Processional Reading

Taken from Mike Mason’s: The Mystery of Marriage pp29-31

Marriage is, before it is anything else, an act of contemplation. It is a divine pondering, an exercise in amazement. This is evident from the very start, from the moment a man and a woman first lay eyes on one another and realize they are in love. The whole thing begins with a wondrous looking, a helpless staring, an irresistible compulsion simply to behold. For suddenly there is so much to see! So much is revealed when two people dare to stand in the radiance of one another’s love. And so there is a divine paralysis of adoration: everything else stops, or at least fades into the background, and love itself takes center stage. Suddenly, for what seems the first time in life, one is presented physically and three-dimensionally with an object that is entirely worthy of one’s wholehearted love and devotion. That is what “falling in love” means.

Naturally on cannot believe one’s eyes. That love should come embodied, encased in flesh, walking and talking and loving in return – for that we are never quite prepared. Of course we are programmed for it, to anticipate and to long for love to enter our lives in this dramatic and personal fashion, but that is not to say we are not bowled over when it actually happens… When the miracle of love erupts before our eyes we cannot help being swept off our feet, dumbfounded, incapacitated for any other action or response except that of love itself: gazing, marveling, contemplating, loving…

For marriage, as simply as it can be defined, is the contemplation of the love of God in and through the form of another human being. It is spell-bound fascination with the sheer incarnateness of something so purely spiritual. Marriage is living with glory. It is living with the embodied revelation, with a daily unveiling and unraveling of the mystery of love in such a way that our intense yet shy curiosity about such things is in a constant state of being satisfied, being fed, yet with out ever becoming sated. It is living with a mystery that is fully visible, with a flesh-and-blood person who can be touched and held, questioned and probed and examined and even made love to, to our hearts content, but who nevertheless, proves to be utterly and impenetrably mysterious, infinitely contemplatible.

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