Wedding Prayers and Blessings

For Healing and Renewal

May your home be filled with laughter
and the warm embrace of a summer day.
May you find peacefulness and beauty,
challenge, and satisfaction, humor and insight,
healing and renewal, love and wisdom, as in a quiet heart.
May you always feel that what you have is enough.

Amen.

You Were Born Together

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone,
Even as the strings of the lute are alone though they quiver
with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hands of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

Love Has No Other Desire

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires,
let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook
that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart
and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate Love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved
in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

Love is Patient

“Love is Patient
Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast,
it is not proud. It is not rude,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil
but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts,
always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.

And now these three remain:
faith, hope and love.

But the greatest of these is love”

[I Corinthians 13:4-8, 13]

The Strength of Two

Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their work:
If one falls down, his friend can help him up.
But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!
Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered,
two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

A Rhyming Wedding Dinner Prayer

What is a vow,
but an intention
spoken out before the world
so that the world, in hearing,
might take part
in aspirations
of the willing heart?

In our coming here today
to join and bless
the joy of your becoming wed,
may we enter in
the truth of the words you’ve said,

“I do.”

Maureen Tolman Flannery