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Readings from Jamie & rui's ceremonies
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Whether a favorite poem, lyrics of a song that touches you, an excerpt from a spiritual guide – choosing the words for your wedding is an intimate affair and sets the tone of the ceremony.
Jamie Butler da Silva chose readings from Rumi, Kahlil Gibran, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (who quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), for her St. Augustine, Florida beach wedding. Jamie said of the poem by Rumi: "Looking For Your Face was my inspiration for the ceremony and says what love really is to me." |
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| Florida Wedding |
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1 Jamie’s best friend’s three-year-old daughter, Sarah, said she would walk down the aisle only if she was wearing angel wings. The bride not only bought Sarah a pair of angel wings, but also a halo and she then tiptoed down the aisle—because “that’s how angels walk,” Sarah declared! 2 Since the couple doesn’t like icing, they had a tiered pound cake with an assortment of toppings available to guests. But in true Jamie fashion, there were two dozen Black Magic roses tucked around the tiers of their wedding cake! |
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Looking for Your Face
From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face but today I have seen it
Today I have seen the charm, the beauty, the unfathomable grace of the face that I was looking for
Today I have found you and those who laughed and scorned me yesterday are sorry that they were not looking as I did
I am bewildered by the magnificence of your beauty and wish to see you with a hundred eyes
My heart has burned with passion and has searched forever For this wondrous beauty that I now behold
I am ashamed to call this love human and afraid of God to call it divine
Your fragrant breath like the morning breeze has come to the stillness of the garden
You have breathed new life into me
I have become your sunshine and also your shadow
My soul is screaming in ecstasy
Every fiber of my being is in love with you
Your effulgence has lit a fire in my heart
And you have made radiant for me the earth and the sky
My arrow of love has arrived at the target
I am in the house of mercy and my heart is a place of prayer
- Rumi |
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Stand together yet not too near together for the pillars of the temple stand apart and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
- Kahlil Gibran
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| Brazil Ceremony |
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| 1 The spiritual practice of the da Silva family is linked to Umbanda, an ancient tradition with roots in Africa. Out of respect, wearing white by all was mandatory for the ceremony in Brazil—no color to interfere with the flow of spirit—so Jamie replaced the red ribbons in her gown from their Florida ceremony with white ones and wore a flower wreath made by local women of baby’s breath with palest pink tiny rose buds. Like her bouquet, no open flowers, it was to be pristine and newborn. 2 Following the old Umbandan customs, when a child is born, they are assigned their spiritual links. One of Rui’s guides is Yemanja—the goddess of the oceans. To honor her, the meal after the wedding ceremony in Brazil was fish and other foods of the sea—a gift back to her. 3 The Umbandan wedding ceremony, spoken in Portuguese, on a Brazilian beach near Rui’s hometown—surrendering to even deeper spiritual awakenings. |
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“Love does not consist in gazing at each other (one perfect sunrise gazing at another!) but in looking outward together in the same direction.” For, in fact, man and woman are not only looking outward in the same direction; they are working outward.
Here one forms ties, roots, a firm base. Here one makes oneself part of the community, of human society. Here the bonds of marriage are formed. For marriage, which is always spoken of as a bond, becomes actually, in this stage, many bonds, many strands, of different texture and strength, making up a web that is taunt and firm. The web is fashioned of love. Yes, but many kinds of love: romantic love first, then a slow-growing devotion and, playing through these, a constantly rippling companionship. It is made of loyalties, and interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, too; a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both physical and mental. It is a web of instincts and intuitions, and known and unknown exchanges. The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward and working outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.
- excerpt from “Gift From the Sea”, Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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