A Brief Blessing
Context: Earlier this month, I officiated my best friend’s wedding. This is an excerpt from my officiant speech, posted with full permission from bride and groom, scrubbed of all identifiable information. Feel free to use parts of this speech in whatever ceremony you feel would benefit from their inclusion.
Ladies, gentlemen, and esteemed guests, welcome, and thank you all so much for being here today. This is an important day, a day of joy, and I know our beloved bride and groom are overjoyed themselves to see each and every one of your faces here.
Briefly, while we're all feeling it, all sitting together in this shared emotion, let's talk about joy. How it works, where it comes from. In life, and especially in marriage, joy is one of those things for which a deeper understanding pays dividends. So when it comes along, like right now, let's ask a few questions of it. Not to lean on it - this isn't an interrogation, we don't want to chase it away - but to learn from it.
Where does joy come from? Where is it born? We all likely have different answers to that question. But it's my personal belief that, when you get right down to the core of it, joy is born from itself. It's a recursive function of the human heart. A messenger on a round trip. When we send joy out into the world, when we tie a little message to its leg and lift it to the sky, when it goes flapping off towards our friends, our families, our fellow human beings, we know that, like all good messengers, it will return to us. Sometimes bearing a gift, a response, sometimes entirely unburdened. But always, it will return, stronger for the exercise than it was before it left.
It's important, I think, in marriage, to remember that. Because sometimes, when we're in a dark place, we go looking for joy. As though it's something that we can just find, as a matter of course, because we seek it. But joy isn't a treasure we can hunt for. It doesn't lie, glittering, in a pile on the floor of some old ruin. We forget, so easily, where it comes from, because we're not in the habit of asking. Don't go looking for joy. You won't find it that way. We get it when we give it. So go seeking to give it out, and ready to welcome it heartily upon its return, and it will find you.
