by John A. Buehrens, minister, First Parish in Needham, Massachusetts, former president, Unitarian Universalist Association
She was a member of my congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee. When she came to church, which was not often, she was always alone. A professor at the university, she could remember the Scopes trial and the McCarthy era. And now a war in Vietnam was on. Then one winter day she called me. Would I be willing to do a private graveside service? The deceased was a woman she described as her “good friend,” her next-door neighbor for almost forty years. They had never dared to live under the same roof together. Yet as I stood on that lonely cemetery hillside, and read the poems she had selected, and heard her read from a letter, and said a final, tearful prayer, it became clear to me that they had been married, totally, though no one had been allowed to know it. And I stood there saying inwardly “This is not right. This must be changed, first in the church, and then in the world.”
Twenty-one years later, at the 1996 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association held in Indianapolis, the UUA was voting whether or not to become the first denomination to call not just for blessing same-sex unions religiously, but for legal recognition of gay marriage. I asked all the dozens of same-sex partners attending the Assembly to join me on the platform. The resolution passed overwhelmingly.
Resolved, that the State should not interfere with same-gender couples who choose to marry and share fully in the rights, responsibilities, and commitment of civil marriage.
Today support for that simple proposition is spreading. Over twenty religious groups, Jewish and Christian, have endorsed it. So have moral leaders like Coretta Scott King. Not to mention hundreds of celebrities, writers, and entertainers.
Marriage is not for everyone; it never has been. Indeed, when I’ve done counseling on the subject over the years, both with those unhappy in their marriages and with those wishing they had a life partner, I’ve been reminded of the one press conference given by Pope John Paul I, who served as pontiff for only a few weeks. A reporter asked him about Catholics wanting to divorce and priests wanting to marry. He reportedly replied, “Eh! What’s a poor pope gonna do? Those who are inside, they want to go outside; those who are outside, they want to go inside.”
As the writer Judith Viorst says in her book, Grown Up Marriage,
Although marriage is for grown-ups, very few of us are [fully] grown up when we marry. Growing up takes time, perhaps a whole lifetime, and getting there—if we get there at all—is hard. But marriage, which can be the most vexatious of human relationships, can also be [an] engine of our growth. For in making some sort of peace with the disenchantments, demands, and astonishing complexities of ordinary everyday married life, we can create—and no, this isn’t a contradiction in terms—a grown-up marriage.
She adds,
In a grown-up marriage we understand that we aren’t, and shouldn’t be, each other’s teacher, parent, editor, supervisor, or home-improvement project. A grown-up marriage allows us to find a balance between autonomy and connection. In a grown-up marriage we gradually acquire a rueful tolerance of each other’s limitations and imperfections. In a grown-up marriage we do not keep score—at least not out loud. In a grown-up marriage we recognize that we don’t always have to be in love with each other. In fact, we are well aware that we couldn’t possibly always be in love with each other. But a grown-up marriage enables us, when we fall out of love with each other, to fall back in. A grown-up marriage involves a tricky combination of honest and polite. In a grown-up marriage we’re able to apologize when we’re wrong and not gloat when we’re right. We can also accept an apology that falls short of total abasement—but not too short. In a grown-up marriage the laughter exceeds the regret. In a grown-up marriage we’ve learned to forgive and forget. Well, maybe not forget. In a grown-up marriage we know how to communicate with each other and know when the only and best thing to do is shut up. In a grown-up marriage we recognize that marriage does not give us a real identity, or keep us safe from the sorrows and pain of life, or even protect us forever after from loneliness.
In a grown-up marriage we understand that we aren’t, and shouldn’t be, each other’s teacher, parent, editor, supervisor, or home-improvement project.
A grown-up marriage allows us to find a balance between autonomy and connection.
In a grown-up marriage we gradually acquire a rueful tolerance of each other’s limitations and imperfections.
In a grown-up marriage we do not keep score—at least not out loud.
In a grown-up marriage we recognize that we don’t always have to be in love with each other. In fact, we are well aware that we couldn’t possibly always be in love with each other. But a grown-up marriage enables us, when we fall out of love with each other, to fall back in. A grown-up marriage involves a tricky combination of honest and polite.
In a grown-up marriage we’re able to apologize when we’re wrong and not gloat when we’re right. We can also accept an apology that falls short of total abasement—but not too short. In a grown-up marriage the laughter exceeds the regret.
In a grown-up marriage we’ve learned to forgive and forget. Well, maybe not forget.
In a grown-up marriage we know how to communicate with each other and know when the only and best thing to do is shut up.
In a grown-up marriage we recognize that marriage does not give us a real identity, or keep us safe from the sorrows and pain of life, or even protect us forever after from loneliness.
As I say, marriage is not for everyone, and never has been. But the more grown-up we become about it, the more we can recognize in marriage an extraordinary combination of accepting and discovering human differences while affirming and deepening what we have in common. My wife, Gwen, always says that in a good marriage the rocks in one head come to fit the holes in another. She also claims to have been married to me for thirty years, twenty-five of them happily. And when I ask her which the bad years were, she replies, “Buster, it’s a daily percentage!”
But why on earth would we, as a clergy couple, want to deny any loving couple the chance publicly to enroll in the great school for spiritual growth known as marriage? Why would we deny them our support and blessing? Because same-sex relationships somehow challenge “the sanctity of traditional marriage,” as some conservatives claim? How insecure! How immature! So I have a simple message for religious conservatives who oppose gay marriage: Grow up! As William Sloan Coffin says, “Quit using the Bible and tradition the way a drunk uses a lamp post—more for support than for illumination.” Consider whether God hath not yet more light to break forth. After all, few traditions have changed over the years as much as those of our most intimate institution.
In a book from the UUA’s Beacon Press, social historian E.J. Graff asks, What Is Marriage For? Is it for children? Well, sometimes. But if we are to limit marriage to those who are capable of having biological children together, then let’s have a fertility test along with the blood test. Is it for kinship? Well, for centuries marriages were arranged. Parents and patriarchs knew best. Is that what we are trying to preserve? Or do we believe in love and free choice? Today, if a man chooses another man, or a woman a woman, why should the state interfere? Because we are made uncomfortable by same-sex sexuality? Sex is a part of marriage, but if there is a public interest in abstinence, fidelity, and safer sex, as the authorities say, isn’t it both hypocritical and immature to denounce gay promiscuity and then to block gay marriage? Or is it money? Since two can live almost as cheaply as one, another part of marriage has always been financial. So society’s interest in promoting marriage has been reflected in the tax code, inheritance, shared benefits, and over a thousand specific legal rights that married couples have and gay couples are denied.
Some people say, well, let’s have domestic partner laws, or civil unions, as in Vermont. But such state-by-state arrangements aren’t recognized elsewhere. And “separate but equal,” never turns out to be really equal, does it?
That’s why my friends Hillary and Julie Goodridge sued the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for denying them a marriage license, in contravention of the equality provisions in our state constitution. They want the freedom to marry. They were joined in their suit by six other couples. Three of them are Unitarian Universalists: Gloria Bailey and Linda Davies, from First Parish in Brewster; Richard Lindell and Gary Chalmers, from the UU Church of Worcester; and David Wilson and Robert Compton, from downtown Boston’s Arlington Street Church.
Because I feel so strongly about the injustice of issuing marriage licenses to heterosexual couples while denying licenses to same-sex couples, I have decided to join with clergy colleagues all across the country in declaring that as long as this inequality exists, when I help couples to celebrate their union in marriage—which I will continue to do most joyfully—I will no longer sign the license. I will function only in my religious capacity, not as an agent of the state. I will arrange to have a judge or a justice of the peace do that.
One of the great ministers of the civil rights movement, Will Campbell of Tennessee, always taught that the proper thing for a minister to do at any wedding is to have the license signed before the ceremony, in the presence of the couple, and then to fling the signed document into the corner, hollering, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s!” Then the minister can remind the couple that they are now about to go out in front of God and everybody and enter into a covenant with one another. A grateful acknowledgement of the love and trust they have found in one another. And a promise to try to sustain and renew that love and trust even when the going gets tough. With the help of a love that was there sustaining them even before they found each other.
At times all of us, even those most clearly blessed in our marriages, wonder what marriage is for. Just as at times, we can wonder what work is for, or life itself is for. There are gaps of meaning, there are abysses of injustice. But love makes a bridge toward a better and more meaningful future—if we are open to it, in all of its many forms.
By Marjorie Rebmann, minister, Unitarian Church of Montpelier, Vermont
I decided to put a new program on my computer. It’s called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It allows you to speak into a microphone mounted in a headset and your words appear on the screen. There is no need to type the words. They just appear on your screen at the sound of your voice. A modern miracle! I thought it would be a real time saver if I could get into the habit of saying my sermons out loud instead of hunting and pecking for them on a keyboard. I believed that Dragon (we’re on a first name basis now) would allow me to write weddings, funerals, and dedications faster, since I could read prayers and appropriate words right into its fire-breathing nostrils as I burned with passionate inspiration. Letters would be easier, too. It would be like dictating to my very own cybersecretary. I counted on Dragon to cut my work in half with every hiss, bellow and scaley belch from its program. I never suspected it would teach me a lesson in religious living.
The night I installed it, I learned that in order for it to get to know my voice, I needed to read to it for one half hour. I had my choice of reading long passages from Arthur Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey, David Barry’s Dave Barry in Cyberspace, or Scott Adams’s Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook. I chose Dave Barry in Cyberspace, thinking that if I had to choose a bedtime story for my computer, it ought to be one about its own kind.
Dragon has some Buddhist leanings. To start it, you only have to say, “Wake up!” To stop it, you have to say, “Go to sleep.” To erase a word, you say, “Scratch that.”
So I sat for an hour or so with a headset, reading, characteristically slurring my words…saying “Scratch that!” going back, saying them over again, getting a cup of tea.
When that process was over, the program asked me to further refine its recognition of my voice by reading some passages of my work using words which I would normally use. They were fairly easy words, like peace and freedom, soul and spirit, justice and mercy, compassion and forgiveness, committee meeting and potluck, grace and faith and Canvass Sunday.
Dragon inhaled my voice and memorized my speech pattern. I was ready to roll at about 9:30 so I decided to write a wedding, which was scheduled for the coming weekend.
The bride and groom had requested 1st Corinthians 13. Gingerly, I whispered into the headset, “Wake up.” Waking sleepy dragons is the stuff of fairytales and myth. I had to say it much louder. “Wake up!”
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal,” I said. But apparently Dragon had not quite registered my speech pattern. On the screen before me, slowly appeared the words, “If I speak in the gongs of mortal sand and angels’ butts do not have love, I am a noisy going or a gang symbol.”
“And if I have,” I said, “prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.” Dragon wrote “miseries” instead of “mysteries” and “legend” instead of “knowledge and.” I pressed on. Around ten o’clock the phone rang as I was working and I hollered for someone to get it. I was interrupted again by someone in the house asking where something was. I continued with a few more interruptions and no little frustration at the words appearing on the screen.
I decided to read it all over from where I had fixed the thing about the “mortal sand and angels’ butts.”
I read from the screen: “Love is patient. Will someone get that damned phone? Love is kind. Why should I know where your new CD is? Who was your servant last year? Love is not envious, boastful or ‘arrogate crude.’” Not only were the words scrambled, but I had forgotten to put Dragon to sleep whenever I spoke to anyone in the house.
Every word I said was being recorded. Dragon went on crooning about love… “It does not insist on its own way…play that CD a little lower, please! I gotta get this wedding done!”
“It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in mongering (meaning ‘wrongdoing’) but rejoices in the ‘truce!’”
I imagined reading all this at the wedding and I began to laugh. There should be a few more commands for a Dragon who indulges in spoonerisms and records everything you say. Commands like “Touché” perhaps, or “Uncle!”
That’s how a computer chip reminded me about religious living. A tiny opalescent crystal grown in a lab somewhere preached a whole sermon to me in my own words. I’ve always deeply appreciated the language of 1st Corinthians 13, a brief handbook on how to recognize love and how to practice it. Entwined in its classic lines now were the everyday, practical words of frustration. Reading the passage over was somehow hilariously…moving.
Dragon recorded my words when I forgot to tell it to “Go to Sleep.” It pointed out the chasm between my love of scriptural poetry and its practical value. Love is “patient and kind. It vaunteth not itself.” Corinthians is not a collection of pixels on a plastic page but one of the sanctuaries of the soul to which we retreat when we want to be assured of how best to live in the world. Only we give the words their value. Only we can live them into being.
Hear one of Dragon’s mistakes now…“and a little chip shall lead them!” But I will continue to work with this beast because it is machinely patient with me, and gave me the gift of hearing myself as others hear me.
Bless all the people and things in our lives which take us by the scruff of the neck and show us how we are seen and heard. Bless even a lab-grown, unseeing, fire-breathing crystal chip, which would lead us into the perfect geometry of the spirit.
By Lynn Ungar, consulting minister, UU Fellowship of the North Bay, Napa, California
Most UU ministers have gotten the phone call—many times. “We’re getting married in June, and we don’t belong to a church. We want a wedding that’s spiritual, but not religious, and traditional enough that our parents feel comfortable, but not so traditional that we feel like it’s not really us.” Oh, and could you please include the groom’s Jewish heritage and the bride’s pagan leanings. Or one bride’s Catholic background and the other’s atheism. Or the bride’s Serbian Orthodox grandmother and the groom’s son from a previous marriage.
Sure we can. Although, at worst, this phone call can make UU ministers feel like the Wal-Mart of religion—one stop shopping at a place which has it all and promises to smile as you go out the door. But these wedding calls are also an opportunity to share the best of Unitarian Universalism. As UUs, we believe that there is no one right book, no single set of words that defines the truth. So we work with couples on planning their own unique ceremonies, offering words from many different sources and encouraging couples to choose the words that speak the deepest truths of their own hearts. As UUs, we believe that the Holy can be invoked in many ways, and envisioned in many forms. So we remind couples, and the loved ones who attend their weddings, that the decision of two people to join their lives in devoted love is a sacred act—although the word “God” may never be mentioned. As UUs, we believe that people’s choices and commitments are at the heart of religious practice. So we often invite couples to write their own vows, reflecting deeply, in the process, on the commitments they will carry out through a lifetime.
The words we choose in the sacred moments of acknowledging birth, love, and death are weighty, charged with the responsibility of naming our highest aspirations and our deepest longings. A wedding ritual is replete with the significance of naming a family, declaring to a community of loved ones and the world at large that these people enter into a covenant of mutual support that is intended to last for all their years to come. It is no small thing. As we have been hearing so often in the political arena, the family is the bedrock of society, a crucial unit of human relationship that holds up the world as we know it. So, as UUs, we choose those words carefully, knowing that the individuals involved are unlike any other people on earth, knowing that the words tie us across time and space to all the ways our human family has chosen to go forward in the path of love.
None ever heard of a good marriage from Mesopotamia to Missouri and yet right marriage is as possible tomorrow as sunshine. Sunshine is a very mixed and costly thing as we have it, & quite impossible, yet we get the right article every day. And we are not very much to blame from our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations & illusions, & this especial trap is laid for us to trip up our feet with & all are tripped up, first or last. But the Mighty Mother who had been so sly with us, feels that she owes us some indemnity, & insinuates into the Pandora-box of marriage, amidst dyspepsia, nervousness, screams, Christianity, “help,” poverty, & all kinds of music, some deep & serious benefits & some great joys. We find sometimes a delight in the beauty & happiness of our children that makes the heart too big for the body. And in these ill assorted connections there is ever some mixture of true marriage. The poorest [pauper] & his [partner], if well-meaning and well-tempered, get some just & agreeable relations of mutual respect & kindly observation & fostering each of [the] other & they learn something, & would carry themselves wiselier if they were to begin life anew in another sphere.
It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well-assorted. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love. Young persons think love belongs only to the brown-haired and crimson-cheeked. So it does for its beginning. But the golden marriage is a part of love which the bridal day knows nothing of. A perfect and complete marriage, where wedlock is everything you could ask and the ideal of marriage becomes actual, is not common, perhaps as rare as perfect personal beauty. Men and women are married fractionally, now a small fraction, then a large fraction. Very few are married totally, and then only after some forty or fifty years of gradual approach and experiment. Such a large and sweet fruit is a complete marriage that it needs a long summer to ripen in, and then a long winter to mellow and season in. But a real, happy marriage of love… is one of the things so very handsome that if the sun were, as the Greek poets fabled, a god, he might stop the world and hold it still now and then, in order to look all day long on some example thereof, and feast his eyes on the spectacle.
It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well-assorted. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love. Young persons think love belongs only to the brown-haired and crimson-cheeked. So it does for its beginning. But the golden marriage is a part of love which the bridal day knows nothing of.
A perfect and complete marriage, where wedlock is everything you could ask and the ideal of marriage becomes actual, is not common, perhaps as rare as perfect personal beauty. Men and women are married fractionally, now a small fraction, then a large fraction. Very few are married totally, and then only after some forty or fifty years of gradual approach and experiment.
Such a large and sweet fruit is a complete marriage that it needs a long summer to ripen in, and then a long winter to mellow and season in. But a real, happy marriage of love… is one of the things so very handsome that if the sun were, as the Greek poets fabled, a god, he might stop the world and hold it still now and then, in order to look all day long on some example thereof, and feast his eyes on the spectacle.
by Linda Hoddy, minister, UU Congregation of Saratoga Springs, New York
I have been told, though I have never actually seen the data, that when polled about values, the value Unitarian Universalists agree on most is that pre-marital sex is not sinful. While that may be slightly amusing, it also reveals an important truth—that marriage is about much more than sexuality. When I was a teenager, growing up in the Church of God, I was taught that any sex outside of marriage is wrong. So, laden with guilt, I concluded it was imperative to marry the first person with whom I engaged in sex. I did, and it was a disaster, for we had little in common. Sex loomed so large in the equation that other considerations were crowded out. As a twenty-year-old college junior, I entered into a marriage which endured for less than two years. As everyone else was planning weddings during our senior year, I was getting divorced. I consider that marriage to be the worst mistake of my life. But I also learned from it. I learned the importance of being true to myself. I waited six years before remarrying. My husband and I recently celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary.
I have come to think of marriage as a wonderful privilege—the privilege of witnessing, up close, personally, and intimately, the unfolding of this other person. I am sometimes awed by him: his kindness, his foibles, those mysterious places which I glimpse, but can never really enter. This witnessing-in-depth can only happen in these long-term relationships. The other part of the privilege is that of fostering and nurturing this other person, doing whatever I can to help him become himself, to find and fulfill his purpose in being.
My attitude toward marriage changed significantly a few years ago, when I read an article about how our ethic of marriage has evolved. Prior to the 1970s the primary purpose of marriage had been to be a vessel for the creation and support of a family. In the 70s, which you may recall was dubbed the “Me” decade, the ethic changed. The primary purpose of marriage was now thought to be the happiness of the two people involved. The problem is that happiness is a very fragile and fleeting thing. If we base our marriages on our momentary happiness, we feel free to leave as soon as we are unhappy. And the divorce rate has skyrocketed.
We also lost some spiritual benefit in that turning inward. There is spiritual value and growth in giving ourselves up to a larger purpose, whether to the sustenance of a family, or to the marriage itself as a vessel for the sustenance and nurturing of both people. Surrendering ourselves to a larger purpose—a larger creation—has always been a key part of spiritual development.
The poet Kahlil Gibran described standing at the temple door and asking all who passed by about the “mystery and merit of Love.” The answers varied from the cynical to the sublime. Gibran concluded that we speak of Love as the “image of our hopes and frustrations.” Then he “heard a voice within the temple” say:
Life is divided into two halves, one frozen, the other aflame; the burning half is Love. Thereupon I entered the temple, kneeling, rejoicing, and praying: Make me O Lord, food for the burning flame… Make me, O God, food for the sacred fire.
Life is divided into two halves, one frozen, the other aflame; the burning half is Love.
Thereupon I entered the temple, kneeling, rejoicing, and praying:
Make me O Lord, food for the burning flame…
Make me, O God, food for the sacred fire.
May all of us, married, partnered or single, be transformed in the sacred fire of love.
Seven years ago, the first issue of uu&me! a UU Magazine for Kids rolled off the press. Born of an interest in providing UU families everywhere a home-based, fun, identity-building resource, uu&me! has been a huge success. Thousands of issues have been sold to individual families and churches, and uu&me! stories and activities have appeared in new curricula, Sunday school classes, camps, conferences—anywhere UU kids gather. You, the members of CLF, should be very proud of your commitment to this unique resource for children and families.
Now uu&me! is about to be reborn. The last issue of the 16-page magazine will be June 2004. Starting in September, uu&me! will appear as a 4-page insert in the middle of each UUWorld magazine. It will be a new product, in some ways, but the goal will remain the same: to provide a link between home and church that will strengthen UU identity for all family members. And now, thanks to the commitment of the UUA, it will go to all UU homes—a goal we never thought we’d reach!
If your family has recently joined CLF, and you’d like back-issues of uu&me!, check out www.uua.org/uume for ordering information. And look for the new uu&me! in your September/October issue of the UUWorld.
When GA begins on June 24th, you can be there even in the comfort of your own living room. Just go to the General Assembly (GA) page of the UUA web site at www.uua.org/ga for live streaming video and on-site reporting. Coverage will include the opening and closing ceremonies, workshops, lectures, and worship, including the Service of the Living Tradition on Friday night and the Sunday morning worship service. Tune in throughout GA for news and reporting and feel a part of the biggest annual gathering of UUs anywhere.
Jane Rzepka, minister, Church of the Larger Fellowship
Have you had just about enough? Are you a person who will scream if you hear one more word about finding that “special someone”; searching for your soul mate, that “other half” who once found will make you complete? Or maybe you are sick of what to your ears are pompous pronouncements about connection and community and how everybody needs it, and how you shouldn’t be “afraid” of it? Perhaps you are baffled when singles like yourself are pitied. Or are you the “stinker” in church who is far from rapturous about holding hands while singing “Spirit of Life”?
Are you a healthy, satisfied loner?
There was a time, wasn’t there, when independence was thought to be a good thing. Self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-containment, keeping to oneself—these were positive personality traits, now somehow turned pathetic in popular culture. Sure, sometimes a loner enjoys the company of others, and sure, sometimes a loner falls deeply in love if the right person comes along, but, well, for a loner, living life as a party of one can feel pretty nice.
The first assumption loners face is that, whether you were raised on Cinderella stories, Indian Bollywood romance movies, “Leave it to Beaver,” Tagalog komiks—those illustrated Philippine love stories with happy endings—or family stories of grand and creative marriage proposals and romantic gestures, permanent coupledom appears to be in the cards. But the years go by and here you are, a grown-up, somehow single for keeps, or single again. To be sure, lots of people ache for a partner, but not you, at least not now.
Even when you feel mostly happy, mostly living a life you like, mostly content, it takes a good bit of self-knowledge and strength to make your way comfortably in a world full of couples and those singles eager for a partner. You can’t take TV commercials to heart, or the Hallmark cards, or all of June’s wedding bells. You have to find gentle and acceptable ways of rebuffing all those kindly cupids out there. You know how you feel—even if you do reserve the right to change your mind—but few can believe that you’re not secretly lonely a lot, or selfish, or even damaged.
The second assumption that some loners, single or paired, confront is that they should be excited by the notion of close engagement with a group of people. The more gregarious among us find it hard to imagine a preference for going it alone, but it’s true: some perfectly fine folks don’t need to get out more, or talk things through, or network, or establish more of a support system, or develop connections.
For many Unitarian Universalists—I daresay most Unitarian Universalists—religion is about community. The loner is in the minority right off the bat. But the truth is, a lot of healthy folks out there, a number of them members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, prefer their Unitarian Universalism alone on-line, or with a sermon or book in an armchair, in a meditative space of their own creating, or in private acts of social justice, creativity, or appreciation. Religion for them is a deep and solitary refreshment: no community, no conventional people-to-people connection.
One of the many things I like about the Church of the Larger Fellowship is its roominess. Introverts and extroverts; committed partners, singles, and everything in between; church-goers and stay-at-homes; people-persons, loners, and all the gradations—we know you’re out there and you’re in our hearts and minds. In June, as we celebrate the many ways that people commit to one another in love, we also celebrate the ways that people find fulfillment in their own company. And so, in this the wedding month, a special welcome to loners.
In honor of our issue celebrating marriage, Helen Zidowecki, our acting minister of religious education, has offered her page so that we could share this story. We hope this tale will open opportunities to talk with kids (or adults!) about love, relationships and human rights.
by Tracy Duncan, director of religious education, First Parish of Sudbury, Massachusetts
Once upon a time there lived a princess named Amalia. She was loving and caring and tried very hard not to ever hurt any living thing. One day a messenger came to the palace where she lived, telling the court about a young prince whom an evil sorcerer held captive in a faraway fortress. He had a spell on him, and only someone who had never deliberately killed anything could rescue him. The sorcerer thought there would never be anyone like that, because almost everybody kills things that annoy them, like mosquitoes, or things they fear, like spiders or even wolves. But the princess knew she had never killed anything. She wore long sleeves in summer to keep off the mosquitoes, and if she was afraid of anything she told herself it was her problem and not the creature’s, and she either walked away or got help. She knew she was the only one who could rescue the prince. So she stepped forward.
“I’ll go.”
Her parents, the King and Queen, said: “Absolutely not. It’s far too dangerous.” In fact, they locked her in her room just to be sure.
But there was, in the corner of the courtyard, a young milkmaid, Helen. Helen had always admired Princess Amalia for her gentleness and courage. (It takes a lot of courage not to hurt something you’re afraid of!) Helen knew Amalia felt she must go to rescue the prince, so she devised a plan. She took some cheese and milk from the dairy on a tray and went up to Amalia’s room, saying she’d brought the Princess’s dinner. The guard by the door let her in. Once in, Helen told the surprised Princess that she admired her and supported her decision to rescue the Prince. They switched clothes and the Princess left the room with the empty tray, dressed as the milkmaid, while Helen, dressed as the Princess, stayed in the room.
The plan worked, and soon Amalia was off! When the Queen came in later to say good night to her daughter and discovered Helen instead, you can imagine the chaos! In the middle of all the running around and shouting, Helen made her own escape, got a horse from the royal stables and followed Amalia’s trail.
Well, to make a long story short, they met up and traveled together and became very good friends. They talked to pass the time. They watched glorious sunrises and sunsets together. They got cold and wet and miserable in the rain and snow together. They took care of each other when one got sick or hurt. They talked about their hopes and dreams. Finally, after many good times and bad, they reached the castle of the Prince. The minute Amalia set foot on the castle grounds, she broke the spell and the Prince awoke.
Amalia and Helen ran up to the tower to meet the Prince. He was very charming, as all good Prince Charmings are, and they ended up laughing and joking together. Finally the Prince said, “You are my rescuer. Will you marry me, Princess Amalia?”
But Amalia looked at him, and then at Helen. “You are very nice and funny and I like you as a friend. But I am in love with Helen. It’s better that you find a wife who can love you the way I love her.”
So, Amalia and Helen rode back to Amalia’s land, all the while planning their new life together. Along the way they promised to love each other and take care of each other, just as they had on their adventure. “For better or worse. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death.” That’s how they felt.
When they returned home from their adventure, the King and Queen wondered where their new son-in-law might be. “Where is the prince—surely you’ll marry him!”
“No, Helen and I love each other,” answered Amalia, “I want to marry her.”
“But two women can’t get married!” cried the Queen and King.
“But we’ve already promised to care for each other and love each other. Why can’t WE live happily ever after? What makes our love any different from yours ?” asked Amalia.
Well, the King and Queen thought about that. And they asked their wise counselors.
The counselors came up with lots of arguments as to why they couldn’t marry, but Amalia and Helen always had an answer. “We love each other. How can that hurt anyone? We made the same promises to each other that men and women who want to marry make. Why is it different for us?"
Well, the King and Queen finally agreed, and since they made the laws, they made a new law in their land—gay people could marry! So Amalia and Helen got married, and as to whether or not they lived happily ever after, well…they’re trying hard!
...that the CLF lending library has resources for planning a wedding? Go to www.clfuu.org and click on library. Search on the word ‘Weddings’ for a list of books on the subject.
Forged love, married love, [is] love that starts molten and throughout its life must be thrown back into the fire, recast, reshaped, restored. Married passion is a quest, in the end, and the lovers are its heroes, fighting along the way demons of their own making and of other’s, changing identities, carving their initials into each other’s hearts. Love is necessity, all else about it is up for grabs.
Forged love, married love, [is] love that starts molten and throughout its life must be thrown back into the fire, recast, reshaped, restored. Married passion is a quest, in the end, and the lovers are its heroes, fighting along the way demons of their own making and of other’s, changing identities, carving their initials into each other’s hearts.
Love is necessity, all else about it is up for grabs.
by Louise Erdrich, from The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year, Harper-Collins, 1995
Last updated June 12, 2005
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