We know why marriage matters -- whether it is the federal government reminding us that marriages make stronger a nation, or the AMA telling us that being married correlates with longer life, better health and faster recovery from illness, or just our own hearts whispering fiercely that THIS person makes our world go ‘round and life worth living – we know that marriage matters. But, does a wedding matter? In this day and age, at least in the U.S. it is de rigeur for couples to move in together and get about the business of life, often without a marriage license, and no one gasps in disapproval. Weddings are expensive to pay for, time-consuming to plan and emotionally draining to implement. So, why weddings?

The deep answer lies in the much maligned and misunderstood realm of mythology. Joseph Campbell, the great expositor of myth in this generation, says: "Myth is the collective dream; dream is the personal myth." When we are in the dreamy state called "being in love" we are in more than a heightened emotional state. We are "in" a collective myth that sets the parameters and possibilities of that state and defines both the promises and the problems of that particular adventure. When we enter into marriage, we enter – knowingly or unknowingly – into a territory that has already been explored, claimed, conquered and colonized for centuries by our ancestors. We become tax-paying citizens of that mythic realm the minute we put the ring on our finger!

I have been creating and officiating weddings for more than a dozen years and whenever I hear a new couple tell me, "Oh, we don’t expect our relationship to change just because we’re getting married; after all, we’ve been living together for years," I smile and shake my head and relate the following anecdote about Joseph Campbell.

Several years ago I had the privilege of escorting Mrs. Joseph Campbell – Jean Erdman Campbell – to Santa Barbara, California, where she was giving a lecture. After the event, we retired to our hotel where she regaled me with stories of her life with Joe. Speaking with the lilt and laughter of the young woman she’d been in 1939 when she and Joe married, she recalled how it had been he who wept profusely for the duration of the wedding ceremony. He had insisted on getting married on the 5th hour of the 5th day of the 5th month of the year, for five was the symbolic number of the great Norse god, Thor, whose thunderbolt is the harbinger of transformation. Campbell, realizing the profound shift that was imminent, wanted that symbol to accompany him to the altar for, as he remarked, "I will not be the same man when I return from that walk!" Campbell understood the true significance of the wedding ceremony and his emotional response is eloquent testimony to just how well he did understand!

The wedding ceremony itself may be likened to the opening paragraph of a great story, as the Nobel award-winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, notes:

"The effort in writing a story is intense… where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm. length, and sometimes even the personality of a character." (from the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims; Penguin Books, 1993)

The wedding matters because it is the symbolic event that shapes the marriage journey itself: the pattern from which the fabric of the relationship is cut; the template from which each day of the marriage is fashioned; the opening chord which heralds the tune, tempo and key of the symphony of love; the cornerstone around which the edifice of a shared life will be built. Use whatever metaphor works for you. The wedding is the initiating ritual which forever divides the before from the after and, as such, it matters.

"Ritual, as I understand it, gives form to human life; not in mere surface arrangement, but in depth," wrote Joseph Campbell.

Like Campbell, I was raised Catholic and left the church during my twenties in search of something else. But, also, like Campbell, I never forgot the enduring importance of ritual in human life. When I began doing weddings as part of my Unitarian ministry, I was quickly brought to a standstill in front of a major dilemma: on the one hand, I did not believe in much of what the old rituals of weddings were doing -- in fact, I thought they were downright unhealthy for most modern couples! – but to denounce the wedding was clearly to throw the baby out with the bath water. How could I, in good conscience, ask people to mouth old platitudes and promises that did not spring from their own hearts and their own beliefs?

I set out to explore the origins of ritual and found my first clues, ironically, in the expressive, impulsive, cathartic gestures made by individuals who were in the process of getting divorced. I asked them what they had done with their wedding rings! In story after story what emerged was a pattern of mostly unpremeditated intelligence that provided a very individualized way to heal the hurt, guilt and anger, and find a way towards forgiveness, gratitude and release. I had discovered "spontaneous ritual" – a facet of human behavior that I now recognize as a basic human instinct.

From the broken pieces of life humans build psychological bridges, based on metaphoric truths, to take them back to wholeness. I took this insight to the couples who came to me for help in making their wedding ceremonies and I asked them to talk about the deep, connecting images that made their love visible and articulable. In listening to more than five hundred couples since 1990, I realized that every couple has a "centering metaphor" for the relationship that often comes out between the lines of our conversation. Once that metaphor is found, the rest of the ritual naturally gathers around it like metal shavings to a magnet, giving the ceremony a coherence and aesthetic integrity – not to mention psychological depth – that is palpable.

When the wedding ceremony itself – the ritual that transforms two humans individuals into "beloved companions for life" – corresponds in every feature to the deep centering metaphor of the relationship, then it becomes much more than simply the short, obligatory skit before the big party! Instead, it becomes a renewing spring for the duration of the marriage. This metaphor fits the image I like to use to explain the significance of the wedding ritual to prospective couples, that of words as the water of life.

"If you spend the time to dig this well of love deep enough now…" I tell them, "…lining it carefully with well-chosen words, gestures and symbolic objects, then this wedding with its vows will be for you an endless source of renewal for as long as you live. You may return to it during the dry and desperate days that every marriage must go through, and draw once again from its depths the same life-giving sweetness that you tasted on that day so long ago when you stood before each other, hand in hand, and promised your life into each other’s keeping."

Yes, this ritual is important. Yes, weddings matter!

Brooding over the loss of love; I churned my disappointments and anger through my heart and my arms as I swam as many laps as it took to find calm. Some days I swam for hours. Walking to my office across the plaza of the court building and seeing the couples - not lovers arm in arm, but lawyers and clients head to head in anxious consultations - I could feel the leeching of emotional poisons into the common stream of humanity. It was at one of these moments that it suddenly hit me: I was also dumping toxic waste into the common pool; with my distress I was polluting the psychic waters in which we all swim! A few evenings later I took my partner out for dinner and over a bottle of excellent wine gave him the choice: Let us part gracefully, or thrash out a viable coexistence with respect, even if it cannot be with love. His look of immense relief and hope - not hope for us, but for his life returned at last - was answer enough. Oh yes, I was shocked at how eagerly he seized the chance to escape from misery, but had he not displayed absolute emotional honesty at that moment, we might still be fighting and dumping. Now we are cordial, speaking several times a month as old lovers can. Sometimes there are moments of bright, heart-searing compassion for one another. We may yet live into that capacity of which Helen Luke speaks when she attests that even divorced couples can "cherish one another til death do part." And, had I not accepted the pain of parting, I would not have returned to receptive solitude, ready to meet the man who would be my true soulmate.

The Myth of Romantic Love has done all of us in the West a huge disservice! We are crippled and perverted in our best efforts by a gross misunderstanding of what that form of love was meant to convey. For thirteen years I have worked as an interfaith minister with couples on the path toward marriage - over five hundred couples thus far - and now I have begun to work with couples on the way out. Entering so nobly to the high-calling of love, what soon happens, as the songwriter Carly Simon so aptly phrased it, is this:

"the couples cling and claw

and drown in love's debris."

I swim daily in the current of so-called romantic love, and it's time to speak out about the conditions I am encountering. Now it is time for some lessons in spiritual ecology!

The late, great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, was a close family friend and from my early teens I was privileged to call him "Uncle Joe." He spoke often and with great passion about the Myth of Romantic Love, which was, for him, the foundational psychological insight of the West. Born out of the tumultuous period known as the Middle Ages, Romantic Love was, at first, a mythopoetic revelation formed from the meeting of minds of Christian and Muslim mystics in Spain and southern France. In the absence of warrior husbands, who left en masse to fight the Turks in the Crusades, the feminine spirit found room to expand, indeed explode into blossom under the worshipful gaze of the poet-lovers, those men left behind to woo the newly empowered women. Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughters gave form to this astonishing surge of psyho-spiritual influx in the laws of Courtly Love. The essential Troubadour spirit is reflected in these lines from the late 12th and early 13th centuries:

"Each day I am a better man and purer,

for I serve the noblest lady in the world." (Arnaut Daniel)

"Lady, for your love I join my hands and worship." (Bernart de Ventadorn)

"To be in love is to reach toward heaven through a woman!" (Uc de St. Circ)

Romantic Love, at its core, is a spiritual insight. As a tool it is one of the most powerful we have for furthering the Soul's journey. But we have forgotten how to use it, and so it has become downright dangerous for us. Campbell's interpretation of the role of Romantic Love in the West was its capacity to introduce the novel idea of particularity into the primal drive of lust, possession and procreation. "This one and no other!" is the cry of the true lover. This face, and only this face, excites the yearning for: "... the individual, not as a member of some sanctified consensus through which he is given worth... but as an end and value in himself, unique in his imperfections, in his yearnings, in his process of becoming not what he "ought" to be, but what he is, actually and potentially; such a one as was never seen before." (Flight of the Wild Gander, Campbell)

This form of love, properly understood and experienced, unites the lower instincts with the energy of the heart (for the beloved) and of the mind (for the idea of love) and of the soul (for God). Further, it introduces a kind of sensitivity to spiritual ecology of which I was unaware until I began to notice that of the couples who came to me for premarital counseling, those who professed to be soulmates - that is they recognized in one another a deep familiarity, a bond with the resonance of eternity - immediately gravitated towards a sense of social responsibility in their wedding plans. It was not to merely celebrate their "us-ness" that they wanted a wedding, but to bless and extend the love to all who were present and even beyond their immediate circle.

Reading history mythopoetically, that is with an eye toward its metaphoric content, has given me hope that we can recover the spiritual insights of the past. In the great myths, the great truths remain encoded as images and metaphors that the soul can decipher. For instance, the central plot of the emerging Western psyche, as depicted in The Quest for the Holy Grail, holds this scene of Parsival at the darkest moment of his trials:

Without hope and in despair, Parsival has abandoned his will, dropped the reins, and lets his horse meander. Over a bleak winter landscape the horse plods through empty fields until overhead, a screeching falcon pierces the breast of a wild goose, and three drops of hot, red blood fall into the cold, white snow. This image arrests Parsival so deeply that he is transfixed and in this state the memory of his wife, Condwiramurs, fills him completely. [Book VI, Chretien du Troyes]

Read rightly, this single image contains wisdom enough to re-ignite the quest - both Parsival's and ours!

Wherever you are in the cycle of love - coupled, in crisis, uncoupling, resting in solitude, answering the call of love for the first time - you can participate in the spiritual ecology of Romantic Love. It is our special task to sort through the perversions that have blinded us to the real meaning of this gift from our ancestors and take up, once again, the deep delights of reaching the One through devotion to "this One Only of the Many."