Continuing in our series of examples of writing speeches, we are posting a wedding ceremony speech. In writing a wedding speech, we reflect upon our lives, our hopes and dreams and the hard work of relationship. Following this example speech, I’ve included a writing exercise to help you begin such a speech, one that can be written to those you love and admire or want to share knowledge with, even if you write long after the wedding. What would happen, I wonder, if those of us long married or divorced, wrote the wedding speech we’d like to hear now?

Words for Tracy and Rob at Their Wedding, May 25, 2008

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet:

For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Playwright Bertolt Brecht writes, “In life we develop one another.”

It seems to me that in love, we learn to unravel and read the scroll of our beloved’s being, to offer the very solution in which our beloved’s being comes completely true.

To this magic work, Tracy and Rob bring their exquisite intelligence, deep hearts, large spirits, and amazing energy. Between them, Tracy and Rob have ridden great distances on bicycles, climbed rock faces, raced down ski slopes, and jumped out of planes to sky dive. They have traveled to many parts of the world and worked with leaders in their fields. They have conquered career challenges and lived through the loss of loved ones.

In my part of the country, near the Hoh Rain Forest in the Olympic National Park, hikers regularly come upon “nurse logs,” fallen trees whose bark has become home to other organisms valuable to the forest. We often see new trees growing from old tree logs. It is breathtaking to see the hundreds-of-years-old sections of trees fostering new life. All of Tracy and Rob’s experience is the nurse log for their love today, the nurse log that holds the nutrients for the new roots and strong branches they’ll grow, the compassion, kindness, and joy they’ll bring to each other and to those around them.

But as Rilke tells us,  it isn’t easy, it is he says “perhaps the most difficult of tasks.” We all know there isn’t any high tech equipment, more comfortable furniture, or labor-saving devices that guarantee a good performance in how we love our spouse. There is only the studying of the beloved as carefully as  learned scholars study and the slow developing that comes of being cherished.

Rabbi Akiva said, “Precious is the human being, who was created in the divine image. It was an act of still greater love that it was made known to us that we were created in the divine image.”

Tracy and Rob, may the branches of your love reach toward the heavens and support a canopy that protects all that is sacred, our humanity and our hope.

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When you sit down to write a speech presented upon a special occasion to honor as well as inform, the challenge is to write both personally and abstractly–to bring the lives of the people you are honoring into the life reflection you are delivering and raise that reflection to a higher level than you might otherwise.

For me, that meant starting with two quotes that I have found resonate with me more the older I get, the more I discover the work in fostering relationships.

Then I used the imagery of the quotes — this allowed me to list the compatible, commendable and exhilarating talents of both members of the couple, to say they have already successfully completed hard tasks.

I realized I could introduce my own thinking by allowing that the hard task of couple-hood does not come with equipment that guarantee success and by using the nurse log metaphor.

Folding together the three ideas, that of Rilke, that of Brecht and my own, I found a way to say that to truly love, we have to reach higher, to the spiritual. What we pray for is the appearance of our highest selves.

I learn this all again today as I reread what I wrote years ago.

If you want to write for a couple, including the couple you are in, try this:

1. Select one or two quotes that have meaning to you. Write the quote(s) at the head of the speech. Then say what they mean to you and how the people you are honoring have gone about beginning to fulfill the ideas in the quotes.
2. Introduce an image that lingers with you from your daily life or geography. Explain how this image applies to the couple and their vows and dreams.
3. How might you bring the speech to an end? Bring in a religious thinker’s words or the words of the Bible, perhaps, or  quote more from one of the people you quoted at the top of the speech. Or write the words you hope the couple will be able to say to one other.

Letting the quotes that have lingered with you for years, the images that strike you from your life and area of the country, as well as your own earned wisdom will lead you in finding and articulating your message and in offering it to others.