WHY WEDDINGS MATTER
FIVE MELODIES OF LOVE
THE MARRIAGE BODY
We know why marriage matters -- whether it is the federal government reminding us that marriages make stronger a nation, or the AMA telling us that being married correlates with longer life, better health and faster recovery from illness, or just our own hearts whispering fiercely that THIS person makes our world go ‘round and life worth living – we know that marriage matters. But, does a wedding matter? In this day and age, at least in the U.S. it is de rigeur for couples to move in together and get about the business of life, often without a marriage license, and no one gasps in disapproval. Weddings are expensive to pay for, time-consuming to plan and emotionally draining to implement.
So, why weddings?
The deep answer lies in the much maligned and misunderstood realm of mythology. Joseph Campbell, the great expositor of myth in this generation, says: “Myth is the collective dream; dream is the personal myth.” When we are in the dreamy state called “being in love” we are in more than a heightened emotional state. We are “in” a collective myth that sets the parameters and possibilities of that state and defines both the promises and the problems of that particular adventure. When we enter into marriage, we enter – knowingly or unknowingly – into a territory that has already been explored, claimed, conquered and colonized for centuries by our ancestors. We become tax-paying citizens of that mythic realm the minute we put the ring on our finger!
I have been creating and officiating weddings for more than a dozen years and whenever I hear a new couple tell me, “Oh, we don’t expect our relationship to change just because we’re getting married; after all, we’ve been living together for years,” I smile and shake my head and relate the following anecdote about Joseph Campbell.
Several years ago I had the privilege of escorting Mrs. Joseph Campbell – Jean Erdman Campbell – to Santa Barbara, California, where she was giving a lecture. After the event, we retired to our hotel where she regaled me with stories of her life with Joe. Speaking with the lilt and laughter of the young woman she’d been in 1939 when she and Joe married, she recalled how it had been he who wept profusely for the duration of the wedding ceremony. He had insisted on getting married on the 5th hour of the 5th day of the 5th month of the year, for five was the symbolic number of the great Norse god, Thor, whose thunderbolt is the harbinger of transformation. Campbell, realizing the profound shift that was imminent, wanted that symbol to accompany him to the altar for, as he remarked, “I will not be the same man when I return from that walk!” Campbell understood the true significance of the wedding ceremony and his emotional response is eloquent testimony to just how well he did understand!
The wedding ceremony itself may be likened to the opening paragraph of a great story, as the Nobel award-winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, notes:
“The effort in writing a story is intense… where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm. length, and sometimes even the personality of a character.” (from the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims; Penguin Books, 1993)
The wedding matters because it is the symbolic event that shapes the marriage journey itself: the pattern from which the fabric of the relationship is cut; the template from which each day of the marriage is fashioned; the opening chord which heralds the tune, tempo and key of the symphony of love; the cornerstone around which the edifice of a shared life will be built. Use whatever metaphor works for you. The wedding is the initiating ritual which forever divides the before from the after and, as such, it matters.
“Ritual, as I understand it, gives form to human life; not in mere surface arrangement, but in depth,” wrote Joseph Campbell.
Like Campbell, I was raised Catholic and left the church during my twenties in search of something else. But, also, like Campbell, I never forgot the enduring importance of ritual in human life. When I began doing weddings as part of my Unitarian ministry, I was quickly brought to a standstill in front of a major dilemma: on the one hand, I did not believe in much of what the old rituals of weddings were doing -- in fact, I thought they were downright unhealthy for most modern couples! – but to denounce the wedding was clearly to throw the baby out with the bath water. How could I, in good conscience, ask people to mouth old platitudes and promises that did not spring from their own hearts and their own beliefs?
I set out to explore the origins of ritual and found my first clues, ironically, in the expressive, impulsive, cathartic gestures made by individuals who were in the process of getting divorced. I asked them what they had done with their wedding rings! In story after story what emerged was a pattern of mostly unpremeditated intelligence that provided a very individualized way to heal the hurt, guilt and anger, and find a way towards forgiveness, gratitude and release. I had discovered “spontaneous ritual” – a facet of human behavior that I now recognize as a basic human instinct. [see my article on Spontaneous Ritual at: www.humanrites.org]
From the broken pieces of life humans build psychological bridges, based on metaphoric truths, to take them back to wholeness. I took this insight to the couples who came to me for help in making their wedding ceremonies and I asked them to talk about the deep, connecting images that made their love visible and articulable. In listening to more than five hundred couples since 1990, I realized that every couple has a “centering metaphor” for the relationship that often comes out between the lines of our conversation. Once that metaphor is found, the rest of the ritual naturally gathers around it like metal shavings to a magnet, giving the ceremony a coherence and aesthetic integrity – not to mention psychological depth – that is palpable.
When the wedding ceremony itself – the ritual that transforms two humans individuals into “beloved companions for life” – corresponds in every feature to the deep centering metaphor of the relationship, then it becomes much more than simply the short, obligatory skit before the big party! Instead, it becomes a renewing spring for the duration of the marriage. This metaphor fits the image I like to use to explain the significance of the wedding ritual to prospective couples, that of words as the water of life.
“If you spend the time to dig this well of love deep enough now,” I tell them, “lining it carefully with well-chosen words, gestures and symbolic objects, then this wedding with its vows will be for you an endless source of renewal for as long as you live. You may return to it during the dry and desperate days that every marriage must go through and draw once again from its depths the same life-giving sweetness that you tasted on that day so long ago when you stood before each other, hand in hand, and promised your life into each other’s keeping.”
Yes, this ritual is important. Yes, weddings matter!
~ Rev. Rebecca Armstrong
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Classic Melodies of Love in Greek Philosophy
The ancient Greeks, from whom we borrow so much of our culture, used a variety of words to distinguish the different aspects of this complicated emotion of "love." We moderns have been greatly handicapped by losing these critical distinctions, as our convoluted and frustrating conversations about the topic reveal. Here are the basic differences in the five types of love as defined by the Greek philosophers: Storge, Philia, Eros, Agape and Xenia.
What we describe as domestic harmony in a marriage – affection, caring about, providing for, shared homemaking concerns, raising children, doing things as a family, creating holidays, building memories – all fall under the heading of what the Greeks called Storge, or familial love. It is a natural and expected bond between family members, which offers unconditional acceptance and is ready to sacrifice for the good of the group. It is a beautiful and necessary condition for a healthy family and community. It is inclusive of all the family but draws firm boundaries between “Us” and “Them.”
The Greeks also had words for other kinds of love: Philia, the loyal bond between friends who share a vision, a path or a common call; Eros, the passionate yearning for physical union, a pining to be always in the presence of the beloved and adoration of the qualities of the other; Agape, the pinnacle of selfless, spiritual love which perceives and works for the good of the loved one, even at a distance; and Xenia, hospitality, the love of the stranger, a ritualized friendship formed between a host and his guest, which bound them together as allies for the duration of the guest’s stay.
Xenia is an essential idea in international as well as national harmony for it predisposes the mind toward seeing “the other” as a friend rather than adversary. In many respects, hospitality is the foundation of civic society, without which only law and punishment can regulate relations between persons. Xenophobia – fear of the stranger – is the opposite of this love.
Philia was much revered by the Greeks as a sublime form of affection often shared between comrades-in-arms or between student and teacher. It was felt that this kind of love was essential for the formation of strong character and much mentoring was done under the wing of Philia. Philia could be extended through a family or a nation, binding siblings and citizens together in this noble affection.
Erotic love has been well-known to modern societies through its cultivation by the Troubadours of the 11th and 12th centuries. It is a complicated form of love which has a spiritual aspect often overlooked by a shallow or hasty interpretation. The physical yearnings of the flesh are invited to be the agent of a soulful longing that unites the lover to God. As one of the troubadour poets exclaimed: “I reach toward heaven through a woman!” In its darker incarnation, Eros is reduced to mere physical lust which may shift into power struggles or desires to dominate or possess the other. It has been considered by many philosophers to be one of the great motivating forces in all human history – for good and for ill!
Agape was a chaste form of affection, later adopted as an ideal by the Roman Christians who remembered these varieties of love from the Greeks. Agape is the patient, tolerant, compassionate love announced in the famous Corinthians passage by St. Paul, seeking not its own, but another’s good: “Love is patient. Love is kind.”
In the latter two forms of love – Eros and Agape -- is the insistence on a type of intimacy – a profound focus on the interiority of the other. Without this interest and attentiveness to the particularity, and sometimes peculiarity of the other, these forms of love cannot survive. Storge, Philia and Xenia are concerned with how the relationship affects the outer world and forms of interaction; Eros and Agape with the inner landscape of the heart/soul/mind. Eros, as we all know, has a special interest in the physical form of the beloved, whereas Agape looks beyond the physical into the simple or spiritual humanity of the other.
Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist and a marriage partner for 50 years, noted that until Eros has become muted between two people, it is not possible to see by the light of Agape and to know whether true compassion has arisen between the partners. Agape, he felt, is the presence of love that enters during the mature phase of a marriage.
Many marriages partake of Philia, where two people face the world together as friends, partners, comrades, colleagues. Eros may or may not be present, but many dynamic couples – artists, poets, scientists, political activists – show the power of this form of love to sustain a long relationship. This form of love is often called “the shoulder-to-shoulder” relationship, for the partners learn about and support each other through what they do, rather than who they are. Some marriages go in and out of this collegial form of love, returning to Eros at peak moments of intimacy.
Storge is also a sustaining type of love and can hold a family and a marriage together for many years. Yet, this type of love is not the same as intimacy and cannot be a permanent substitute for intimacy. Indeed, intimacy may “rock the boat” of daily Storge rituals, for intimacy is, first and foremost, being present to the moment. In the moment, something new may come to light for in the loving quietude of true attention to the beloved, the soul is finally free to be born. This is one reason why every marriage counselor advises partners to leave the confines of house and family responsibilities if they want to re-kindle romance. Eros requires a space to be face-to-face and without distraction, while Agape soars when the soul essence of the beloved becomes visible beyond the persona of the daily roles of husband, wife, child, etc.
While it may be considered ideal for all five forms of love to co-exist simultaneously in a relationship, it is much more likely that there will be seasons or cycles among the styles of loving. In fact, a relationship that has all of them at high pitch might be too exhausting and cut the lovers off from other valid relationships in the world. Whether in marriage, or in the exploration of one’s own place in the vast family of earth, or an attempt to understand the ways and means of society, it is essential to explore all the melodies of Love. Finding where you are in the ebb and flow of these different currents of love, and learning to tend and honor each of them, is a beautiful exercise in wisdom and gratitude.
Dr. Rebecca Armstrong 2007
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A Story in the Life & Death of Forms
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” ~ Wm. Blake
All human experience comes to us through FORMS. This was the great revelation of Immanuel Kant who coined the term “categories of mind” and pointed out that we can only know things as they appear to us through our mindset with its limitations and predilections. All physical phenomena have forms – even wind, water and light have patterns that can be observed and predicted in the great game of cause and effect. Ideas require FORM in order to be fully experienced in the human realm. These FORMS are the archetypes, the well-worn river beds into which new experiences tend to flow.
MARRIAGE is a FORM that is constructed collectively and individually to be a container for many things: sexual satisfaction, procreation, raising children, easing loneliness, owning and bequeathing property, running businesses, creating dual-units for the social system, maintaining tribal loyalties, passing down genetic and moral codes, etc. It also is the container for subtler forms of energy like: affection, imagination, memory, fear, faith, shared experience, projection, joy, disappointment, hope, anger, transformation, compassion, impatience, yearning, bliss, etc. At any given time, one or more of these may be in ascendancy or may seem to have vanished altogether.
All these emotions and effects may be experienced outside of marriage too, but the accumulated power of them within the FORM of a single marriage feeds what I will call The Marriage Body and gives it the illusion of substance. It is now a “something” which has a past, a future and can exert influence over people and events in the real world.
Is there “really” a marriage body? If it “dies” the two people grieve over it as if it were a living thing and the physical symptoms often found in divorcing couples give strength to the idea that something has been severed or cut off, cut out, killed. Here is how poet, Robert Bly, describes the Marriage Body:
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body they have in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
(The Third Body by Robert Bly)
Now, you may have experienced, or know someone who has experienced, the unsettling sensation of waking up one morning and suddenly not recognizing your own spouse. Or, even if you recognize the contour of the body and the face, all feelings of marital love have simply vanished. Like a radio whose dial has been jostled, you can’t tune in to the “we” frequency anymore. Only then do you recognize the ephemeral nature of the Marriage Body which is entirely based on a tacit, unconscious agreement about a shared past and an anticipated future. It is a drama in which two co-authors are also the stars. In that moment of lapse you inadvertently stumbled into the place called the Present where the flow of life is all there is. Sometimes you can jostle yourself back into the play called Our Marriage, but sometimes you cannot, as if you “missed the tide” and that ship sailed without you. Now you find that the reality you are tuned into places different demands on you. It’s like finding yourself inside a different a game.
Marriage is a FORM of the type called PLAY.
In all successful PLAY it is necessary for the players to take on roles, agree to goals and rules, boundaries, penalties, points, etc. Play can be exhausting, painful, dangerous, risky, but people choose to do it because it is basically FUN. It allows you to do those things that human beings like to do the most: test your abilities, learn new things, be cooperative and competitive, hang out with other human beings, see the world from different perspectives, feel really alive.
The reason that people say vows like “I will love you forever” or “until death do us part” is that marriage as PLAY is more FUN and life-affirming for both players when it is an INFINITE rather than a FINITE game.* Infinite games are all about keeping the play of possibilities alive; finite games are about winning and losing. If you are in a relationship where somebody always has to win and somebody has to lose, then you are in a finite game which is not life-affirming and ultimately, not much fun. What makes marriage such a desirable game is its infinite quality. The Marriage Play is open-ended in that there is no end point where one player wins and the other loses; its possibilities of enjoyment and learning stretch out into infinity. This does not mean that the play of marriage that you are in has to last forever – in fact, that’s impossible. The bodies that both players are in will eventually wear out and death will end the game in its present form. What it means is that marriage participates in the qualities of the infinite – meaning that if you play it, you get a taste of what eternity is. That is worth the play! As mythologist Joseph Campbell tried to explain to Bill Moyers:
“Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time.
Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of
here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off.
And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.”
The kind of eternity the Play of Marriage allows you to experience has to do with recognizing the boundless nature of love, compassion, forgiveness, joy and delight in another’s wellbeing. It’s sort of like getting to play god and goddess for awhile, which is why so many cultures treat the bride and groom as if they were the divine couple during their wedding ceremony.
The vows of fidelity around marriage and the idea of “til death do us part” increase the enjoyment of the game in the same way that raising the stakes do in other games – these are the boundaries that help refine the play and keep us focused and invested in the unfolding drama.
Now, it is fully possible for two people to change their relationship or separate in such a way that it is life-affirming for both players. That is, to keep alive the sense of play for both partners while ending the FORM of the play they have been in. This requires giving up the idea of winners and losers. It also allows the soul to remain alive and interested in the proceedings, which, when you think in terms of infinity – or even of getting through next week -- is not a bad trade-off.
To enter into a marriage soulfully means to understand the playful nature of all life forms and respect all your game partners. It means that you are open to changing the FORM of the marriage which includes altering the game plan, the ground rules and the player’s roles – whatever is necessary to keep the PLAY enjoyable and compelling for both players. Then, even if you finish your partnership because each of you just ran out of chips to play or moves to make, you can still honor one another for the amount of time and energy that each did put into making the play enjoyable; remembering the best of the times and the life lessons that came from them. If you end your marriage because you were like two samurai warriors and it just became too exhausting to continue, you can still salute one another as honorable opponents and reflect on the valuable skills you learned in such intense and fierce play. If one of you wanted to end the game sooner than the other, each can take comfort in the fact that opportunities to find new FORMS of the PLAY are endless and offer themselves to us each and every day in myriads of forms.
Entering relationships with this level of consciousness is difficult because it runs against the grain of the myths of romantic love and America’s obsession with “being special.” It requires an existential awareness of the fleeting beauty of all life forms and the preciousness of all experience:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones
knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(from "In Blackwater Woods" by Mary Oliver)
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Rev. Rebecca Armstrong
* For more on Finite and Infinite Games, see the book by James Carse of that name. Highly recommended for giving perspective during times of crisis.
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