This reflection, adapted once again from Matthew Fox’s Daily Meditations, concludes my three-part series on vows. As an officiant, I continue to find Fox’s insights both ancient and strikingly relevant to the work of holding vows at the center of a wedding ceremony.
In his Order of the Sacred Earth, Fox suggests that the vows once taken by monks—poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability—can still guide us, provided we see them not as rules to be followed but as habits of the soul. They were never meant to restrain the restless heart, but to ground it in love. They were meant to anchor the soul.
He reminds us that each vow can turn rigid if taken mindlessly, yet each can open into new meaning when placed in a living context—a tree rooted in a forest, a lily opening on a pond, a fox returning to its den. Promises, too, draw strength from the world that surrounds them; they need air, light, and relationship to stay alive. For couples preparing to make vows of their own, this rings true: a promise only comes alive within the living context of relationship, where love gives it shape and breath. In this spirit, the vows that once shaped monastic life can still speak to us today—reshaped by the contemporary world we inhabit, yet still rooted in the same longing.
To live with integrity in love—a fresh and more approachable way of understanding chastity—is to honor the sacredness of desire, to keep passion alive as a mutual gift rather than a possession. It’s to treat intimacy not as a commodity, but as communion.
To live with mutual obedience—a word that can sound foreign to modern ears—is to listen. It’s to recognize that no one person rules the marriage; rather, the relationship itself becomes a kind of third presence, the “tribe” whose health both partners must guard.
And finally, to live with stability is to plant one’s life in a particular soil. Not necessarily to stay in one place forever, but to grow a fidelity to the places and people that sustain us—to know the land beneath our feet, and to love it. In Fox’s words, creation spirituality is not about an abstract love but about a local love as well as a cosmic love.
Taken together, these reimagined vows offer an ecological foundation for promise-making. They remind us that the commitment two people make to each other is never made in isolation—it reverberates through family, community, and the wider earth that holds us all.
In the end, a vow is not only something we say but something we live—renewed each time we choose one another over comfort, distraction, isolation, self-pride, or the petty preoccupations that pull us apart, and root ourselves instead in the love and the world that hold us.
In my next reflection, I’ll turn to the art of writing vows themselves—how words, drawn from this deeper soil, can speak honestly and beautifully of what we mean to promise.
Source Note:
Adapted from Matthew Fox’s Daily Meditations and Order of the Sacred Earth.