It’s not what it used to be. A comment from someone prompted me to take another look at the Niagara rite of blessing of civil marriage: it would be used for the blessing of same-sex partners (one of whom has to be baptised – why?), but, presumably could be used to bless heterosexual civil unions too. We are assured in the introduction that the “rite is innovative” – and indeed it is as an excercise in maudlin sentimentality:

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other.
Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other.
Now, there is no more loneliness.
Now you are two persons, but there is one life ahead of you.
Go now to your dwelling to enter into the days of your life together
And may your days be good and long upon the earth

From there it lurches recklessly into the assertion that same-sex attraction and its fulfilment is a sacred God-given gift and a bodily expression of Christ’s perfect love:

In your mercy you befriend those who wander in loneliness and shame, those oppressed because of difference, those who do not know the value of their unique and sacred gift; and by your Holy Spirit you awaken in them the dignity of humankind and the responsibility of embodied love, as perfected in Jesus Christ, who loved and gave himself for us, showing us the way to intimacy with you and with one another.

None of which overshadows the Proclamation of the Word with its suggested secular readings. Here is one from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “We two boys together clinging” – a poem about gay love:

WE two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,
threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on
the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness
chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.

Or the couple could select “The Road Goes Ever On”. While it works pretty well in Lord of the Rings, I wonder if the happy couple look forward to wading through the festering marshes of Emyn Muil, only to end up in Mount Doom where the bride will have his finger bitten off and thrown into the molten lava, ring and all.  Although – maybe that’s an apt metaphor.