I love weddings, and was quite honored when, in 2008, some young friends asked me to officiate at theirs; they said they wanted a “Belief Systems & Other BS style” marriage talk. Honored, but also a little apprehensive. For my radio show was known for espousing the weird beliefs of others along with my own godless philosophy, and while I knew this would play well in Paonia, Colorado—last redoubt of the unreconstructed hippie—and that Carl and Kelly were spiritually liberal people with their own set of weird beliefs, I also knew that this would be a fairly large ceremony with plenty of people of conventional faith gathered together from all over the country. And who wants to be controversial at a wedding?
I wrote a talk that spoke to the conventionally religious and to godless heathens, and I have to say it went extremely well. To keep people guessing, I wore a black velvet jacket that looked gay, but not too gay, and an all white priest’s shirt with collar that looked holy, but not too holy. I started with ‘Dearly Beloved’ because I couldn’t resist, I kept the talk short and sweet—about eight minutes plus vows and ring exchange, I made sure it was personal, and I put in some laughs. And after it was over, plenty of people from both camps made sure to shake my hand and tell me it was one of the best wedding talks they’d ever heard—it really turned out to be a lovely wedding and reception (I was also the bartender!) and if you’re in a similar situation, you could do worse. Feel free to copy, sample, or remix as needed, and don’t feel obligated to credit me… although if you do use this somehow, I’d love to hear about it.
faced with the enduring enigma of love, we can only be grateful that it happens to us now and then
Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to bear witness to a most sacred event, the joining of two souls in holy matrimony. And even though marriage is quite a common thing in one sense—so common that many folks undergo the ordeal several times—it remains mysterious, so inexplicable and strange that we humans tell ourselves a variety of stories in our efforts to understand it. In the view of many, marriage is an arrangement received directly from God, instituted almost simultaneously with the very creation of humans: a man shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. And in the view of some others, the pair bonding of two hairless primates is an evolutionary strategy that improves the odds for survival of offspring.
It’s interesting that both of these ‘explanations’ of marriage point to something holy. For those who accept conventional religious views, marriage is a divine gift, a state with many blessings and rights and privileges, a way for two people to stand together in a difficult world and support each other. For godless heathens, marriage is a triumph of awareness, an attempt by our species to direct our own evolution and find enlightened ways to manage reproduction and sexual energy.
And both these views highlight the difficulties that face any married couple. The religious point out that we live in a fallen world, and that worldly temptations and our own sinful flesh work against the family arrangement. Marriage is seen as a virtuous struggle and the reward for fidelity is a clean conscience before our Maker. Alternately, marriage is seen as an attempt to sublimate the impulses of our long evolutionary past. Rather than sin, we struggle against the desire to mate indiscriminately, or to express anger uncontrollably, and we fight against that awful demon, jealousy.
And that’s just two possible views. In a crowd this size, there may be dozens of differing views of marriage, and there may even be husbands and wives who tell different stories about their own relationship and what it means. Very different people are gathered and yet, here we all are; we’re all happy to be here. Happy and honored, happy and hopeful, happy and in agreement that what we’re here to witness is something special, something amazing, something sacred.
So why would these two delightful kids embark on such a mysterious journey, so fraught with peril? Well, they love each other, don’t they? They’ve been working at it for several years, their love has blossomed and grown strong, and now they want to commemorate that love, acknowledge it to their friends and family, and they want the state to endorse and license their union, so that they never have to testify against each other in court. And love is an even stranger thing than marriage. The Bible, for example, has almost nothing to say about romantic love, evolutionary theorists have a hard time explaining it, neurologists are trying to come up with a chemical basis for the weird feelings that go along with love, but the fact is, love, like faith, is hard to define and hard to make happen; maybe we say we ‘fall’ in love because it always seems like an accident, something that happens to us while we’re making other plans. And yet, love is the engine of all human achievement. As Max Ehrmann wrote in Desiderata, ‘never be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.’ Faced with the enduring enigma of love, we can only be grateful that it happens to us now and then, and we can delight when we’re invited, as now, to share in the love that others are celebrating.
So, who are the people who stand before you now, so patiently enduring this talk and this whole wedding extravaganza? It’s a curious feature of weddings that about half of you know Carl pretty well, and the other half of you know Kelly pretty well, but relatively few of you know both of them well. So here’s a little biographical sketch of both celebrants:
[Here I related some biographical details of Carl’s life, concluding at the moment just before he met Kelly.]
[And here I related some biographical details of Kelly’s somewhat more ambitious life, which I emphasized with a sidelong look at Carl that got a few laughs, concluding at the moment just before she met Carl.]
So Carl literally bumped into Kelly and what do you know there was a spark, and that was the beginning of the rest of their lives. [Here I gave details of how Carl and Kelly ended up in Paonia, got a shout out from the local mountain biking crew, and generally worked in some local flavor for the benefit of out-of-towners.]
So, that’s your married couple. Max? (Max was a youngster that brought up the rings… during the event, I got flustered and kind of forgot about Max, but Kelly got me back on track.]
[Kelly and Carl wrote and here delivered their own vows to each other—they both did a very nice job, which was to be expected as they have about four degrees between them—I used that fact to put a little pressure on them prior to delivery.]
Carl, you may now kiss the bride. [Totally patriarchal, of course, but who hasn’t wanted to say, “You may now kiss the bride,” at least once in their lives?]
[And because, in Colorado, you’re not actually married until the marriage license is signed we here had one of the groomsmen present a pen and the license, and I turned around and offered my back as a desk]
[And then I presented the married couple, and a great shout was heard throughout the land. And yea verily, there was great rejoicing and they did party throughout the night.]
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