Why I’m using a reading from “Les Misérables” at my Pagan wedding

My partner is an atheist, and I am an Atheistic Pagan, so we do not have a concept of a religious soul. Finding a wedding reading that feels right has been challenging, but we settled on a reading from Victor Hugo's book, Les Misérables.

Here's my pagan wedding reading, and why I think it's perfect

The soul mentioned in this passage–to us–is human energy. Love is the greatest of those energies.

The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.

Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven…

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.

I am a Victor Hugo fan. I like The Hunchback of Notre Dame better than Les Misérables, but this is perfect for us. I have a tendency to think rather than follow my heart; however, my heart circumvented my brain when it fell in love with my partner.