Edge of Somewhere: Words from the wedding

Words from the wedding

My sincere apologies for not updating this site for so long; Penny and I have been married for nearly a month now and, hopefully, as things come to some sense of normalcy here in Sydney, I’ll write more regularly here.

This is my ‘teachable moment’ from the wedding. The minister did not give a message; in lieu of a sermon, Penny and I both shared reflections. I’ll post more from the wedding in the incoming week.

I’d like to speak specifically about the love that is shared between Penny and I. I choose these words carefully. We share a love; it’s not just a single ended love that one or the other of us has. It’s a mutual activity, something that we co-create together. Also, it is between us. It’s both a bond and a buffer. Something about who we are as individuals has drawn us together and holds us in love; but there is also something about love that protects us from bumping in to one another. I’m discovering the equilibrium in love that keeps everything in balance.

I’m going to borrow one of Penny’s favourite phrases here and say that our love may be in a space between; it’s not wholly contained in either one of us but lives in that miraculous place that brings us together. I don’t think that image diminishes the love we have within us at all or separates out love as something outside us. But it makes love something that is not dependent on us; it speaks of love as something more expansive than either one of us could make personally. Love is that unseen matter that does not really collide with the material stuff in the universe. It goes into and through through everything. It infuses us with an energy that is real but is also beyond something we can simply manipulate.

I know that each of us experiences love as something that ebbs and flows; that sometimes it seems stronger…or sometimes that person seems more distant. But if love is that energy between, that underlying force that joins us, then, in a sense, nothing we do really effects it. It’s just our sense of where we are in the connection to it. In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran writes:

When you love you should not say,
‘God is in my heart,’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.’
And think not you can direct the course of love,
for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course…
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the moving shores of your souls.
and give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hands of life can contain your hearts…
You were born together and together you shall be forevermore.

We are both impressed with the fact that, considering all the span of time and geography that could have separated us, there was some larger activity of the universe that brought us together. That there was something about the bond between us that reached across all that. That’s tied to our own actions; but it’s more a matter of destiny than decision. When I was back in the States and we were lamenting the physical distance between us, we said that we could have just as easily been born in different centuries. But somehow, that pervading force of love that brought us together found every right moment and guided all the decisions that brought us to this day. Not just our decisions, but, in a sense, all the decisions that you have made as well. In some way, most of you have had a part in the forming of love here.

Everything we each do ripples out into and intertwines with that force of love between us all. We are entering into a marriage where we have the opportunity to ask, ‘how am I building this energy of love between us?’ I hope that, for each of us, we can ask ourselves that question in every dealing we have with others. That we can ask what is the need that others have for love in this world and how can we be a presence of love to those in need.

Journal • 17 April 2011

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