Wedding Ceremony Readings

When you find the right wedding ceremony reading you will know it. It will feel right. Your wedding minister or officiant will likely have some suggestions. You can also find a wealth of selections in wedding planning books and through online wedding sites. Below are some of the wedding readings, poems and quotes that I find particularly inspiring and have used in my Atlanta wedding ministry. Whether you choose any of these for your ceremony or not, they offer inspiration and good food for thought. Enjoy!

From Letters to a Young Poet

Maria Rainer Rilke

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person; it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in themselves. It is a great, demanding claim on them, something that chooses them and calls them to vast distances.”

Madeleine L’Engle

Ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take…It is indeed a fearful gamble…Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

From the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Cornith

“If I speak in tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing…

“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things…Love never fails.”

Hindu Marriage Poem

You have become mine forever.

Yes, we have become partners.

I have become yours

Hereafter, I cannot live without you

Do not live without me.

Let us share the joys,

We are word and meaning, unite.

You are thought and I am sound.

May the nights be honey- sweet for us.

May the mornings be honey- sweet for us.

May the plants be honey- sweet for us.

May the earth be honey- sweet for us.

From The Divine Comedy
Dante

" The love of God, Unutterable and perfect, flows into a pure soul the way light rushes into a transparent object. The more love we receive, the more love we shine forth; so that, as we grow clear and open, the more complete the joy of loving is. And the more souls who resonate together, the greater the intensity of their love, for mirror like, each soul reflects the other."

From The Velveteen Rabbit

Margery Williams

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn't how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn't happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

From Know Deeply, Know Thyself More Deeply

Sonnet XLVIII

D.H. Lawrence

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,

love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock

molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself,

And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.

For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths

out of sight, in the deep living heart.

From The Prophet

Kahlil Gibran

Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage master?

And he answered saying:

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.

Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather by a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

“I dreamed of a wedding of elaborate elegance…

A church filled with flowers, friends and beautiful music…

I asked him what kind of wedding he would wish for…

He said one that would make me his wife.”

-Author UnKnown

“I do not know what it is about you

That closes and opens; only something in me

Understands the voice of your eyes

Is deeper than all roses”

-E.E. Cummings

“The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you, not knowing

how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.

They're in each other all along.