love readings
Yesterday I gave you some tips to get you started thinking about the readings you may want to incorporate into your ceremony. Such readings not only will allow others to feel the joy of your big day, but they also will add a literary resonance to the proceedings. Today I have a couple of readings on love and the essence of marriage.
'Love' may already be in the dictionary, but this Ross Snyder passage on the meaning of the word will undoubtedly leave a more romantic impression on your guests.
Love is sensing the other as a presence. Love is receiving the feelings, thoughts intentions of the other into your own understanding. Love is fidelity over the long haul. Without fidelity love is a puff of wind, a gust of emotion. Love is talking together about insignificant things and significant things until a few important things, words, people have similar meanings for both of you, and you both know that this is so. Love is listening together to the pulse of what-it-means-to-be-alive, to be human, to glorify that which is sacred and enjoy it.
The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, contains many appropriate passages, such as the following, which captures the essence of the husband-and-wife union.
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' may already be in the dictionary, but this Ross Snyder passage on the meaning of the word will undoubtedly leave a more romantic impression on your guests.
Love is sensing the other as a presence. Love is receiving the feelings, thoughts intentions of the other into your own understanding. Love is fidelity over the long haul. Without fidelity love is a puff of wind, a gust of emotion. Love is talking together about insignificant things and significant things until a few important things, words, people have similar meanings for both of you, and you both know that this is so. Love is listening together to the pulse of what-it-means-to-be-alive, to be human, to glorify that which is sacred and enjoy it.
The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, contains many appropriate passages, such as the following, which captures the essence of the husband-and-wife union.
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.
