Ceremony of the Wine Cup or the Loving Cup

Wine Cup Ceremony

Chaplain:

The years of life are as a cup of wine, poured out for you to drink. The cup contains within it the sweet wine of happiness, joy, hope and delight. The same cup, at times, holds the bitter wine of disappointment, sorrow, grief and despair. Those who drink deeply of life invite the full range of experiences. This cup is symbolic of the pledges you have made to one another to share together the fullness of life. As you drink from this cup you acknowledge to one another that your lives, until this moment separate, have become one vessel into which all your sorrows and joys, all your hopes and fears, all your dreams and dreads will be poured, and from which you will find mutual sustenance. Many days you will sit at the same table and eat and drink together. Drink now, and may the cup of your life together be sweet and full to overflowing.

If the glass is broken, the following may be said:

Even as life moves on in its restless flow, we would not cling to the present moment, no matter how filled with joy. Your loyalty is to each other, to the many cups which you will fill to each other, not to the cups of yesterday.

Celtic Loving Cup Ceremony

Chaplain:

____and_______, on this your wedding day, we celebrate the Celtic spirit of the anam cara. Anam cara is translated from the Gaelic as "soul friend." By entering in a partnership with your anam cara, you are joined in an ancient and eternal way with this person whom you most cherish. In everyone’s life there is a great need for an anam cara and so I ask you to toast one another by repeating the following:

The Couple: (repeating after the chaplain)

Today I recognize you, my anam cara and ask that you become a part of me, in sacred kinship.

With you I will share my innermost self, my mind and my heart.

With you, I have lost all fear and have found the greatest courage. I have learned to love and let myself be loved. With you, I have found a rhythm of grace and gracefulness.

With you my anam cara, I am understood, I am home.

Chaplain:

And now, please drink to the love you have shared in the past

(Chaplain hands the couple the cup and each take a sip)

Drink to your love in the present, on this your wedding day

(Drink again)

And drink to your love in the future and forever more

(Drink again)

The Celts believed that the way you view your future actually shapes it. I now ask everyone here in the room to take a moment to visualize a future for _____and_______.

As a group let us think of the happiness in store for these two. Let us put their joyous future out to the universe.