Marriage is a Clay Figure

I was recently performing a wedding ceremony that I offer on my own website but had not yet read before except quickly in passing. This time it was different. The words to a poem that I read that day jumped off the pages of the ceremony because I had never heard marriage expressed that way before.

There are a host of things these days that can disrupt our marriages if we allow it to happen. I believe though, and I will admit to the same problem, that the general basis of most marital disagreement is selfishness. We all pay lip service to sayings like "marriage is a give and take" and many more like that. Sometimes you have to lose your life in order to find it. Some will say, "lose my life? You mean I have to give up who I am as a person?" Well we do it in many other aspects of our life. We give up our own wants and desires many times for our bosses who demand us to work 12-14 hour days sometimes, and often with no extra pay. Doesn't a partner in life deserve the same effort from you and the same willingness to give?

This is the part of the ceremony I read that day and I quote. "The true art of married life is an inner spiritual journey. It is a mutual enrichment, a give and take between two personalities, a mingling of two endowments which diminishes neither, but enhances both. I would like to share with you this poem about this mingling, called "Married Love," which was written by a medieval poet about seven hundred years ago. In the English translation, it reads:"


"You and I
Have so much love,
That it burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you and a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay."

This is what marriage is all about! Are you in each other's clay?