Love lives at the junction of life and death. Death is the reminder that our time is too precious to waste it on what and whom we don’t love. Life is the permission we have to keep loving until death takes us and then only our memory will serve as love’s force. When I first began my ministry I would pronounce a couple married until “the death in two people’s hearts”. What a self-help cop out! That was almost permission to throw in the towel! Then I shifted to pronouncing them married “until death do us part”. That was more like it. But only after I did a wedding for a former Mormon couple did I realize that I was still missing the point. Mormons believe that marriage is for eternity. In some ways, we are still married to the ones we first loved, still parents to the children we have lost, still connected to the parents now gone. I have revised my pronouncement once again, “I will love you, from each sun to each moon, from now to forever.”
Love never dies. It may be as immortal as time itself.
With grace and grit, John
