Monday, August 16, 2010

Massachusetts Wedding Officiant - Elly Jackson: The lifetime road to love

Massachusetts Wedding Officiant - Elly Jackson: The lifetime road to love

The lifetime road to love


Yesterday I wrote out of the box for an upcoming ceremony. I actually remembered that I, too, have a marriage, a long one, and experience to draw upon directly. I withhold advice from my weddings in fear that it will sound too much like “elder” scolding.

I have had couples tell me of weddings they’ve seen where the preacher lectured the couple on the divorce rate, during their wedding ceremony. Thus, I have attempted to keep my words strictly upbeat. Who wants to be reminded of the risks on that special day?

But yesterday, when writing the concluding blessing and declaration of marriage, the last words I say before announcing the couple as newlyweds, I wrote something entirely new and completely true to what I know. It may be perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned in 33 years of marriage.

Remember this through the years, as love itself never changes, just the world around it to teach you over and over what love really is. What your particular love will come to mean is beyond predicting, but you will know, just as you somehow knew when you first loved each other. May you honor this adventure always.

What did this come from?  The subject of love is more written about than any subject on earth. What did I learn about love? I remember ten years ago when my husband told me that he didn’t feel any love for me anymore. I told him that love is not a feeling. Love is a choice. Feelings will follow if the choice is sincere. That’s why we make promises at the ceremony: in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, in joy and in sorrow are very real and will predictably happen, if only briefly in some cases.

And then we redefine what love is, out of having made a commitment and sticking with it. This is my road to myself, to awakening, to becoming the spiritual body of my ideals, to being fully human at last.

All adventures are risks. We can’t live without them. It’s all good.