Wedding Reading, by David M.

What is love, ultimately?

In every civilisation since the dawn of time man has asked this question. We have asked the question most pertinently when we have felt its power; it's ability to shock us, to redeem us, to tell us something about the very nature of human existence which makes it so mysterious and yet so novel

Even after these many thousands of years new hearts ask old questions. They ask why it is they feel this strange burning in the chest when thinking of their loved one. They ask why it is they drive a hundred miles to Lincoln to pick up their beloved's best friend even though they are exhausted after a shattering day at work. They ask why they feel such a strong desire to do the things they might not necessarily want to do simply to make that other person a little bit happier. What is this curious zeal a person feels which is so oddly out of touch with our typical responses, our typical passions, our typical selfishness.

Love, they tell us, is something involving chocolates and roses and small ornaments from expensive shops. Sometimes that is the case, if one considers love to be something we ought to "keep up". But it isn't those things really. Chocolates don't put out the rubbish when it's pouring down with rain outside. Roses won't make you a mug of warm tea when all you want to do is cry you're so miserable. Little ornaments won't get you up for work after 30 years of marriage. No, love is something more than all these things we use as signs, however sweet and tender those signs might be. Love is not vanity.

All True Love involves sacrifice. Sacrifice of our own ego, sacrifice of our selfish needs and wants, sacrifice of our precious time. Sacrifice of our most basic tendencies in order to create goodness in another person. And there is deep deep mystery in that for us who are born of man into a world which tells us that the individual is more important than any other consideration.

Love saves us. It makes the intertwining of two hands something glorious and beautiful and heavenly. It makes us smile at that one unique person in a way we just don't smile at all those others so dear to us. It gives meaning to all our pain and all our joy, for in these two we suddenly see something beyond ourselves and beyond the simpler understanding of our Nine to Five life. Love is there in those sighs after a long and hearty laugh, where all the world looks golden. Love is there in that twinge of sorrow we feel when our beloved has departed even for a moment. Love is in those messages at 12.30pm when all you can do is think of your treasured one and know that all is right in life because you have them there.

Love is an ocean of compassion, of understanding, and of hope. It is gentleness, humour, protection. Love is beyond any one word we might choose to describe it.

For we know, in the end, many things only in part. One day, they say, we shall know things more perfectly. And when the sun draws to a close at the inevitable day we will know that we, who loved truly, sacrificially, and profoundly have sucked deep of the very essence of what it means to be alive. We will know we have performed that great work that makes it all worth while.

That is where love remains. And that is why we are here at all. True love is in the giving of our whole selves.

From Tennyson's Ulysses:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Love is that goodness we give at the doorstep after life's long, and troubling day. That is love. And it is what these two people have.