Our Commonwealth of Joy: The Mysteries of Marriage

In quotes and poems

Dec 13, 2024

The union of marriage has been confounding thinkers for millennia. They have always been trying to capture its essence:

Philosopher Edith Stein calls it a ‘serene community of love’.1

Poet and author Wendell Berry asserts that ‘we enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy’.2

Biographer Clare Carlisle says that ‘there is something dazzling about marriage — that leap into the open-endedness of another human being. It is difficult to look directly at it.’3

Pastor William Sloane Coffin declared that ‘we live on the brink of mystery and wonder. What is marriage but the willingness of two people to live on that brink, forever and without retreat?’

Ancient Poet Homer wrote that ‘there is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.’4

The labour, the dazzle, the power, the joy—are all wrapped up in this sacred bind of monogamy, which steadies the soul and orders your days. I only grow more convinced that marriage truly is a product of the oldest story, something with cosmic beginnings.

Below you’ll find excerpts from three poems I read over and over leading up to my own December wedding day, now just over three years ago.

Oh, the thrill of ‘sharing life’s table’ with another.5

1. Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

2. The Chuppah by Marge Piercy

We have made a home together
open to the weather of our time.
We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle
converting fierce energy into bread.

3. On Marriage by Kahlil Gibran

You were born together, and together you
shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white
wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the
silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance
between you.