Cosmic Love In Action: A Wedding Poem Poem by David Perry

I once heard a learned scientist
Explain away marriage with an evolutionary twist:

"It's a simple matter of a biological imperative,
An unstoppable urge that the species might live.

Blind nature's way of creating a home
Where offspring might grow until they can produce their own.

Romance is only nature's clever trick
To fool us into becoming more prolific."

And to this Richard Dawkins adds his theme:
We are all helpless servants of the selfish gene.

Will, Consciousness, Freedom, Mind:
All but illusions of a most pervasive kind.


When all is said and done we can grant this
to the arguments of the materialist reductionists:

There is indeed an unstoppable cosmic force,
Though its name is not Survival of the Fittest but, well, Love of course.

Love does seek to expand the circle of the living,
Not blindly but because its nature is self-giving.

Since the Big Bang until today
From all the evidence it seems fair to say

That the universe has but one firm goal:
For things to join together to form a new whole.

And as if displaying hidden smarts,
These wholes are always more than the sum of their parts.

The parts each have their unique qualities,
But the wholes have entirely new properties.

Hydrogen and oxygen may be widely dispersed,
But only water can quench your thirst.

Then these wholes in turn become new parts
And so a higher level of being starts.

From atoms to molecules to cells to you and me,
Everything grows in greater circles of inclusivity.

Some have called it an unquenchable cosmic urge
For everything that arises to eventually converge.

What we call the process of evolution
Is really Love's struggle to birth a higher union.

Though this process may at times appear as cruel,
Love is the teacher, and our life is the school.

But in order for Love to teach us to be glad,
It must first cure the sickness that we didn't know we had.

Which brings us back to marriage, Love's penetrating mirror,
Where, with work, our own true face may become a bit clearer.

It's not an easy task this making one out of two.
But ours is to simply do the best that we can do.

At times we may feel stretched to our limit
But this is the eternal process and Love is surely in it.

So let those of us who gather here
Form an even larger supporting sphere

As we witness the enacting of this couple's deeply written constitution
To honor, cherish, and form a more perfect union.

And now how can our hearts not be stirred
When we hear in their vows the reverberating word

That has echoed across eons of time
Now, at last, saying, "I am yours and you are mine."