Meet Erik and Amber: A Story Driven Homily

Wedding homilies have the potential to be the most beautiful part of your wedding day. Yet it is often the most overlooked, a mere formality and trite sermon on the way to the real event: vows and cake.

The homily below was written for Erik and Amber by an officiant using the Story Driven Wedding exercises. We laughed! We cried! It was beautiful.

Meet Erik and Amber

We are here today to celebrate two people who represent the best of friendship and family. Erik and Amber represent an expansive love. This love extends far past their love for each other and embraces all the people around them. This love includes all of us when we are part of their lives. 

The contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton has said that, “Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.” 

What this tells me is that love is something that we learn in our lives, not something that just happens when cupid’s arrow strikes. It is mysterious but mysterious like working a farm through changing seasons and watching things grow. There is work and effort. 

Erik and Amber were both practicing love long before they met each other. They practiced in their friendships and they practiced in their families. They walked through heartbreak and loss. And as they went, they both became people for whom one thing was important above all else: permission to be themselves. It is rare to find people who have also done the hard work of learning to love themselves as individuals. This self- love radiated to the other people in their lives. When you’re around these two, everyone has permission to be who they are and to be accepted for that person. 

So when Erik and Amber met dancing, sure they found their perfect dance partner. And they found a fellow traveller, someone who really understood how rare and how beautiful and how necessary it is to say: “I see you. I like you. You don’t have to be anyone else.” That is what their love is built on. What makes Erik and Amber so perfect for each other is that they believed that loving people and being free mattered. Their compatibility is the result of their expansive, inclusive love, not the result of a romance. 

The first time they really saw this shared quality in each other was hanging out at the pool at Erik’s house a few weeks after they started seeing each other. It was just the two of them and they spent two hours playing a game that Erik made up called Impromptu Pool Charades (or something like that, they don’t actually remember but it was long enough for an acronym). Imagine Erik yelling out “Lord of the Rings!” and Amber then running across the lawn, leaping into the air, miming putting a ring on her finger and yelling “my precious!) as she falls into the water. As Erik said, “I didn’t know many people who would be willing to throw their heart and soul and body into a game where they’d look so ridiculous. Amber did that and we barely knew each other and it was amazing.” Later, they would also sit together by the pool and read books. Amber said, “I didn’t know you could just sit in quiet with someone, just be and enjoy something separately but together.” 

They had both found not only someone who was as weird as they were but someone who had no qualms about being weird or about seeing someone else’s weird. They felt permission to be who they were and not perform. They knew something cool was happening. And that experience gave them both a new hope (Star Wars reference intended). This wasn’t their first time falling in love with someone. They knew how love can go wrong, how it can hurt, how its loss can make you doubt your own lovability. And together, a new possibility emerged. There was a chance that maybe, just maybe, they could be with someone who saw them for who they were and who gave that same kind of love to everyone else in their lives. 

There are a number of ways that this deep love and deep freedom expresses itself in their relationship. 

1. 

First, they are committed to always growing so they can be the best version of themselves and the best version of their partnership. In some seasons, that has meant digging deep into their past and present. In other seasons with intense workloads, it’s meant making time for each other no matter what. A small example of this is in dance. They’ve danced together for a long time, which can sometimes mean that your dances with that person can grow a little familiar or routine. But even now, they have dances together that totally wow them, that show them how they’ve grown and changed. They see how they are still pushing boundaries and creating new things together. There are new surprises and joys when they invest in each other and in themselves. 

2.
The Second is how they figure things out together. It’s key to how they keep growing and evolving. When they were first planning to move in together, they had a conflict that would define the next few years. And that conflict was buying a rug together. Turns out, they had wildly different aesthetics and could not find a way through their differences. Would they ever be able to build a life together if they couldn’t decide on a rug?! Finally, they hit upon an unexpected plan. They took turns walking down the aisle of rugs and describing what they liked and didn’t like. Then, they took the overlapping details that they liked and looked for something that had that. Turns out, there was a rug that made them both very happy. They were both really proud of their ability to find an unexpected way through. It gave them both confidence that they would find a creative way through future challenges. Fighting well is critical in a marriage and the mutual respect and creativity they both bring to the table means they are well set to do this going forward. 

3.
The third way is in how they support each other’s dreams. Erik and Amber have both been working toward their dreams while they’ve been together. One dream that they shared was to travel abroad together. Erik had visited Spain when he was little and wanted to go back to a specific plaza that had enchanted him as a kid. Amber had grown up dreaming of travelling the world but hadn’t left the continent yet. So they planned a trip to Spain which accidentally coincided with their third anniversary. 

The very first night they were there, the very day of their anniversary, through a surprising set of circumstances that seem to uniquely happen to Erik and Amber, they were given a private lounge area in a fancy restaurant with a perfect view of Madrid at nighttime. 

Amber said: “It just hit me. This is my life. I have this wonderful person who wants the same things I do, wants to see different cultures, experience new things. The person I love created this experience with me.” Amber’s longtime dream had come true and it was better than she had imagined. 

Later in the trip, they sat in the plaza that Erik had dreamed of revisiting since childhood. Erik said: “[Being in that plaza] was the culmination of something I’d always wanted and didn’t know I wanted: to be abroad with my love. To share this place, sipping wine and eating olives and watching street performers, for years. I was able to connect to my past and be in the present. It was amazing. And Amber was loving it, having her own independent experience. I wasn’t taking away from her experience of being abroad for the first time.” 

Just like the night they read together by the pool, they could be in an experience together and enjoy something both together and independently. Their dreams could come true together. Erik returned to a favorite memory with the person he loves the most. Amber traveled the world with the person she loves the most. 

They work to see each other’s dreams come true in regular life as well, not just while they travel the world together. I’ve seen them celebrate each other’s wins, new jobs, new research, new friends, new birthdays, with full and open hearts. 

4. 

All of these are just expressions of the same generous, accepting spirit that they bring to their entire lives. Everyone gets included in their antics, their joy, their love for people, and enthusiasm for a great time. The same permission that Erik and Amber gave to each other extends to everyone in their lives. 

If you spend any time with them, and I think you’ll see in this gathering, that there is a profound diversity in personalities, job titles, geographies, cultures, etc. They don’t collect friends who are like them. Rather, they delight in people who are brave enough to accept the invitation to be totally themselves. This love, this freedom, is the heart of their partnership. And it’s the heart of their gift to us. 

This is a partnership that GIVES, that expands beyond its borders to include everyone around them in the good times. They believe that a good time is a better time the more people can be brought along for the fun of it. Erik and Amber are a partnership that includes. Other people are brought along for these beautiful moments. It’s why we’re all here. Erik and Amber would never want a wedding that did not have all of their favorite people there to celebrate with them. 

The Charge 

To Erik and Amber: each of us here are better for knowing you. We know what a better party looks like and a better dance and better laughter and better games like dare-dare. We also know what it means to love better, to give freely, to look for the chance to really enjoy someone, to include everyone in the good time, and to be there in hard moments. 

And so I charge you (also known as dare-daring you) to keep the life that you have begun together. Keep giving each other full permission to be yourselves. Grow independently of each other and come home to a love that celebrates every win alongside you. Invest in your own lives and in your own work. Keep fighting well and creatively crossing every barrier. And as loss comes, hold each other and be there for each other. Keep welcoming everyone into your hearts as you have welcomed each other. Continue into the years with hope and love. 

Our love goes with you.