Last spring, my niece Kate asked me to perform the ring ceremony in her October wedding. She also asked that I speak “a few words” about love. I told her that since I’m not a minister, I wouldn’t be able to pronounce her and Nate man and wife. Kate said that Nate’s uncle was a minister and would say the “By the power vested in me by God and man...” part of the ceremony. But since Nate’s church didn’t include an exchange of rings in their wedding services, she wanted me to do that. With all that now understood, I agreed to be in the ceremony.
I wrote the first draft on a hot July afternoon and returned to it over the next few months to revise it. This process included sharing it with some people, including Kate and Nate, who said they loved it. A week or so before the big day, I found out there would be about 180 people in attendance. It’s a strange thing, but when I had thought it would be around 50 or so, I was fine. If the gathering were to be 100 people, I would have still been okay. What was there about a larger audience that caused me to be more anxious than a smaller one would have?
The wedding was being held at the Publick House in Sturbridge, MA. A chance of showers had been forecast for the day earlier in the week, but it was a beautiful day, warm for late October. By the time we arrived an hour before the ceremony, I could feel butterflies fluttering in my stomach. I reminded myself I had an important message to share with everyone. I had written my words with care. Deep down beneath the butterflies, I knew everything would go as I hoped it would.
Nate's uncle finished his remarks and introduced me. I stood and walked up to the microphone. I looked at Kate and Nate and then out across at all those who had gathered. I took a breath and began to speak the words I had practiced for the past few weeks. This is part of what I said:
"There have been many songs written about love. One comes from a movie titled 'Love is A Many Splendored Thing.' It was released in 1955, so many of you may not have heard of this song, but it speaks to us in ways that are still true today:
'Love is a many splendored thing
It's the April rose that only grows in the early Spring
Love is nature's way of giving a reason to be living
The golden crown that makes a man a king.'
Today, sixty-six years later, we would say love can and does grow in any season, not just early spring.
Since love is a many splendored thing, it finds many ways to make itself known to us. There is the love of and for God, the love we have for nature and all the creatures who inhabit the natural world with us. There is the love between parent and child, between brothers and sisters, between friends, both two and four legged. There is another presence of love among us today, not just from those whose eyes we can now look into and whose hands we can this moment hold, but also the love we keep in our hearts and always will for those who have gone from our physical presence and who remain with us in spirit.
Today is the day we celebrate the love Nate and Kate have for each other. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote one of the loveliest songs ever about love such as theirs in the musical “South Pacific.”
“Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger
You may see a stranger across a crowded room
And somehow you know, you'll know even then
That somewhere you'll see her again and again.”
Sometimes, when we see a stranger across a crowded room or wherever we are when our eyes first meet, it just so happens that what the eyes have seen is made known to the heart. And sometimes love then begins to grow in the heart and continues to flourish as it did for Kate and Nate until a day like this arrives when love takes on a deeper level of commitment…"
David James Madden