One Hard Part of Weddings

We didn’t have any readings at our wedding (it was short and sweet), but this poem is framed next to our wedding portrait:

Most Like an Arch This Marriage
By John Ciardi

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what’s strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

As an avid reader people ALWAYS ask me to read so I started keeping a list of readings that I liked.

Here are a couple of my favorites that I didn’t see in the comments so far:

Coming Home by Mary Oliver

When we’re driving, in the dark,
on the long road
to Provincetown, which lies empty
for miles, when we’re weary,
when the buildings
and the scrub pines lose
their familiar look,
I imagine us rising
from the speeding car,
I imagine us seeing
everything from another place — the top
of one of the pale dunes
or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea —
and what we see is the world
that cannot cherish us
but which we cherish,
and what we see is our life
moving like that,
along the dark edges
of everything — the headlights
like lanterns
sweeping the blackness —
believing in a thousand
fragile and unprovable things,
looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping
barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.

“Waiting,” by Raymond Carver
from All of Us: The Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)

Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There’s a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there’ll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There’s a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It’s not that house. It’s
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia,
and marigold grow. It’s
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing the sun in her hair. The one
who’s been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
“What’s kept you?”

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Jazz by Toni Morrison
“It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together never mind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love.”

An Apache Blessing
‘Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other. Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before you. May beauty surround you both in the journey ahead and through all the years, May happiness be your companion and your days together be good and long upon the earth.

Treat yourselves and each other with respect, and remind yourselves often of what brought you together. Give the highest priority to the tenderness, gentleness and kindness that your connection deserves. When frustration, difficulties and fear assail your relationship, as they threaten all relationships at one time or another, remember to focus on what is right between you, not only the part which seems wrong. In this way, you can ride out the storms when clouds hide the face of the sun in your lives – remembering that even if you lose sight of it for a moment, the sun is still there. And if each of you takes responsibility for the quality of your life together, it will be marked by abundance and delight.’

At a Catholic wedding you have limited options. I thought the “Love is patient, love is kind” reading was a little trite after hearing it over and over as an altar server when I was a kid, so I decided to pick the trippiest readings allowed. The Song of Songs reading – it starts with “hark!” – is outright erotic and it was one of my favorite parts of the liturgy. My friend who is a poet read it and she definitely stirred the crowd. I still love hearing the line “My lover is like a gazelle” – it makes me laugh and transports me back to my wedding day.

Choosing readings will be the easy part for me — I would love to hear more about choosing bridal attendants! Part of me wants to ask just one close friend to stand with me, so as not to have a parade of people (I have been in weddings with 6, 10, 12 bridesmaids…). The other part of me wonders if I will later regret not including more friends to stand with me? If you are looking for another wedding-related topic, this is one my friends and I debate often (we are in our late 20s — it’s that season of life!).

“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?’
‘Supposing it didn’t,’ said Pooh after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this.”

― A.A. Milne

for wordy people like us (two writers) this was SOOO hard. we ultimately decided on these two readings, a Robert Frost poem & a snippet from A Farewell To Arms.

The Master Speed
No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still-
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar
Robert Frost

At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.- A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway

This post is perfect! We are getting married in a few months and starting to look for readings.

I’d love to see a similar post on the songs people chose for their ceremonies!

We chose this for our 2010 wedding, at a time when many of our gay friends couldn’t be legally married, as an acknowledgment to how lucky we were.

From “Goodridge Vs. Department of Health” by MassachusettsnSupreme Court Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall

Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations….Without question, civil marriage enhances the “welfare of
the community.” It is a “social institution of the highest importance.” … Marriage also bestows enormous private and social advantages on
those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal
commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family…. Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.

Poetry is very personal. I find poems/readings at weddings absolutely cringe-worthy. I’d prefer that they be left out.

Now that you’ve asked… both of my wedding readings came from your blog! I loved two things you shared: John Steinbeck’s letter to his son on falling in love as well as portions of George Saunders’ advice to graduates on choosing kindness, which in turn has become our family guiding principle.

We read excerpts from Harry Potter. Our vows were the vows read for Barney and Robin’s wedding on How I Met Your Mother.

We used this quote:

“You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.

PS You have to be brave.”

― Jeanette Winterson

Just finished proofing the wedding program for my son’s wedding today! They are having the Apache Blessing read and using Justice Anthony Kennedy’s beautifully written paragraph from the ruling on same sex marriage sprinkled throughout. What a timely topic!

One of our readings was Instructions for Life by the Dalai Lama

I attended 3 weddings in 3 months earlier this year, and the readings each couple selected were very special. My favourites were Sandol Stoddart’s poem “I Like You”, Reagan’s letter to his son on the eve of his wedding (the bride’s 89-year-old granddad was the reader – you can imagine the waterworks), and excerpts from Obergefell v Hodges – the prose expounded in the majority judgment is beautiful and universal in its sentiment.

I have been struggling to find a reading for my friends’ wedding for a year. This post has many wonderful ideas. Thanks Joanne, and your lovely readers!

No real readings, but we asked my cousin’s husband, a Rabbi, to “open” the festivities. Our family isn’t Jewish (my cousin converted), so while he was unable to perform the actual ceremony, his sweet sentiments set the tone for the whole evening. And still bring tears to my eyes!

We had a little snippet from Hemmingway which was lovely but in retrospect not as meaningful as this short piece from Homer that was printed on our orders of service:

“For there is nothing better or more excellent than when two people manage a household with a United mind, the husband and wife together. They are a great joy to their friends, a grief to their foes, but they know it best themselves.”

And we do!

Love that Hafiz poem!! All right, I have to add mine, even though there’s already so many comments! I still adore the text we chose, by my favorite author ever, Frederick Buechner. It’s both realistic and hopeful, and just beautifully written.

“They say they will love, comfort, honour each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it but even – for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – when they don’t feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other’s burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is: what do they get in return?

They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they’re lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don’t have children, they each become each other’s child.

They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.”

We had part of a letter John Steinbeck wrote to his son talking about love. We were on maybe our second date when the subject of the website Letters of Note came up and we realized we had both recently read this letter and loved it. I remember sitting at the narrow counter of the burger joint with my (now) husband and feeling like I was in a magic moment while talking about it with him. We both are very impulsive by nature and the last line really resonated with both of us. It still gives me shivers thinking about it. Here is the part we used:

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

My husband and I, both lawyers, were inspired by the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. As soon as the opinion was released and I read the poetic words of Justice Kennedy, I knew it had to be part of our wedding ceremony. We chose the following excerpt and it was very well received:

The lifelong union of a man and a woman always has promised nobility and dignity to all persons, without regard to their station in life. Marriage is sacred to those who live by their religions and offers unique fulfillment to those who find meaning in the secular realm. Its dynamic allows two people to find life that could not be found alone, for a marriage becomes greater than just the two persons. Rising from the most basic human needs, marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations.
Choices about marriage shape an individual’s destiny. “It fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.” The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.
Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurances that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.
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 something greater than they once were.

I think the book “The Big O Meets The Missing Piece” by Shel Silverstein is lovely. If I took a different turn in my life that book would have been what was read at my wedding.

We had two poems. One was Rilke–I don’t remember it. It was a little too formal and intense for us, though I love Rilke. But I still love the other poem:
Robert Frost’s “The Pasture”. The line “–You come too” with the dash and the capital “You” still moves me.