Over the weekend my wife and I attended a wedding in Houston.  The groom was my nephew, one of my brother's three boys.  He and his bride had known each other for ten years; they actually met the first week they both started at the University of Michigan.

    As with most weddings, all was happiness and good cheer.  Although my nephew asked a friend to officiate, he invited me to do a reading from chapter four of the book of Ecclesiastes.  I was delighted.  I read verses nine to twelve.  These verses extol the virtue and benefit of mutual support in a relationship, that having two people in any situation of peril almost always makes for a better outcome.  It concludes by noting that, "A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart."

    Put another way, while the mutual support of a husband and wife are crucial to the success of a marriage, the ideal marriage is that which finds support in a network of other people, a community, as it were, who care about them.

    While my nephew and his new wife are, by their own admission, not very religious, they nonetheless found meaning in this passage from this enigmatic book from the Hebrew wisdom literature.  And why not?  As beings created by a relational God, we are made to love and relate to one another and to hold each other up in our journeys across the planet.  To remind each other that we are never completely alone.

    And never absent our creator.