It was my great pleasure to perform another wedding ceremony this weekend.  All brides are beautiful, and all grooms are handsome, but this couple were even more so.  Young, nervous, excited, and ready to begin their new lives together as husband and wife.  The setting was a park near Grand Rapids, and the sun was shining and the air was full of birdsong. 

I love performing weddings.  To me, there is nothing more human, or more sacred, than the joining together of two lives to meet a shared future.  This world can be a cold, empty place, and when you reach out your hand into the darkness, and find another hand to hold onto, that is truly miraculous.  I'm not religious in the traditional meaning of the word, but I have a sense of the divine.  That which passes between between two people who have decided that their lives are incomplete without each other is divine.

I'm not anti-religion.  Please don't get me wrong.  I believe that everyone has a path that they should follow.  Some follow the path that they were shown as a child, and are quite happy to do so. If they are happy, then that is as it should be.  If your faith sustains you, helps you to live in this world, gives you purpose and meaning and, yes, the divine, then that is the path for you to walk.  Some, like me, have chosen a different path, a path without faith in the traditional teachings and dogmas of our culture.  And again, if this is the path that you have chosen, that is as it should be.  One of the definitions of faith is "belief in something for which there is no proof".  Meaning, at least to me, that whether or not you have faith in a particular religious teaching is purely subjective.  We can't know for certain whether or not a particular god or gods exist.  Any deity worthy of the title is going to exist outside of our ability to prove that it exists.  The only way to know whether or not that god exists is through faith, and not all of us have that, or even feel the need for it.
Besides faith, the other gifts are hope and love.  That's why I've become a wedding minister.  A wedding is an act of love, but it's also an act of hope.  A person getting married is declaring to their partner and to the world that their future is bonded to this other person's future.  They believe that life together is going to be better than life separated, and that they trust this person with their hopes and dreams and fears, now and tomorrow and all of their tomorrows to come.  This other person will help them carry that love and hope forward into the unknown.
Reading this, I guess maybe that I do have faith after all.  Not in gods or revealed wisdoms, but in humanity.  In spite of all of the horrible things that we are capable of doing to each other, we are capable of love.  And when we love, we are divine.  And I have faith in that.