This past weekend I had the
pleasure of attending a wedding that wonderfully integrated Pagan and more
traditional motifs, held within a redwood grove, not far from where I
live.  The ceremony was a subtle
interweaving of magickal and shamanic principles within a framework that the
bride and groom’s more traditional family members seemed to find very
enjoyable.  As I did.

In matters of love, whether
someone is Pagan or Christian, or secular or Muslim is pretty much
irrelevant.  They all can come
together to celebrate its triumph and its promise in that field where it most
fully manifests: the relation of one loving being to another.  There might well have been vast religious and political differences among the guests, but it did not matter in the celebration of something more basic, more primordial.

It got me to thinking about the
changing nature of marriage within our society.  At one time marriage was for many reasons other than love:
economic well-being, raising a family to provide for old age and to further the
line, and for the powerful, cementing political alliances.  Marriage for love was even suspect
because love is fleeting, or so makes for a fragile union.

Certainly infatuation is fleeting,
which is why a rapid marriage, made under its influence, often falls apart as
both partners increasingly see their partners for who they are rather than as
fantasies.  The same holds for chemistry.  Chemistry is certainly a part of a relationship, particularly early on, but it is not sufficient, and love need not depend on it.  The pure energy part of relationships fades over time, I think, but the love need not.

The problems of marrying for love are different.  Mostly, we are not all that good at it, despite love’s being
a quality that in at least some of its forms is uniquely human.  But few are  utter failures at it
either, and some people get  better with practice.  Hopefully this holds for us all.

Even marriages made for love where the
partners ultimately drift away, and ultimately divorce, still can end harmoniously, and
with affection on both sides.  I’ve
seen it happen repeatedly.  These
marriages are not complete failures by any means.

One of this weekend’s wedding’s most
wonderful elements, one that was new to me, was a time for married guests to
address the bride and groom with insights from their own marriages as to how to
make them last.  After they had
done so, they watered a small tree, an oak, blessing it.  That tree would later be planted where the couple lived.  

I loved that ritual, integrating as it
did the human realm with that of nature, and the many kinds of flourishing that
life makes possible. 

The ultimate futility of the
current conniptions by so-called defenders of “traditional marriage” came clear
to me during this ceremony.  This wedding’s center of gravity was love, not economics, not family, and certainly not
politics.  But love is something
that is open ended.  The movement
towards gay men and women being able to marry one another is the ultimate
outcome of this logic.  And more
power to them. This is why the childless Limabugh and others are forced to argue that marriage exists to raise children, ignoring their own behavior in the process.

The traditionalists’ worry that
its logic leads to marrying animals shows them for their complete inability to
understand mature human love.  In a
way, that so many could make such a claim suggests how far they themselves are
from understanding or perhaps experiencing love for another.  They are representatives of a fading
past where marriage was made for reasons other than love, and that so few
actually walk their talk in their personal lives suggests that day is
done.  The issue is whether we can
grow into a new and finer way of relating, or not. 

Perhaps in this portion of life we
as a people are actually making progress. 
This weekend it was easy to think so.