On The Way to The Wedding [Hardcover]

Linda Schierse Leonard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 1986

The author writes with depth and understanding about the longing for a true wedding that unites 2 beings in a sacred search for meaning in life.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

The author writes with depth and understanding about the longing for a true wedding that unites 2 beings in a sacred search for meaning in life.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

Linda Schierse Leonard is the author of Creation's Heartbeat, Meeting the Madwoman, Witness to the Fire, and On the Way to the Wedding. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 262 pages
• Publisher: Shambhala; 1st edition (May 12, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394552504
• ISBN-13: 978-0394552507
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,848,170 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceelent - addresses the dark side as well as the light, January 2, 2004

By 

cara (Brooklyn, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship (Paperback)

this book was very helpful in my process of deciding whether to get married and then during my engagement. A junian therapist, Leonard adressed the dark side as well as the light. She gave me great comfort when I was having less than perfect feelings about the whole process -- which is normal but rarely discussed. She also delves into the symbolism of the Ring and The Veil and the importance of taking time to go within oneself before merging with the other. But as she says it is good for any kind of Marriage process -- even that of being more connected and "married" to oneself" or one's work, etc. Insightful, Rich with Imagry, story telling and the power of archtypes. I recommend this book to any one seeking a book that is not afraid to embrace the shadow on the way into the light. It was very helpful to me.

5.0 out of 5 stars To Love is to Endure, an illuminating Jungian study of the Archetype of Marriage, October 11, 2011

By 

Char - See all my reviews

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This review is from: On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship (Paperback)

About "the quest to affirm life in our divided human existence...." A Jungian approach that uses the "mirror" of archetypes to illumine the motions of the soul striving, hopefully toward wholeness.

The following are chief summary messages of the book: Suffering and Death (although commonly avoided aspects of life) are necessarily confronted, even embraced, by persons who undertake a unifying individuation process in their lives. When Vowed Relationship is a part of this process, taking on and undergoing that new condition of existence requires great courage. Awaiting the fruition that can come of certain vowed relationships may require infinite patience.

The ULTIMATE message is: To Love is to Endure....

This study about making a journey of "individuation" via an ego-overriding bonded relationship is not confined to the marriage relationship between two individual persons but also encompasses other types of vowed commitment such as to religious life or to an artistic vocation. About "individuation," Linda Stierse Leonard writes herself and then quotes Jungian Marie Louise von Franz as follows: "Individuation, the process of becoming a person who is open to the whole of Being, requires a surrender of the wishes which limit one's existence. And part of this surrender is to give up the flight from suffering and turn to face what seems to be empty darkness. 'The actual process of individuation--the conscious coming-to-terms with one's own center (psychic nucleus) of Self--generally brings with it a wounding of the personality and the suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock amounts to a sort of "call"....' "

The author is most eloquently successful at delivering the "truths" of her study, in my opinion, toward the end of the book when she deals with the Marriage symbolism of the Veil, the Vow, and the Ring. To put my appreciation casually: I was really "floored" by the articulate beauty and revelatory wonder of her writing in those chapters!

About taking on the risk of marriage, Leonard writes: "The breakthrough from the ring of power [personal ego striving] to the ring of love requires a descent. Just as transformation in an individual life requires descent, a death before rebirth, so it is in relationship. The creative process in both an individual life and in a relationship throws us into a ring of descent and ascent, a ring that pulls us away from our ego projections and plans into a sacrifice of the ordinary way we look at ourselves, the world, and the Other. One of the dangers of breaking through....into the abyss is that of being torn apart by the wild, chaotic forces that rant and rave down there. But without this risk, one risks losing all creative human potentialities....[C]ourage before all aspects of existence, even the 'unheard-of,' is essential for the human journey, for the search for a soul relationship."

Leonard writes of human (as opposed to inner) marriage with what I would call a sympathetic insight to marriage-as-sacrament, but not, of course, within the traditional or even non-traditional contexts of any particular religions, Christian or otherwise, since her job is to address the possibilities for psychological transformation from the broadest and most universal human perspective.

Most of the book deals with archetypal dramatizations of complexes that hinder the soul on the way to a realization of the true "marriage" that must take place within the soul before, or, as well as, in actual life. There are detailed summaries of some more-and-less familiar stories that obviate common complexes. These include the fairy tales and legends of Rapunzel, The Flying Dutchman, Beauty and the Beast, The Handless Maiden, Lohengrin, and the legend of Dracula in novel form by Bram Stoker from 1897; the ballets La Sylphide and Swan Lake; the opera The Ring of the Nibelung; the French film Invitation to the Voyage, and the American film Paris, Texas; the novel The Snows of Kilimanjaro; and various other lesser allusions to literature and poetry.

I have to say that I found the length and detail of some of these summaries to be tedious. It's so much better to experience the stories as art forms than to have them through descriptions. But perhaps there was salutary suffering for me in enduring the summaries to their end. Many of the stories contained plots and characters that I wasn't already familiar with, so I suppose it was about time for me to learn about them. And the reward is that finally Leonard does draw terse and simple conclusions about the lessons to be learned from each of these stories that can be seen as archetypal.

Woven throughout the book, actually as a main basis of the truths that Leonard brings to light about relationship, one has the pleasure of reading excerpts from the poetry and other writings of Rainer Maria Rilke who has been a key soul-mate for Linda Leonard on her own "dark night of the soul" journey toward individuation and actual marriage. Since I've heretofore found the poetry of Rilke to be mostly impenetrable, I'm particularly grateful for the elucidation of some of it that comes as a bonus of reading this book.

One of the most fulfilling and inspiring passages of the book for me was a dream account from one of Leonard's clients, a female victim of incest who often wanted to escape to the eternal realm in order to be free of the wounds of the human realm. As Leonard says, "The woman's task of psychological transformation was to live in the tension of human suffering and the divine mystery." In the dream the woman finds herself frightened in the midst of a chaotic and dangerous social revolution where a blind nun points her toward an altar of the Holy Mother within a convent that is filled with the sense of God and where she realizes that others before her have found preparation for a new life. She is sent to an interview with the convent's Mother Superior to whom she sobs out the woeful tale of her life and her feeling that she has nothing to live for and that she doesn't want to go on living. She is awed as the Mother Superior figure comes to life and addresses her in a wise and wonderful voice, laughing gently, saying!, "Yes, you have had a hard life. I know all about what you and your loved ones have been through, but you are safe now....And I want you to know that I envy you your physical life. The way has been cleared for you now to continue on a new path and you must do so, as my divineness depends on your humanness, on your living out the human life intended for you to its fullest. We cannot do our work without you doing yours. You must go on. There is work intended for you."

Jung is cited as saying that the inner mystical marriage is an image that is at the very heart of our human existence. It is the vision which inspires the soul's sacred journey to the divine. Jung says, too, however, that human marriage seldom develops into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises. "There is no birth of consciousness without pain."

Leonard, quoting Rilke, offers the reader a challenge: "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most daunting of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." ---(Mercy! Isn't the heavy responsibility in that statement enough to send you to the altar quaking?!)

I thought this was a great book, terrific!, especially in the last four chapters which were so enjoyable and eye-opening for me that I couldn't help raising my grade from 4 stars to 5. By contrast with another reviewer here, I definitely did NOT feel that the author included too much personal information about her own life, and what she did so generously include was to the point and very helpful.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On the Way to the Wedding (not a real one), September 1, 2005

By 

scandinavian-born (miami, florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On the Way to the Wedding: Transforming the Love Relationship (Paperback)

I have owned this book myself for many years, and because I find it to be extremely useful for anyone pursuing his/her inner journey, I purchased it for a friend. Readers should, however, have a basic understanding of psychology before venturing into the "wedding" of the female and male psyche.