For Better and Worse

Wedding Readings

08 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by kathleenerindavis in Uncategorized Tags: ceremony, family, Love, parents, wedding readings

I’m a word geek. I underline passages in books, and rip out pages in magazines. I have multiple journals filled with quotes, poems, and passages. So when it comes to the words that will make up our wedding ceremony, I’ve given it a lot of thought.

As I mentioned before I wrote the ceremony a few months back (stealing bits and peices from various sources) and more recently I’ve been working on my vows as well. I’m even working on a little art project of paintings with quotes about love that I’ll frame and put on the gift and cake tables.

We’ve been thinking about the roles that everyone will play in the wedding, and we’d really like to include our parents in the ceremony in someway since they are such an important part of who we are. So we’ve asked our parents to do readings at the ceremony.

As pretty as it is, you know I can’t just pick the much used 1 corinthians. I had to scour the internet for more hours than I should admit amassing all my favorite readings in one massive document. The best source I’ve found was the forums on Indie Bride 

The problem is that some of my favorites  (like the poem “Love” by Roy Croft) is written in the first person and therefore might sound kind of odd for a reading done by our parents.

If there’s a reading you’ve heard at a wedding and loved please put it in the comments, my collection is always growing!

Here is the one that my mom is going to read:

“Love”, author unknown

Love is a friendship that has caught fire.
It is quiet understanding,
mutual confidence,
sharing and forgiving.
Love is loyalty through good and bad.
It settles for less than perfection,
and makes allowances for human weakness.
It’s the day-in and day-out chronicle of compromises,
small disappointments, big victories, and working toward common goals.
Love is content with the present.
It hopes for the future and it doesn’t brood over the past.

And we are working to find something for Mark’s parents, here are some ideas so far:

Excerpt from the Velveteen Rabbit
by 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. “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.”

A Marriage
by Michael Blumenthal

You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms
are tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceiling
will soon collapse.

But then, unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel relief,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner’s arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
without the house falling.

Love is Temporary Madness
by Louis de Bernieres

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.

And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.

Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion.

That is just being in love, which any fool can do.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.