My daughter and her fiancé are choosing readings for their wedding next month. A civil ceremony, neither of them being members of a church. They asked me for some suggestions and they liked the piece by Kahlil Gibran on the subject of marriage but the official who'll be performing the ceremony wouldn't allow it because it contained the word 'God'. That's the rule.

We all slept on this for a night or two and this morning I suddenly thought, 'I know! What if we remove the word 'God'?' So I did a little bit of light editing, which I felt Gibran might forgive and God certainly would.
The edited line read, you shall be together, even in the silent memory of eternity.
My son-in-law ran it by the registrar immediately. And that was when we learned the rule in full. The spirit of the rule, you might say (except the registrar probably wouldn't like that) rather than its letter. Okay, here goes.

The problem with Gibran is not the word 'God' per se , rather the fact that Gibran is known as a religious writer. If my daughter chose Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How do I love thee? Let me count the ways and asked me to edit the word 'God' out of line 13, that would be permitted. Because EBB is categorised as a poet. See?
No, neither do I. But I'm going to try lying down in a dark room. Maybe it'll become clear.

I guess this means they definitely wouldn't be allowed Thomas a Kempis's laundry list.