Below is the "Love & Marriage" message that I shared during the ceremony. After the message, Ingrid and Tony exchanged vows and rings and then I pronounced them husband and wife and introduced them for the very first time as Ingrid and Tony Black.
W.H.
Auden expressed it perfectly in one of his last books, A Certain World, where he wrote, “Like everything which is not the
involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any
marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance,
however passionate.”
What
is the great difference between a romance and a marriage of which Auden
speaks? It’s the signing of that piece
of paper, or walking through animal parts, or stomping on the glass, or jumping
the broomstick, or whatever way a culture provides to make a solemn, public vow
and commitment to which you are held accountable.
The
commitment of marriage is what brings us here today. Tony and Ingrid are both individuals who have
made the decision to join their independent lives in order to create a brand
new family unit. They’re bringing into
this marriage backgrounds, experiences and expectations. Both come from families that value marriage. Ingrid’s parents celebrated 30 years of
marriage this past Monday. Tony’s
parents will celebrate 40 years of marriage next week. (applause)
I’m
sure both of these marriages have had ups and downs, failures and victories,
heartache and elation and I am certain that both couples are composed of
significantly different individuals today than they were on their own wedding
days. 30 and 40 years later, the vows
they made to one another have much deeper meaning and a sense of sincerity that
could not possibly be realized when they said them decades ago. Those promises made to each other have been put
to the test and you have two wonderful examples of what a thriving marriage
looks like. But you’re not committing to
replicating your parents’ marriages.
You’re forging your own path and creating your own story.
A
wedding is not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of
future love. A wedding is not a
celebration of how loving you feel now – that can be safely assumed. Rather, in a wedding you stand up before your
family and friends and all the main institutions of society, and you promise to
be loving, faithful and true to the other person in the future, regardless of
internal feelings or external circumstances.
See, a successful marriage requires falling in love many times and
always with the same person.
That
might be somewhat misleading, though.
Falling in love sounds like it’s something that happens to you, that
it’s out of your control. Tony and
Ingrid have communicated to me that they believe love is a choice, not simply a
feeling. Our emotions are not always under
our control, but our actions are. It is
a mistake to think that you must feel love to give it. If you stress the action of love over the
feeling, you enhance and establish the feeling. Our culture says that feelings of love are
the basis for actions of love. And of
course that can be true. But it is truer
to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love. Love between two people must not, in the end,
be identified simply with emotion or merely with dutiful action. Married love is a symbiotic, complex mixture
of both. Having said this, it is
important to observe that of the two – emotion and action – it is the latter
that we have the most control over. It
is the action of love that we can promise to maintain every day. This is why marriage is not a 50/50
partnership agreement. It is a 100%/100%
commitment to each other.
Ingrid
and Tony, marriage brings you into more intense proximity to one another than
any other relationship can and will.
Therefore, very shortly once the two of you are married, you will begin
to change in profound ways, and you can’t know ahead of time what those changes
will be. Ingrid, you don’t know, you
can’t know, who Tony will actually be in the future until you two get there. Tony, you’re marrying the totality of Ingrid,
which means you are marrying the changes, not just the one, single, momentary
version of Ingrid who walked down this aisle.
So, both of you will wake up every morning, sort of the same, but sort
of new. You’ll look at each other and
introduce yourselves again and choose to love who you see. You choose to love and that’s the only thing
that will never change.
*Experts from The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller were the basis for this message. It doesn't matter if you're single or married, I strongly encourage you to read it.
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