From the Song of Songs:

Living water, you are a fountain,
A well, a river from the mountains.

Come, north winds and south winds!
Breathe upon my garden,

Bear its fragrance to my lover,
Let him come and share its treasures.

My bride, my sister, I have come
To gather spices in my garden,
To taste wild honey with my wine,
Milk and honey with my wine.

Feast, drink, and drink deeply, lovers!

 

read by Tamara Stone

From D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths:

Gaea, the Earth, came out of darkness so long ago that nobody knows when or how. Earth was young and lonesome, for nothing lived on her yet. About her rose Uranus, the Sky, dark and blue, set all over with sparkling stars. He was magnificent to behold, and young Earth looked up at him and fell in love with him. Sky smiled down at Earth, twinkling with his countless stars, and they were joined in love.

 

Blessed is the creation that manifests the world in radiant glory.

read by Rick Cottingham

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"A Third Body" by Robert Bly:

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 that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

 

Blessed is the creation of human beings upon the earth.

read by Joshua Arthurs

From "The Country of Marriage," by Wendell Berry:

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew, day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed
provided we stay brave enough to keep going in.

 

Blessed is the creation of human beings for each other, infused with spiritual light.

read by Ish Theilheimer

 

 

From "The Hours," by Michael Cunningham:

Sally would like to tell Clarissa something, something important, but can't get it phrased. "I love you" is easy enough, but now Sally finds that she wants to go home and say something more, something that extends not only beyond the sweet and the comforting but beyond passion itself. What she wants to say has to do with all the people who've died; it has to do with her own feelings of enormous good fortune and imminent, devastating loss. If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not, exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half. She can bear the thought of her own death but cannot bear the thought of Clarissa's. This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining. Now there is a cord she can follow from thihs moment, walking toward the subway on the Upper East Side, through tomorrow and the next day and the next, all the way to the end of her life and the end of Clarissa's.

 

Rejoice and be glad you who have wandered homeless and alone. In joy have you gathered with your sisters and your brothers. Blessed is the joy of our gathering.

read by Rachel Giese

 

From the movie "When Harry Met Sally," by Nora Ephron:

I love how you get cold when it's seventy-one degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle right there when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you're the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely. And it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

 

From the source of all energy we call forth an abundance of love to envelop this couple. May they be for each other lovers and friends, and may their love partake of the same innocence, purity, and sense of discovery that we imagine Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden of Eden.

Read by Andrew Craxford

 

From "Turn of the Century," by Kurt Andersen:

The dinner is going well. The standard gaiety is bound up tonight with a complicated sense of gravity. Almost everyone at the table feels it as they eat and drink and flirt together, this sense of some new hybrid sentiment sweeping over them. It's not fear, or giddiness. Is it cheerful rue? Is it wonder? What they're feeling, one of them thinks (or maybe several of them) is a mood of respite rather than of completion, pausing here in the middle of the expedition to trade stories and collect thoughts. They've learned the queer new truth that the best way to move between two points isn't always a short, straight line, that many of the zigs or zags may be important. The road ahead isn't necessarily a road, as everyone in this room should realize by now.

 

Blessed is the creation of joy and celebration, lover and mate, gladness and jubilation, pleasure and delight, love and solidarity, friendship and peace. Soon may we hear in the streets of the city and the paths of the fields, the voice of joy, the voice of gladness, the voice of lover, the voice of mate, the triumphant voice of lovers from the canopy and the voice of youths from their feasts of song. Blessed, blessed, blessed is the joy of lovers, one with each other

read by Liz Fitzgerald