient and eternal union with humanity that cuts across all barriers of time, convention, philosophy, and definition. When you are blessed with an anam cara, the Irish believe, you have arrived at that most sacred place: ~HOME~”
In addition to the passage from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres referenced above, my husband and I also used an excerpt from Frida:
“Frida: [A]t worst, [marriage] is a hostile political act. A way for small minded men to keep their women in the house and out of the way, wrapped in the guise of conservative religious nonsense. At best, it is a happy delusion: it is two people who really love each other, who have no idea how truly miserable they are about to make each other. But! When two people know that and they decide, with eyes wide open, to face each other and get married anyway… I don’t think it’s conservative or delusional. I think it’s radical. And courageous. And very romantic.”
It was the only reference to gender in our entire ceremony. I was bothered by not making the whole thing gender-neutral, but was willing to make an exception for that particular text.
We had our officiant read the passage below, which is from an an episode of Numb3rs (the one where Charlie and Amita get married and Larry officiates).
“Whilst you all know that the 4 fundemental forces of physics are electromagnetism, strong nuclear interaction, weak nuclear interaction and gravity.
We’ve been talking here about the forces that bind the universe. But, what binds humans?
Love.
Powerful in small spaces, yet with profound effect on distance. Love defies time, outliving both its source and its object. Love is faster than light; for light requires time in order to travel through space, but love reaches its object instantaneously. Love journeys forever; into infinity. And its here binding together two lives. (gets the ring) Symbolic of eternity and rendered in a beautiful element. ”
We read this right before we exchanged rings. Wish I’d had the Firefly quote though. We would totally have used that!
We used for one of our readings a poem by Mari Nichols-Haining called “Why Marriage”.
We edited it down a little and re-wrote some of the lines to suit us a little more, but I thought I’d share it.
Because to the depths of me, I long to love one person,
With all my heart, my soul, my mind, my body…
Because I need a forever friend to trust with the intimacies of me,
Who won’t hold them against me,
Who loves me when I’m unlikable,
Who sees the small child in me, and
Who looks for the divine potential of me…
Because I need to cuddle in the warmth of the night
With someone I feel blessed to hold…
Because marriage means opportunity
To grow in love in friendship…
Marriages do not fail, people fail
Knowing this,
Together we create our marriage…
Because of this understanding
The possibilities are limitless.
We used this same reading in lieu of vows since we’d done our “legal” marriage a few months prior to our spiritual ceremony. This reading touched so many important aspects of our spiritual views (Religious Science) and said everything we feel about our marriage.
We turned the poem into a script that we read in turns. We omitted the “people fail” lines only because this was his 2nd marriage and his 11-yr-old son (my stepson) might have thought it was a negative remark about his first marriage/son’s mom.
Here’s our adaptation of WHY MARRIAGE? By Mari Nichols-Haining
A: Because to the depths of me, I long to love one person,
With all my heart, my soul, my mind, my body…
S: Because I need a forever friend to trust with the intimacies of me,
Who won’t hold them against me,
Who loves me when I’m unlikable,
Who sees the small child in me, and
Who looks for the divine potential of me…
A: Because I need to cuddle in the warmth of the night
With someone who thanks God for me,
With someone I feel blessed to hold…
S: Because marriage means opportunity
To grow in love in friendship…
A: Because marriage is a discipline
To be added to a list of achievements…
S: Knowing this,
I promise to take full responsibility
For my spiritual, mental and physical wholeness
so I may take half of the responsibility for this marriage
(RING)
A: I promise to take full responsibility
For my spiritual, mental and physical wholeness
so I may take half of the responsibility for this marriage.
(RING)
BOTH: Because Together we create our marriage…
and with this understanding the possibilities are limitless
We used this reading from C.S Lewis’ Mere Christianity…not for everyone, but it echoes the sentiments in the Captain Correli’s Mandolin one…which we were going to use, except Husband’s cousin threw a surprise wedding 6 weeks before and used it and it just didn’t feel right to have the same reading…it’s really nice, and if you aren’t religious could probably be adapted. I love the last part especially
‘If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. it is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it’
We had our officiant paraphrase that Robert Fulghum reading, and my husband’s aunt read the bit from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. We also had my brother read a silly little Ogden Nash poem for a bit of levity. Our 3rd wedding anniversary is next Wednesday, so this is a very timely post. 🙂
I read the captain corelli’s mandolin piece at my brother’s wedding. We’re thinking of one of these two for our wedding http://annabelvita.com/2012/06/22/our-minus-one-year-anniversary
For the Elopement of Awesome, we used a reading from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The excerpt has been dubbed “On Flying” or “How to Fly.”
We also used Ariel’s wording for the rings because it’s awesome.
I know that A Lovely Love Story is very popular here, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen (and read) the text. I doubt my Special Gentleman would go for it, but now I see why it’s used so often 🙂
We used Union in ours and it was lovely, a proper shiver down the spine moment.
We did, too. I still can’t read it without tearing up. It’s so perfect, especially for those who have been together for awhile before getting married.
Could you please elaborate more on the ‘union’ I’m unfamiliar with the literature, but interested. Thank you.
I tried not to cry when I had my sister read The Velveteen Rabbit excerpt, but I couldn’t help but get choked up. She had thought it was a weird thing to read at a wedding at first, but after the ceremony, my dad told me that he “totally got it”. That made me really happy.
I’m in the planning throes, and we haven’t settled on a reading yet (nor have we even begun to think about one!), but he did share the Mandalorian wedding contract with me a while back, and I think they’re pretty perfect for us. It may be odd, but I’m seriously considering using it.
“Mhi solus tome.
Mhi solus dhar’tome.
Mhi me’dinui an.
Mhi ba’juri verde.
Translation:
We are one together.
We are one when parted.
We share all.
We will raise warriors.”
We got married just a month ago, and had 3 readings at our wedding. While we had to have one Bible reading (compulsory for Church of England weddings – we picked Romans 12: 1, 2, 9-18; the same one Prince William and Kate Middleton had), we had leeway on any other readings we wanted, so we chose Union by Robert Fulghum – as in the article – and also had an excerpt from Plato’s Symposium, as follows:
.
‘Humans have never understood the power of Love, for if they had they would surely have built noble temples and altars and offered solemn sacrifices; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done, since Love is our best friend, our helper, and the healer of the ills which prevent us from being happy.
‘To understand the power of Love, we must understand that our original human nature was not like it is now, but different. Human beings each had two sets of arms, two sets of legs, and two faces looking in opposite directions. There were three sexes then: one comprised of two men called the children of the Sun, one made of two women called the children of the Earth, and a third made of a man and a woman, called the children of the Moon. Due to the power and might of these original humans, the Gods began to fear that their reign might be threatened. They sought for a way to end the humans’ insolence without destroying them.
‘It was at this point that Zeus divided the humans in half. After the division the two parts of each desiring their other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one. So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of humankind.
‘Each of us when separated, having one side only, is but the indenture of a person, and we are always looking for our other half. Those whose original nature lies with the children of the Sun are men who are drawn to other men, those from the children of the Earth are women who love other women, and those from the children of the Moon are men and women drawn to one another. And when one of us meets our other half, we are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other’s sight even for a moment. We pass our whole lives together, desiring that we should be melted into one, to spend our lives as one person instead of two, and so that after our death there will be one departed soul instead of two; this is the very expression of our ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called Love.’
.
The whole message of acceptance and equality of love regardless of sexuality was particularly important for us, and particularly poignant that the bridesmaid we chose to read it had only recently come out after a long struggle with her own sexuality. It was a passage that went down surprisingly well at our wedding.
“The Apache Wedding Prayer” was our reading at my 1910 Indian Shaker Marriage
Since the moment I heard “These things are how you make me feel” by Anis Mojgani, I’ve imagined how awesome it would be to have it read at my wedding.
“The world may think it idiotic,
Nor care at all we’re symbiotic,
But I will say at once and twice:
I find it nice. I find it nice.”
-Edward Gorey
I read The Lovely Love Story at my brothers wedding and it was absolutely perfect. Not too serious, very sweet, and actually pretty accurate personality wise to the bride and groom!
We had a friend read excerpts from “I Like You” by Sandol Stoddard Warburg. I pulled together the parts of the poem that really spoke to me and used that, so we could make it a little shorter. It is funny but still has deep meaning. My favorite part was the last lines (only time I cried during the wedding):
Even if it was the 999th of July
Even if it was August
Even if it was way down at the bottom of November
Even if it was no place particular in January
I would go on choosing you
And you would go on choosing me
Over and over again
And that’s how it would happen every time
From “Instructions For Life In The New Millennium”
by His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama
Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
And that a loving atmosphere in your home
is the foundation for your life.
Be gentle with the earth,
be gentle with one another.
When disagreements come
remember always to protect the spirit of your union.
When you realize you’ve made a mistake,
take immediate steps to correct it.
Remember that the best relationship is one
in which your love for each other
exceeds your need for each other.
So love yourselves, love one another,
love all that is your life together
and all else will follow.
I took “Union” as a starting point, and rewrote it for a reading at my brother’s wedding. I renamed it, “Yes”:
[name] and [name] it was a little over a year ago that you both said “yes” and committed to get married. Yes is a promise. It speaks of hope and optimism and responsibility. And in that yes you effectively said, “I believe in us. I’m hopeful for our future. We will build a life together. Yes.”
But it wasn’t the first, or even your most significant yes. You said yes when you decided to reach out and find each other out there in the world. You said yes when you moved your first date from [location 1] to [location 2]. It was yes that created this beautiful home, with big yesses and little yesses along the way.
All of those casual conversations in the car, while making dinner together, or under the stars on a camping trip – all those conversations that began with, “When we’re married”, and continued with “I will” and “you will” and “we will” – all those late night talks that included “someday” and “somehow” – and all those deep looks that are unspoken. These are the promises — the yeses that brought you here, to this moment, when once again, you will say yes.
Before today you have been many things to one another — but with this yes you become something new — husband and wife — and begin a whole new life of yesses together.
I like this one
FROM TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE
By Mitch Albom
“Still,” Morrie said, “there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.
“And the biggest one of those values, Mitch?”
Yes?
“Your belief in the importance of your marriage.”
He sniffed, then closed his eyes for a moment.
“Personally,” he sighed, his eyes still closed, “I think marriage is a very important thing to do, and you’re missing a lot if you don’t try it.”
He ended the subject by quoting a poem he believed in like a prayer: “Love each other or perish.”
Because I have a thing for slam poetry. Shihan This Type of Love, which is both funny and sweet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4cMD2lnHWU And also 6 Million by Dan and Dasha which would be cute if you could get two married friends to recite it for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijb-f6JJvIU
Oh hey, that’s me in the picture! I moved on from OBB to the other Offbeat sites once I got married, so I never saw that this picture was used. One of my favorites. 🙂 I was reading “I Like You” by Sandol Stoddard Warburg
Hi, I read something on this web site and can’t find it again. It was a comedy skit which explained the effects of love. I can’t remember much else about it. If anyone could help that would be great. Cheers
We used the Captain Corelli’s Mandolin reading, as well as this:
LOVE
by Roy Croft
I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am when I am with you.
I love you,
Not only for what you have made of yourself,
But for what you are making of me.
I love you
For the part of me that you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand into my heaped-up heart
And passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can’t help dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out into the light all the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked quite far enough to find.
I love you
Because you are helping me to make of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern but a temple;
Out of the works of my every day
Not a reproach but a song.
I love you
Because you have done more than any creed could have done to make me good,
And more than any fate to make me happy.
You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it by being yourself.
We had a Humanist wedding (these are legal in Scotland) which meant only secular texts could be used as readings. We had fun choosing and eventually settled on these three: The Confirmation, by Edwin Muir; i carry your heart, by ee cummings and Sonnet XII, by Pablo Neruda. I loved them all!
Extract from Stardust on love.
I know a lot about love. I’ve seen it, centuries and centuries of it,
and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable.
All those wars… pain, lies, hate… It made me want to turn away
and never look down again. But when I see the way that mankind loves…
You could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never
find anything more beautiful. So yes, I know that love is unconditional.
But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable,
unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and… What
I’m trying to say is…I think I love you. Is this love?
I never imagined I’d know it for myself. My heart… It feels like
my chest can barely contain it. Like it’s trying to escape because
it doesn’t belong to me any more. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it,
I’d wish for nothing in exchange…no gifts. No goods.
No demonstrations of devotion.
Nothing but knowing you loved me too.
Just your heart, in exchange for mine.
We used excerpts from two of our favorite books. The first was From Douglas Adams’ “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish”
“There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which, Fenchurch explained, you could actually swing a cat in, “But,” she added, “only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head. So. Here you are.”
“Yes.”
They looked at each other for a moment.
The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.
For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who wakes one morning to find the door of his cage hanging quietly open and the savanna stretching gray and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.
He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.
He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was,
‘Yes.'”
The second was from Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”
“When he looked into her eyes, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke – the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. Because when you know the language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.”
Also our whovian reading stiched together from quotes from doctor who and Torchwood.
Look at them. What are their chances? But That’s what makes it so brave and wonderful. Making a promise and going forward. Doesn’t matter what happens in the future. Right now it’s real, and it happens, and it’s true.
The good things don’t always soften the bad, but vice-versa, the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
You know when sometimes, you meet someone so beautiful – and then you actually talk to them, and five minutes later they’re as dull as a brick; but then there’s other people. And you meet them and you think, ‘Not bad, they’re okay,’ and then when you get to know them… Their face just sort of becomes them, like their personality’s written all over it, and they just – they turn into something so beautiful.
When you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all… grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that’s it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.
We all change, when you think about it. We’re all different people all through our lives. And that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this. Not one day. I swear.
Reposting via Ashley @Alhoug on the Offbeatbride tribe:
“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in this case demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say that they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.” -Justice Anthony Kennedy, SCOTUS 06/26/2015!!
“I was never helplessly in love with you… . But I saw that you were the kind of man who was worthy of my love. I knew the man I would marry would be good and strong and gentle and honorable and smart and stubborn enough to handle me and … Hold on, I know there must be some other virtue,” she teased.
“Charming? Never forget charming.”
“Sometimes I could do with less of that,” she said. She got serious. “I chose you.”
“Ah, you couldn’t resist me.”
“Yes, yes I could,” she said flatly. “I chose you.”
“How startlingly… unromantic,” he said. …
“I love you body, soul, and breath. Is that unromantic? Love is not a whim. Love is not a flower that fades with a few fleeting years. Love is a choice wedded to action, my husband, and I chose you, and I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.”
— Brent Weeks, The Blinding Knife