A Wedding in the Redwoods

In matters of love, whether someone is Pagan or Christian, or secular or Muslim is pretty much irrelevant.  They all can come together to celebrate its triumph and its promise in that field where it most fully manifests: the relation of one loving being to another.  There might well have been vast religious and political differences among the guests, but it did not matter in the celebration of something more basic, more primordial.

It got me to thinking about the changing nature of marriage within our society.  At one time marriage was for many reasons other than love: economic well-being, raising a family to provide for old age and to further the line, and for the powerful, cementing political alliances.  Marriage for love was even suspect because love is fleeting, or so makes for a fragile union.

Certainly infatuation is fleeting, which is why a rapid marriage, made under its influence, often falls apart as both partners increasingly see their partners for who they are rather than as fantasies.  The same holds for chemistry.  Chemistry is certainly a part of a relationship, particularly early on, but it is not sufficient, and love need not depend on it.  The pure energy part of relationships fades over time, I think, but the love need not.

The problems of marrying for love are different.  Mostly, we are not all that good at it, despite love's being a quality that in at least some of its forms is uniquely human.  But few are  utter failures at it either, and some people get  better with practice.  Hopefully this holds for us all.

Even marriages made for love where the partners ultimately drift away, and ultimately divorce, still can end harmoniously, and with affection on both sides.  I've seen it happen repeatedly.  These marriages are not complete failures by any means.

One of this weekend's wedding's most wonderful elements, one that was new to me, was a time for married guests to address the bride and groom with insights from their own marriages as to how to make them last.  After they had done so, they watered a small tree, an oak, blessing it.  That tree would later be planted where the couple lived.  

I loved that ritual, integrating as it did the human realm with that of nature, and the many kinds of flourishing that life makes possible. 

The ultimate futility of the current conniptions by so-called defenders of "traditional marriage" came clear to me during this ceremony.  This wedding's center of gravity was love, not economics, not family, and certainly not politics.  But love is something that is open ended.  The movement towards gay men and women being able to marry one another is the ultimate outcome of this logic.  And more power to them. This is why the childless Limabugh and others are forced to argue that marriage exists to raise children, ignoring their own behavior in the process.

The traditionalists' worry that its logic leads to marrying animals shows them for their complete inability to understand mature human love.  In a way, that so many could make such a claim suggests how far they themselves are from understanding or perhaps experiencing love for another.  They are representatives of a fading past where marriage was made for reasons other than love, and that so few actually walk their talk in their personal lives suggests that day is done.  The issue is whether we can grow into a new and finer way of relating, or not. 

Perhaps in this portion of life we as a people are actually making progress.  This weekend it was easy to think so.