In which love is real

 

This year a lot of my friends are getting married (nine weddings!) and I've been thinking again about ours.

One of the hardest choices we made for ourselves was choosing wedding hymns. We wanted to pick things that we theologically agreed with. That's pretty a pretty big ask for such liberal picky questioning folk. We ditched the very tuneful 'teach me to dance' for the creepiness of "For I was made for your pleasure. Pleasure" (*shudder*)
And whilst I love the poetic sounds of  "Immortal, invisible, God only wise" I felt that it was a bit inaccessible with all it's 'thous' and 'lauding' and 'wither and perish' weren't quite for that mood.

So we talked about this with my Dad and out of the blue, he produced this awesome hymn. It was one neither of us knew, but the lyrics were incredible. It's the most feminist badass wedding hymn we could imagine:

Let love be real

Let love be real, in giving and receiving,
without the need to manage and to own;
a haven free from posing and pretending,
where every weakness may be safely known.
Give me your hand, along the desert pathway,
give me your love wherever we may go:
as God loves us, so let us love each other,
with no demands, just open hands and space to grow.

Let love be real, not grasping or confining,
that strange embrace that holds yet sets us free;
that helps us face the risk of truly living,
and makes us brave to be what we might be.
Give me your strength when all my words are weakness,
give me your love in spite of all you know:
as God loves us, so let us love each other,
with no demands, just open hands and space to grow.

Let love be real, with no manipulation,
no secret wish to harness or control;
let us accept each other's incompleteness,
and share the joy of learning to be whole.
Give me your hope through dreams and disappointments,
give me your trust when all my failings show:
as God loves us, so let us love each other,
with no demands, just open hands and space to grow.

Copyright: Kevin Mayhew Ltd., Stowmarket, Suffolk, P14 3BW (www.kevinmayhew.com). Written by Michael Forster, dedicated to his father Eric Foster.

I just want to make some enthusiastic noises about this. This is a Christian hymn that celebrates equal love. And I'd like to highlight some key lyrics that amaze me for their rare brilliance.

"Let love be real, in giving and receiving,
without the need to manage and to own;

Let love be real, with no manipulation,
no secret wish to harness or control;"

Soon after I got married, someone told me that that Andy and I respected each other too much, because the man should be in charge of the woman, and yes, told me off for my pro-equality attitude. It was a moment that fired me up and really hurt me for a long time, I had thought better of them, and I have no time for that kind of crap that thinks that men oppressing women is some God-given right. And yet there it is in this rare Christian hymn, a celebration of love without any of that patriarchal bullshit.

"A haven free from posing and pretending,
where every weakness may be safely known."

That's too far from Tumblr posts by kids who long for a best friend to eat pancakes with in the morning and who'll read their favourite stories to them under blankets when they're ill. It practically encourages guys to let go of the whole 'I must be manly and masculine, because of my ever-present man-ness,' and just have a friendship. It's freaking beautiful.

Let love be real, not grasping or confining,
that strange embrace that holds yet sets us free;

To some people marriage is a terrifying tethering, an end to freedom. For me it's a bit like a well operated scientific study: you can experiment with all the other things and keep one variable constant.
The security we have in our relationship gives us flexibility in all the other aspects of our lives, because no matter where we go or what happens to us we have each other. 

And that security has been so true in the last 2 years, it's hard to explain exactly, but I concentrate on myself more and have greater confidence to be the person I've always wanted to be. I've written before about becoming who I always imagined I could be, whether that means I can get the haircut I've always wanted. I can demand more from my job. I can yell at cat callers in the street. I can feel damn sexy every day. Now I would travel, I would do something on my own or with him. I can think about career moves. I can give myself permission to be myself.

Because he is there, and no matter how mad life gets, or the ways I grow and change, we "accept each other's incompleteness, and share the joy of learning to be whole."

In writing all that, I'm still talking as though it is about romantic relationships, but it was actually a son, writing to a father as a eulogy. The Internet told me so. This is fascinating because when you look at it again, it makes me think of it for real as about love itself, the very concept. It's not being hetero-normative, it's just talking about love as the kind of stuff that makes us all better people. And I just wanted to share it for the delight in somehow how radical that message can be.

 As always all props and copyright for these photos go to Nom & Malc of Mustard Yellow Photography.