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Weddings - Ananda offers a beautiful and uplifting Wedding Ceremony for those who wish to invoke the blessings of God through our line of Gurus in their marriage. Contact us for details for your wedding - 503-626-3403.
 

Ananda Wedding Ceremony

(Excerpts)

 (After a brief period of prayer and meditation, the bride and bridegroom offer roses to each other and say:)

Dear beloved, I offer you this rose
As a symbol of my love for you;
A love inspired by God,
And offered to you as a channel of His love.

Song: (These words may also be spoken, rather than sung, by the priest or minister)

Where He dwells, the earth in gladness
Puts forth sweet herbs, shading trees.
Gay streams bound through summer meadows;
Fragrance blows on every breeze.
They with happiness are blessed
Who the Lord have made their Guest —
Who the Lord have made their Guest.

Crystal Clarity in Marriage
Chapter Nine of Cities of Light by J. Donald Walters

A sad aspect of marriage in modern times, and particularly of marriage in America, is the high incidence of divorce. It betokens a breakdown of fundamental values—of commitment, for example, to the feelings and well-being of others; of loyalty to others, and to an ideal; of the recognition that difficulty in the fulfillment of one’s duty never constitutes a valid reason for abandoning that duty; of the understanding that to live rightly is a long-range proposition, and should not be influenced by short-term “solutions” that offer merely a way out.

On the other hand, there is also a positive aspect to the divorce rate. For it isn’t likely that people’s reasons for getting married have changed all that radically in this century. Even though, nowadays, too many marriages fail, this doesn’t mean that in olden times all marriages were “made in heaven.”

The truth is, many marriages in times past, when divorce was virtually unheard of, were things not of beauty, but of great suffering and bitterness for both partners. It is far better, surely, for people to separate who otherwise would be forced to live together in constant, mutual disharmony and friction.

The solution, then, is not to approach the problem symptomatically, by studying the causes for divorce and how to minimize them. Rather, it is to study the reasons for marriage, to see how valid they are, and how to get people to enter into marriage with greater clarity and self-understanding.

Cities of Light offer people of good will an opportunity to develop new ways of looking at everything, and in the process to find new ways of solving old problems.

Solutions to the major problems in human life usually require the cooperative interaction of many people. If those people speak from many different premises, however, communication becomes almost as difficult as in a roomful of people talking different languages. Discouragement and fatigue eventually cause a breakdown of further communication, and the problems end up looking more insoluble than ever.

Every great movement in history, whether in art, science, religion, or any other field, was born out of groups of people who shared basically the same interests and premises, and who found themselves in a position to communicate creatively with one another. One might almost say that their combined energy produced the magnetism that attracted the inspiration, which seemed to settle on them for the duration of that energy-flow.

The fact of those movements is well established. This explanation for them, however, is my own, and ought perhaps to be further elaborated.

Could Beethoven, for instance, have written the music he did had it not been for the other composers of his era: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and the rest? The question might be moot were it not for the fact that history shows us so very few examples of isolated greatness.

Here, then, we see one of the supreme benefits that may, and in fact should, reflect back to society as a whole from the creation of Cities of Light. A group of people interacting creatively with one another, and not merely shouting one another down, ought surely to discover, and bring to outward manifestion, new solutions to countless old problems.

Some of these opportunities for new discovery we have touched on already. Another such opportunity, and a vital challenge to our entire society, is the institution of marriage.

Not only is a bad marriage a tragedy because of the pain it causes the two people involved, but also for the much deeper scars it inflicts on the children, if any, of their marriage. It is no cure, however, merely to stop people short of taking the final step of divorce. The tragedy was written already in the marriage itself.

Part of the answer, surely, lies in sorting out the couple’s emotional, mental, and spiritual “chemistry” at the time when they first show an interest in each other. It is important that someone, or a group of people, help them to see whether they are truly compatible.

People need better reasons than the movies give them for getting married in the first place. Many, indeed, would have done better to confine their relationship to a friendly wave from opposite ends of an aisle at the supermarket.

The whole idea of marriage for reasons as ephemeral as sexual attraction has generally proved to be a disaster. Any children, moreover, born to couples that are forever torn between passion and disharmony are likely only to fan the flames of their disharmony.

The meaning of marriage needs to be explored in depth. The chemistry of attraction between two people needs to be better understood. The very education of young people in the realities of sex needs to take place in a higher context—from above, so to speak: from a level of high ideals, even of divine love, rather than from below, with the emphasis placed wholly on the animal aspects of procreation.

The very ceremony of marriage needs to be made a statement of lofty commitment on the couple’s part—a commitment not only to each other, but to truth, and to God. Marriages that involve little more than the signing of a legal contract in a county courthouse are a travesty. Small wonder that so many people today speak of marriage as though all it meant was “a silly piece of paper.”

Marriage, however, made sincerely before God, and in full understanding of what the commitment means, must surely have much greater chances of success than a quickie ceremony performed before fidgeting witnesses before a justice of the peace.

It is an interesting fact that, even in communist countries—or perhaps I should say, in Rumania, which is the one communist country I have visited—the preference of the party faithful is to have their weddings performed in church. Even atheists, then, so it would seem, sense the importance of adding to marriage some nobler commitment, some solemn ceremony that will endow the occasion with an importance beyond the mere signing of legal forms.

People nowadays are often heard to ask, “Why should one get married? If two people love each other, why shouldn’t they simply live together? What difference does a piece of paper make?”

The simple answer is that, when a marriage is sincerely entered into before God, with a ceremony performed in a spirit of blessing by a priest or a minister, there is a grace that can be felt almost tangibly in the air. This sense of blessing can carry a couple through many crises in the years to come, crises which, in less spiritually based marriages, would cause an irreparable rift.

A meaningful wedding ceremony is certainly an important ingredient in a successful marriage. Apart from the blessing it invokes, two people who aren’t compatible in the highest sense may think twice before getting married, if beforehand they are faced with a lofty statement of what marriage really means.

Cities of Light offer an ideal opportunity for the study of this problem. It is a challenge that faces Ananda also, where people have had to deal with previously conditioned attitudes and expectations. The problem is being seriously addressed by the entire community, and, bit by bit, solutions are being found. There is reason to hope that radical new insights will provide a basis for truly happy and mutually supportive marriages.

An important step has been taken at Ananda with the creation of a wedding ceremony that invites the couple to approach their marriage in full awareness that they are participating in a reality much greater than their own.

Much of the difficulty in marriages is the tendency to focus on problems of the moment, and on energies that are being generated at a minuscule point on the vast stage of life. When a couple can keep in mind life’s longer rhythms, and the greater context for every present reality, they also find it easier to hang on to the central reality of their marriage, which is, simply, their love and commitment to each other.

It may be helpful at this point to include excerpts from the Ananda wedding ceremony, partly so that the reader may have a clearer idea of what it means to be married “in God,” and partly to show what I mean by a monastic commitment in the context of marriage and family.

Priest or minister:

In all things, see the hand of God;
And seek, through them,
His blessing on your union.

From rocks and earth,
Seek steadfastness in love.

(He places a touch of earth on the forehead of each, at a point between the eyebrows.)

From water and all liquid things,
Seek the grace to flow through life in harmony
Without attachment,
In a spirit of acceptance and cooperation.

(He sprinkles a little water on their heads.)

From air and sweet fragrances,
Seek pure freedom
From all thought of “I” and “mine.”

(He holds steadily before them a few sticks of burning incense.)

And from rising fire,
Seek the understanding that human love
Must ever aspire toward the heights
Of perfect, divine love.

(He lights a fire in a metal bowl. Once the flames begin to rise, he says:)

In fire we see also a symbol of the unifying power of God’s love, uniting your separate flames of life in His one, infinite light. Offer yourselves mentally into the fire of that love.

Repeat after me:

O Infinite love,
We offer ourselves up to Thee.
Burn up and purify our limitations.

(Bride and groom each offer a stick of wood into the flames.)

Destroy in us the seeds of earthly desire.

(They each cast a handful of rice into the fire.)

Accept our pure aspiration
To be one with Thee.

(They pour a little clarified butter into the flames.)

Holy Vows at Marriage

(Expressed first by the couple to God:)

Beloved Lord,

We dedicate to Thee our lives, our service, and the love we share.

May the communion we find with each other lead us to inner communion with Thee.

May the service we render each other perfect in us our service of Thee.

May we behold Thee always enshrined in each other’s forms.

May we always remember that it is above all Thee we love.

In every test of love, may we see Thy loving hand.

In any disagreement, may we see Thy hidden guidance.

May our love not be confined by selfish needs, but give us strength ever to expand our hearts until we see all human beings, all creatures as our own.

Teach us to love all beings equally, in Thee.

(The couple then speak these vows to each other:)

Dear Beloved,

I will be true to you as I pray always to be true to God.

I will love you without condition, as I would be loved by you—and as we are ever loved by God.

I will never compete with you; I will cooperate always for our own, and for all others’, highest good.

I will forgive you always, and under all circumstances.

I will respect your right to see truth as you perceive it, and to be guided as you feel deeply within yourself, and I will work with you always, in freedom, to arrive at a common understanding.

All that we do, may we do for God’s glory.

May we live and grow together in His love and joy.

And may the offspring of our union—whether human children, or creative deeds—be doorways for the inspiration that we feel from Him, through each other.

May our love grow ever deeper, purer, more expansive, until, in our perfected love, we find the perfect love of God.

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