Reading

Our reading for this morning is by poet Robert Bly, and is called "A Third Body." Bly's poem makes reference to a man and a woman, but it could just as easily be two men or two women.

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born in any other nation, or time, or place.

They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.

 Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.

 The man sees the way her fingers move; he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.

 They obey a third body they share in common.

 They have made a promise to love that body.

Age may come, parting may come, death will come.

A man and woman sit near each other; as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,  someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

"On Love and Marriage"

When the phone rang Friday the voice on the other end was looking for a minister who would be able to perform a service of union later this spring in this church. The speaker had grown up in the area and was aware that services of union are performed here. Each year I perform a combined total of about ten marriages and services of unions. The season tends to begin  every year,  just about now, around Valentine's Day.

It is seasonally appropriate that Valentine's Day is the calendar's most romantic day. How it came to be that way is a bit of a mystery.  The Book of American Days says that there are at least two Sts. Valentine,(and maybe up to 7 or 8 other Valentines, if you count minor characters) anyway two who were martyrs of the church, who are associated with February 14^th. The few known facts of their lives are so interwoven with undocumented traditions that it is impossible to separate fact from legend. The best guess anyone seems to have as to why their names came to be connected to the day in which lovers send tokens to one another is that back in the Middle Ages it was believed that birds began to mate on February 14^th. (If you have good nesting material, old bits of yarn, now is the time to put it out in your yard.)

Working with couples in love at this special time in their lives is one of the many great pleasures of ministry. I remember well receiving my license  in the mail as a divinity student, necessary because I was not yet ordained.  I phoned Elizabeth, who was my teacher in these matters, to tell her it was in hand, and it was only a short time later that I got a call from her saying that she had recommended my services to a couple.  I remember the delight and humor in her voice when she shared that she had recommended me "highly", and, she  said, "with confidence," withholding from the couple only the fact that I had never officiated before. I would do fine, she said firmly.  Meanwhile, I obsessed and worried about what it would be like to say the words "I now pronounce you husband and wife" in a real context.  How surreal.  And what a privilege.

Couples have come in over the years, hesitant, bold, exuberant, shy, each in their turn full of dreams.  Some are 12-step realists on their second marriage, others are young and starry-eyed and as naïve as the day is long. All declare their readiness, a belief in the tomorrow they can shape together, a desire to risk the tie that binds, a willingness, an enthusiasm to declare their faith in one another publicly.  All are hoping, through this ritual act, to be drawn toward greater wholeness. As I turn my thoughts over to the many couples I have known, their stories are so real.  We tell our children the picture book perfect story of Cinderella - today's Prinderella and the Since is a gentle reminder that it's hard to even tell a perfect story, let alone live one.

To this day I carry a small ammonia capsule in my pocketbook, thrust into my hand by the aunt of a bride barely moments before the bridal march was to begin. "She tends to throw up and faint when she gets nervous," she explained dutifully.  The bride did fine.  I, however, was much more nervous than usual.

At the end of the first service of union that I performed here; the two brides exited the sanctuary at the conclusion of the ceremony with friends throwing confetti. The surprise was that, simultaneously a second wedding party was flowing out the doors of the church across the street. All motion seemed to come to a halt for one precious Kodak moment when it seemed everyone recognized that here there were two brides together. Motion resumed when our two brides waved to the bride and groom just before stepping into their limo and driving off happily into the sunset.

There was the children's author and his wife whose wedding was in two parts - first begun in front of a quite magical lighthouse in a stiff wind, and later finished at a Lightkeeper's Inn miles away;

The ancient handfasting celebrated by a couple honoring Scottish roots.  With the groom and best man dressed in kilts and with bagpipes for punctuation,  an ancient ritual binding of marital hands;

The quiet weddings at home of couples who had been so long together that neighbors, seeing the minister visit carrying a black book, might worry there has been a death or illness in the family;

The weddings of interfaith couples, struggling with language and ritual to find a good balance - one that would honor their own integrity and could draw a circle large enough to keep both  their families in;

The wedding which was canceled the night of the dress rehearsal because both partners confessed to be addicts. A year later, these two graduates from rehab proudly tied a sober knot.

The British wedding party who showed up 30 minutes late to their own large wedding because the chauffeur had driven them to the wrong church, but they didn't know until they stepped out of the car.

The couple whose service of union was their answer after their wedding-obsessed daughter had innocently asked, "Why not?" when hearing that her parents had never had a wedding.         There was something right about their children leading them down the aisle, the four of them walking together into a world in which people who love each other do not have to be afraid.

This is all sacred ground, holy sacramental ground. They come, bringing their hopes and dreams to the altar… May their loved ones rejoice in the warmth of the love that has united them.. May they have patience in time of strain, strength in time of weakness, courage in time of doubt, and above all, a growing love. …. They seek our blessing.

All couples want their marriage to provide for them a place to anchor in intimacy and safety; a place from which to go forth refreshed,  as well as a relationship that will give meaning to their days.  No minister, no rabbi, no priest can provide this… our task is to acknowledge the institution and to help them lift up and honor their covenant as an act of public witness.

I have come to agree with the wisdom of Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Safford, who  writes:

"We are here to grant our blessing, because, as Wendell Berry says somewhere, Without a community to exert a shaping pressure around it, [a marriage or any kind of household] may explode because of the pressure inside it. There is no such thing as two people, in love and on their own, any more than there really can exist, in any meaningful way, an individual, an autonomous free-floating human being.

[And this is why, of course, it's so critical for each of us, single, separated, or variously coupled, to support as if our own lives depended on it such basic needs as domestic partnership benefits, or the right to marry (and not just in Vermont), and all these civil rights, human rights, that make it easier, not harder, for a family to be a family, not just in its own eyes but in the eyes of all the world; not just floating out there on its own, where no marriage, however picture perfect, could survive. Without a community to exert a shaping pressure around it, to shout or sing a constant blessing, the whole thing might explode…That's true for all of us, in our fragile little houses made of cards."

And so, beginning around Valentine's Day, calls to the offices of the minister, rabbi, priest and justices of the peace, increase in anticipation of the picture-perfect ritual blessing on a warm-weather day.  We, as clergy, help to make a ceremony, and if we are conscientious, we will impart some realism into conversations that may otherwise have a tendency to float away. Someone, no doubt with experience, once said, "People fall in love, but they have to climb out." To avoid having to do that, there is a language of relationship with which we recommend becoming familiar.  Poet Edna St Vincent Millay observed, "It's not love's going that hurt my days but that it went in little ways." Guidebooks exist which describe various kinds of inhospitable terrain that couples may encounter.  "It is good to talk early and often," we say. "Develop a language of relationship". Novelist Ursula LeGuin described the work of relationships well when she said, "Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread."

We don't know this when we are young, that love has to be made and remade, like bread.

What can that possibly mean? Another way to say it is that we must fall in love many times, always with the same person. What isn't said, what cannot be heard anyway, is there are times when this assignment can become too difficult,  requiring too much, more than we think we have.

I remember a brief moment of personal despair years ago, when it seemed that marriage was too hard for me, too hard for Larry. Only our own voices speaking from off the pages in our own love letters from an earlier, less complex time that made me believe that our love could be remade. Is that too much to share with you?  I don't think so. Relationships have to be made and remade like bread.  Actress Ruby Dee, in the beautiful book I Dream A World, said, "It takes a long time to be really married.  One marries many times at many levels within a marriage."

Poet Jane Hirshfield writes:

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

And so it is with the couple Robert Bly described in "A Third Body." Their breaths together feed someone we do not know.  They share a third body in common… they too, in their exquisite moment of talking or not talking, in their contentment, are bound by proud flesh….  As each of us loves and loves again as we weave our own strands of life into whole cloth with threads of joy, sorrow, passion and pain.  Whether your marriage lasts for a golden lifetime or ends somewhere along the way, proud flesh remains.  The eloquent Victoria Saffords says,

"We stand in desperate need of blessing, every couple, every household, every single person, every one long ago divorced, or separated recently and blinking in the sunlight, every full or breaking heart -- we stand in need of blessing and encouragement.  We should all have celebratory arches of swords and rifles to process through, and grandmothers tossing off their shrouds and dancing in the aisles, honoring, not just our choices, but the integrity with which we hold to them."

Whether, at the moment,  we identify more with Cinderella and the Prince or Prinderella and the Since, the human need for love, blessing and support is with us. The journey is long and full of surprises. Let us love, respect and support one another along the way.