“In 1962, John Steinbeck wrote one of his lesser known novels Travels with Charley. It’s essentially a travelogue—a quest across, and in search of the America he’d been writing about for his whole career. In the beginning of the novel, before he sets out on this long journey, there’s a scene in which he chooses a starting point and decides upon a path. And as Steinbeck beholds in his mind the course that lays before him, he remarks, “It seemed to give the journey a design, and everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition, it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.“ He’s talking here about a road trip—an adventure, but as is the case with all enduring literature, the remarking is consonant with something deeper and more universal.
Cole and Chelsea, as you both ready to make your vows and step into a journey of marriage, I would remind you that you are entering into a covenantal relationship of great design and triumphant purpose.
When Adam beheld Eve in the Garden of Eden, his heart leapt with recognition of someone who was all together like him, and yet distinctly and wonderfully different. Comprising some of the Bible’s first poetry, he responds “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” The Genesis account continues to expand on the design of marriage by explaining that, “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
Chelsea and Cole, after you, like Adam, have surveyed all of the other creatures—the thousands of people you have met in your lifetime--God has graciously provided each of you with the other: the one who is special. The one who makes your heart dance and your soul sing. The one to whom something deeper inside of you than you know how to explain, responds to and moves towards. The one who is a perfect combination of identity and otherness. You are different in many ways, but as you stand here in the radiance of one another’s love it is clear that you each recognize in the other bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh.
And this is a revelation: to have lived as one and now to be fused with another as a new whole—a new single flesh—as surely as your own arms and legs are a part of you, separate and inseparable. “What greater thing is there for two human souls,” George Eliot writes in Adam Bede, “Then to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting?” This is the loving commitment you are making. Not a contract that benefits, but a covenant that transforms you into a higher entity by sending yourself out and giving another person a claim.
Chelsea and Cole, your love for one another is rich and unalloyed. But as any seasoned veteran of marriage might tell you, feelings are fickle and at times prone to fail. However, love does not. Because love of the kind that you are committing to is not merely a feeling—nor an emotion, though it contains many emotions. But rather it is a covenantal commitment: a fervent far-reaching state of pursuit that longs for union with the other.
Therefore, as your lives coalesce and go deeper into time, I encourage you to never stop unraveling the mystery of one another and never stop pursuing union with one another.
You have fallen into love, but you will need to march forward into marriage:giving more and more of yourself, on deeper and deeper levels, while surrendering your ego to fight under a victorious banner of sacrificial, self-forgetting, other-oriented love. It will be inexorable in its demands of you, and at times painful to the stubborn parts of self that don’t wish to surrender. But as you march yourself entirely into the hands of love through an act of your own will, you will arrive at the other shore as a single flesh—fused by an enduring love that will never fail.
“What I am through her she is through me,” Kierkegaard wrote, “and neither of us is anything by oneself, but we are what we are in union.” This is the love to which you are committing.
Cole and Chelsea, in each other you have someone to walk with, and someone to walk towards.
It has been said that good people mirror goodness in us, and you two are the perfect example. I think I speak for everyone here when I say that you are one of those dynamic couples that are just plain fun to watch: alike in all of the most important ways, and dissimilar in all of the most complimentary and comical. You have a fun-loving child-like playfulness toward each other that I hope you always allow to remain ageless. It has been such a joy to have a front row seat to see your love for one another deepen and develop over the years, and as you traverse the peaks and valleys of life together, know that everyone here today, will also be there for you tomorrow.”
By Chase Lamoreaux