MARRIAGE VOW


The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other;
it unites each of them with the community
in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others.
The whole community is married,
realizes its essential unity, in each of its marriages . . .
What marriage offers --
and what fidelity is meant to protect --
is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen
and what we desire are the same.
Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous.
No relationship can continue very long at its highest pitch.
But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments,
which gives us the highest joy we can know:
that of union, communion, atonement
(in the root sense of at-one-ment).

[Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977, p. 122]

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