The wedding was filled with beauty – people looked splendid, especially the bride and her two sisters who attended her, and the one hundred of us present in the Andover church, all in a celebrative mood.

Since my niece Jennifer was marrying a Frenchman, the liturgy was intriguingly bilingual. Christophe, for his part, seemed poised, not only for his role as bridegroom, but in serving as a kind of master of ceremonies. With remarkable aplomb for a person about to be joined in marriage, he helped steer the ushers to their spontaneous and unrehearsed duties.

As has become the norm, photographers scurried about to record every move of the bride and groom. Parents of the bridal partners looked on happily while other relatives and friends more relaxedly entered into the flow of this joyful event.

Part way through the Eucharistic liturgy I was suddenly struck by a new appreciation of how daring it is for a woman to take a man and a man to take a woman as life partner. It hit me as a move fraught with spirituality.

This realization struck home while the second reading was being proclaimed. The couple had chosen a passage from the Song of Songs, the inspired poem from the Hebrew Bible that proclaims an ardent and erotic love, of a woman and a man for each other.

“The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice.”

“My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.’”

This fiery love is what can impel men and women to take on the challenges of the unknown. It drives them even to give assent to the scary words “for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, till death do us part.”

Imagine the things that can happen in anyone’s future! Life after marriage can take on such a different shape from what one’s dreams have dictated. And yet the couple stands ready to dare this future, to take a leap impelled by love.

That marriages often fail cannot come as a surprise; the surprise is that they often succeed. To pull it off takes soul. You must have some spiritual depth ever to live permanently in intimacy with one other person.

Spirituality helps us acknowledge our flaws. I remember hearing of a man, aged in marriage, who starts off every day by looking in the mirror and saying “You’re not so hot yourself!”

But, more important, spirituality drives us to reach beyond ourselves and seek strongly the real good of the other person. The soul craves this union; in following this lead we enter into the life of God who is love.

As Thomas Moore says in his book Soul Mates, “Every relationship that touches the soul leads us into a dialogue with eternity, so that, even though we may think our strong emotions focus on the people around us, we are being set face to face with divinity itself, however we understand or speak that mystery.”

Marriage, to the eyes of the spiritual seeker, must indeed be seen as mystery. This word suggests that marriage has too much meaning ever to be comprehended. No matter how long we contemplate what it means for men and women to come together like this, we will never exhaust its significance.

So, whether the spouses reflect on it or not, they are caught up in a human enterprise with divine meaning. Facing one another, they somehow suggest what happens in the life of God. That’s why partners must stay open to the twistings and turnings that take place over time. These events, to the spiritually minded, are intimations of divine activity in lives lived together.

So Jennifer and Christophe, like others who have been joined in marriage, have set out on a spiritual adventure that promises surprise, challenge, and grace.

Richard Griffin