Our Ceremony

The Marriage of

Antoinette Capaccio and Joshua Miller

August 16, 2008

Master of Ceremonies: Matthew Rogers, friend

Parents of the bride: Anthony and Helen Capaccio

Parents of the groom: Robert and Ruth Miller

Matron of Honor: Angelina Maynard, sister
Best Man: Daniel Brunson, friend

Bridesmaids: Sybil Dunlop, friend; Joanne Gault, cousin; Tina ManWarren Roche-Kelly, friend; La'Kesha Marshall, friend
Groomsmen: Dominic Capaccio, brother; Jean-Marc Gorelick, friend; Jason Kristall, friend; Steven Maloney, friend
Readers: Jean-Marc Gorelick, friend; Betsy Farquhar, friend; Hillary Avis, friend

Processional

Opening Words and Charge to the Community

Matt: Welcome. We have come here tonight to witness and rejoice in the marriage of Joshua and Antoinette.

Joshua and Antoinette asked their parents to lead both of them to the altar today to symbolize how their families, friends and traditions have brought them together. They have chosen the words of poet Wendell Barry to express how important you all are and will continue to be to their relationship:

“Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another 'until death,' are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, 'die' into their union with one another as a soul 'dies' into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing..."

Matt: Please affirm your intention to continue to support this relationship by responding, “I will” to the following question: As part of the community that surrounds Joshua and Antoinette, will each of you do everything you can to uphold and care for these two persons in their marriage?

Guests: I will.

Readings

Matt: Our first reading is from the sermons of Soren Kierkergaard. It will be read by Jean-Marc Gorelick.

If it is true–as conceited shrewdness, proud of not being deceived, thinks–that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one did this and did it out of fear of being deceived, would not one then be deceived? […] To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity. For usually… when there is talk about being deceived in love the one deceived is still related to love, and the deception is simply that it is not present where it was thought to be; but one who is self-deceived has locked himself out and continues to lock himself out from love.

Matt: Our second reading is from The Book of Ruth. It will be read by Betsy Farquhar.

Long ago when judges ruled in Israel, a man from Bethlehem left the country because of a famine and moved to the land of Moab. With him were his wife, Naomi, and his two sons. These two sons married girls of Moab, Orpah and Ruth. But later both father and sons died, so that Naomi was left alone, without her husband or her sons. She decided to return to Israel with her daughters-in-law, for she had heard that the Lord had blessed his people by giving them good crops again.

But after they had begun their homeward journey, she changed her mind and said to her two daughters-in-law, “Why don’t you return to your parents’ homes instead of coming with me? And may the Lord reward you for your faithfulness to your husbands and to me. And may he bless you with another happy marriage.” Then she kissed them and they all broke down and cried. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law good-bye, and returned to her childhood home; but Ruth insisted on staying with Naomi. “See,” Naomi said to her, “your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; you should do the same.”

But Ruth replied, “Do not make me leave you, for wherever you go, I shall go. Wherever you live, so shall I live. Your people will be my people. And your god will be my god too. Wherever you die, I shall die, and there shall I be buried beside you. Nothing but death will separate us.”

Matt: Our next reading is "love is thicker than forget," by e.e.cummings. It will be read by Hillary Avis.

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is more sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky

Marriage Address:

Joshua and Antoinette have chosen to pursue a self-uniting marriage. This is a form of marriage based in the Quaker tradition that allows a couple to marry without an officiant. I will not pronounce them husband and wife. They will voice their own commitment to each other. Today, Joshua and Antoinette will not be married, they will marry themselves. To prepare for this ceremony, they have asked me to read to you this address about what love means to them.

Josh and Toni met twelve years ago this month, as freshmen at Bard College. Far from falling in love at first sight, they can't quite remember meeting each other. And it wasn't love at second or third sight either. In fact, while they were always close friends, it was three years before they started dating. After such a long friendship, what was it that finally changed for these two? Neither can quite identify it, but their connection grew and deepened from that first forgotten meeting. It's tempting to chalk this up to the enigma of love, but more than the mystery of romance has brought them back to each other time and again, through career highs and lows, graduate degrees, and geographic separation. They chose each other.

Printed in your program is a favorite poem of the two, The God Who Loves You. In it, a man struggles with the idea that God is disappointed with his choices, not because those choices were wrong, but because they may not have been perfect. He cannot sleep at night because of his concern for an anxious God, harassed by the alternatives set before him in his omniscience. Finally, the resolution comes: the man must rescue God by imagining the deity as a friend with whom he can share his actual, chosen life.

The narrator of the poem is not an arrogant man, equating himself with God, but one who feels deeply his responsibilities to all around him, just as he imagines God would. Is this not ultimately where our conception of God comes from? Often, at weddings, First Corinthians is read to present divine love as a model for human love: “Love is patient, Love is kind, etc.” But perhaps this is backwards. Human love is what forms the template for all else. Believers are asked to follow God as Ruth followed Naomi into Israel; they are asked to make a public virtue out of their private faith.

By having faith in each other, and by taking full responsibility for and full joy in our own decisions, we rescue God from his tortured “what ifs?” We create a community instead of living apart. We need each other if we are ever to resolve the . In life, we reach for the infinite, the universal, the perfection of justice, charity, and honor, but of course we inevitably fail to achieve it. And we cannot forgive ourselves for this inevitable failure. In each other Joshua and Antoinette find the forgiveness they seek, a reconciliation with their finitude, partiality, and imperfection , which they cannot grant themselves alone. Only together can these two come to accept the gap between what they are and what they ought to be, to do, and to achieve.

Antoinette and Joshua believe that love is deciding to stay together, choosing one above all others, and doing it knowing that it may only have been chance that brought them together in the first place. Most of our stories end with love rather than beginning with it. But just as we can only revise once we have begun to write, we can only create a full relationship once we have made the decision to devote ourselves to one another. Only through commitment will we ever discover if we were right. Only through this leap of faith will we ever have put ourselves in the position to have been right. We have only one life and can love only one other with all of our heart. If we are prepared to choose each other, and to do the work to support the choice we make, we will find that we have made our own happiness, that we have in fact lived.

Declaration of Intent

Matt: Joshua and Antoinette, do you intend to be joined in marriage today?

Joshua and Antoinette: We do.

Exchange of Rings

Matt: May I have the rings?

Matt: Joshua, take Antoinette’s left hand and place this ring on her third finger and repeat after me: With this ring, I thee wed, and pledge my faithful love.

Joshua: With this ring, I thee wed, and pledge my faithful love.

Matt: Antoinette, take Joshua’s left hand and place this ring on his third finger and repeat after me: With this ring, I thee wed, and pledge my faithful love.

Antoinette: With this ring, I thee wed, and pledge my faithful love.

Pronouncement

Joshua and Antoinette, your vows of love and loyalty to one another in front of friends and family have united you in marriage. You may kiss.

Closing Words

I now have the pleasure of introducing Joshua Miller and Antoinette Capaccio as husband and wife.

Recessional