Our Ten Favorite Secular, Feminist Wedding Ceremony Readings
First thing’s first: the vast majority of secular wedding readings out there are by (straight, white) men. Which isn’t a problem necessarily, but maybe you’re planning a wedding and you’d like thoughts on love and marriage from, you know, a different perspective. Considering these weird times, we’re sharing wedding planning tips for parts of your wedding that cost $0.00 to change, and won’t be affected by any global disasters.
Today’s topic: Our ten favorite feminist wedding ceremony readings.
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Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
“Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other: neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world.”
Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses
“Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today’s struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no.”
bell hooks, all about love
“The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom...When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”
Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season
“To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation. It takes a lifetime to learn another person. When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.”
Ann Druyan (Carl Sagan’s wife), Skeptical Inquirer November/December 2003 Issue
“Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous. . . We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . That we could find each other. . . That we could be together for 20 years. The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
Maya Angelou, on Oprah’s Master Class in May 2014
“I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn’t just hold—that’s ego. Love liberates. It doesn’t bind. Love says, ‘I love you. I love you if you’re in China. I love you if you’re across town. I love you if you’re in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I’d like to have your arms around me. I’d like to hear your voice in my ear. But that’s not possible now, so I love you. Go.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from Gift From The Sea
“When you love someone; you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity — in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits — islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
Louise Erdrich, from the poem “Advice to Myself” in her book Original Fire
“Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button…
Don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.”
Hilary T. Smith, from Wild Awake
“People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square. Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn’t know were there, even the ones they wouldn’t have thought to call beautiful themselves.”
Brandi Carlile, “I Belong to You”
“I know I could be spending a little too much time with you
But time and too much don’t belong together like we do
If I had all my yesterdays I’d give ‘em to you too
I belong to you now
I belong to you.”
BONUS: Excerpts from Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) aka the Supreme Court deciding that same-sex marriage is legal in the USA!
“The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms...This is true for all persons…who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices...The lifelong union ... always has promised nobility and dignity to all persons, without regard to their station in life. Marriage is sacred to those who live by their religions and offers unique fulfillment to those who find meaning in the secular realm. Its dynamic allows two people to find a life that could not be found alone, for a marriage becomes greater than just the two persons.”