Rachel and Simon Pollack at their wedding, September 2, 2017 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

On Labor Day weekend, my wife’s son, Simon, was married to his beloved Rachel.
At the ceremony, I was asked to say a word about love:

One of our culture’s most tenacious fictions is
the autonomous individual: self-made, self-sufficient,
like Shakespeare’s Richard III when he says, “I am myself alone.”

But we have gathered here to refute that tired fiction.
No man––or woman––is an island.
Or as another English poet put it,
“I am he as you are she as you are me and we are all together.”

The commitment Simon and Rachel are making is a deeply personal act;
but it is also a public one, testifying in community
to our common vocation to love one another
“with gladness and singleness of heart.”

Unique as each of us is,
we are all made to be in relationship with others,
in communion with others.
Relationship isn’t just something we have or something we do;
it’s something we are.
We only exist in relationship––with other people, with the natural world,                 
with the sacred Source and Giver of life.

The ‘I’ who is myself is only realized in communion with what is more than myself.
‘I’ cannot exist without ‘Thou.’
Human life at its heart is an event of communion
in which we join the divine dance toward which all being tends.
When we love one another,
we manifest the fundamental pattern and flow of the universe.

And so, we who are creatures of such deep longing,
keep reaching for that larger truth of our existence.
We sense our incompleteness, and seek beyond our solitude
for the answering Presence in which we may be completed.

Raymond Carver expressed this, fittingly enough, in the form of a dialogue:

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
to feel myself beloved on the earth.

The theologians say you can never really know yourself
until you see yourself as the Divine Lover sees you––
until you feel yourself, know yourself, as beloved.

Simon and Rachel have discovered this loving gaze through one another,
and they will be blessed by that every day.
And so will we, for such love wants to shed its grace
freely and generously on everyone it encounters.

Simon, Rachel, we rejoice that when Love called, you said yes,
and that you each choose today to be for the other
“a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity,
a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy.”

You remind us by your example
that we are too are made to love,
whatever form that may take in our own stories––
not just love as a feeling,
but love as a choice, an intention, an act of the will
transcending self-interest to affirm, nurture and guard
the well-being of the beloved, with all our heart and mind and soul and strength.

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes,

We were all born like empty fields.
What we are now shows what has been planted.

Simon, Rachel, you are each a beautiful harvest, planted by many hands.
Some of those are here today, while some are absent in body but present in spirit.
And today you plant a new field together.
May your marriage be blessed with unimaginable abundance.

And to borrow the words of a writer describing Dante’s poetic vision of Paradise,
may the days be many when your marriage will
“not be the extinction of desire, but its constant fulfillment,
the attainment of a perfect state of equilibrium
whereby [your] soul will always receive what it desires
and will never cease desiring what it receives.”

Let me close with a poem by Jane Kenyon
which beautifully conveys the quality of married life.
There is none of the rapturous ecstasy we expect from a love lyric;
instead, we are given a quietly observant description
of the poet and her husband arriving home from a road trip.

It’s called “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer.”
The speaker never says “I,” only “we.”
Whatever happens, happens to both of them together.
The details are small and ordinary,
but the fact that they are shared so naturally,
like a practiced ritual,
signals the strength of the bond between the partners.

We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done––the unpacking, the mail
and papers . . . the grass needs mowing. . . .
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

Here is a moment of pure gift––
the ripened fruit offering itself as a sacrament of fecundity and blessing.
They might have missed it and just gone inside to get busy.
But they were in love, and love was in them.

And love always notices.

They walk out into the meadow,
and there, like communicants at the altar,
husband and wife are fed, as if by a sacred hand.

In this moment, we hear an echo of Paradise Lost:
they’re like Adam and Eve, plucking fruit in the garden.
But this time there is no fall from grace.
There is only blessing.
These lovers are not on the verge of exile.
They have come home.

. . . and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.