This ceremony requires additional elements to make complete (vows, ring vows, unity ceremony, etc.)
GREETING
Bride and Groom, family, beloved friends, colleagues, accomplices, witnesses. We have come here to celebrate the marriage and the intertwining of destinies of Bride and Groom who, through being ruthlessly and wonderfully themselves, have fallen in love and chosen to get married.
Whether we know it or not, the path of our lives is already laid out deep within us, and life is the process of being willing to discover the direction of our path, the giving of ourselves to whatever it takes to be able to hit the mark. In other words, we are all here for a reason, and it is our business, as our lives progress, not only to discover what that purpose is but also to cultivate the conditions — whether emotional, educational, personal, or geo-graphic — that allow us to fulfill that highest purpose.
In this context, marriage is a nurturing matrix in which two individuals can continue to expand and develop, so they can fulfill their individual destinies and offer their gifts to life and to the world. In this view, the focus is not so much on the couple and what they may undertake together, but more on the power of the individuals and what they have to contribute through their lives, how their union serves to enlarge and develop each of them.
Although this may appear on the surface to be an unromantic vision of love, it is a view that holds a relationship in the highest spiritual regard, for it has as its underlying assumption that each of us is alive for an important purpose, and that marriage enhances that capacity for individual contribution and participation.
Bride and Groom have stretched their individual development so far that they are no longer laboring alone to become themselves, but have arrived at the point in self-discovery where they can offer themselves as accomplices of destiny to one another.
It is in this spirit that they marry, not just because of their ineffable attraction to one another, but because the composite of their experiences has brought them to the place where they are ready to fulfill what is theirs to accomplish in this life. To join the forces of their individual spirits, capabilities, and backgrounds for the purpose of accomplishing together and individually what is theirs to do.
Therefore, we celebrate with them their arrival at the portal of true and conscious loving. We are incredibly happy for them and with them that one of the landmarks in the vast landscape of their becoming is the love that has brought them, and us, to the joyous occasion of this marriage.
