Day Marks

“If you want to have something you have never had before, you have to do something you have never done before.” (Richard Jones)

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]

“Guard closely a sense of the wonder of life, of the joy of giving, of love for another. For in a heart devoid of these, God cannot dwell.” (ENSIGN July 1977)

“What is more amiable and pleasant than those pure, innocent, endearing affections which God has placed in the hearts of the male and female, who are united in lawful matrimony, with a love and affection, pure as the love of God, because it springs from Him, and is His gift: with bodies chaste and virtuous, and an offspring, lovely, healthy, pure, innocent, and uncontaminated: confiding in each other, they live together in the fear of God, enjoying nature's gifts uncorrupted, and undefiled as the driven snow, or the crystal stream.” ( Teachings of Presidents of the Church , John Taylor, p. 194)