The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, reprise

 

the wedding of Malachi and Hannah

It was 13 years ago, plus a couple of months, when I first wrote about my wife and I entering into the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Since that time we've left one parish and jurisdiction (Antiochian) to join another parish in another jurisdiction (OCA), we've begun a mission and left the second parish to become full-time members here, and that mission just celebrated its first wedding, both members having come to the Church through the mission. It was a joyous celebration, and warrants a return to the Church's teachings on matrimony.

As I wrote previously, the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony in the Orthodox Church is not the same as going to the Justice of the Peace, or even your typical Protestant wedding in a church. That is not to denigrate those things -- my wife and I were married in a little Baptist Church in Bremen, Georgia, one my father helped build with his bare hands. We certainly do not think God refused to bless our wedding because the parish and the pastor lacked the right credentials, or belonged to the "wrong" church body. We have never questioned our union, nor considered it lacking. Neither did the Church, our priest, or our bishop. We were accepted and treated as a married couple from the very beginning.

But we still went ahead and got crowned in the Orthodox Church. Why? Because, as our friends Malachi and Hannah learned this weekend, an Orthodox wedding is something God does to and for us, not something primarily we do before God. We submit, but God joins. We assent, but God unites. This is why in the Orthodox wedding service, there are no vows. We are not focused on what we say. We focus on what God says. My wife and I are what God says we are. And now Malachi and Hannah are what God says they are.

The focus of married life in Orthodoxy is leading one's spouse and children to salvation. Children are an expected part of marital union, though one ought not get too tightly wound about the parameters of that. Metropolitan Saba wrote a lovely piece on marriage and childbearing recently. In it, he wrote:

As implied by the petitions for childbearing in the marriage service, Orthodoxy does not teach that sexual marital intimacy is in any way sinful. Neither does the Church teach that intercourse in matrimony is merely tolerated for the sake of conceiving children, as does the Augustinian tradition of western Christianity. Nowhere in the New Testament does one find a denigration of sex in marriage or the view that it requires justification through procreation. St. Paul does warn, however, against excessive abstinence from marital relations: “Do not deprive each other, except by mutual consent and for a time, so you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again, so that Satan will not tempt you through your lack of self-control” (1 Cor. 7:5).

The discipline of marital fasting in Orthodoxy should be embraced freely by mutual agreement between the spouses in light of their current state of spiritual maturity, not as a matter of rigid law. Especially in this most intimate dimension of married life, misguided ascetical strictness may have disastrous consequences that are counterproductive to the healing and wellbeing of all concerned.

While children are certainly one of the great blessings of marriage and the Church encourages couples to “be fruitful and multiply,” there are no canons in the Church that forbid the use of non-abortifacient means of birth control by married couples—and some barrier method contraception was known in antiquity. The canons of the Church have detailed descriptions of sexual offences, but none limiting births apart from the condemnation of abortion. What some identify as the rare patristic condemnations of contraception reflect the identification of them with abortion considering the limited medical knowledge of those times.

As ever, the Church's focus in the marital union is not on mere childbearing, but a life in Christ, the giving of one's self to the other, and to the children born of the union.  We are not trying to breed more Christians, like livestock. We are trying to fill and subdue the earth by uniting ourselves, one another, and our children to Christ. So yes, we value and expect children in an Orthodox marriage, and we ought to have as many as God will bless us with. But the Church has no per se prohibition on contraception, nor does the Church endorse the novel idea that once a married couple is past childbearing age they should "live together as brother and sister." The marital union is a mirror of the love of the Holy Trinity. Withdrawing from that love to pursue man-made "rules" is folly. As His Eminence reminded us above, and as St. Paul says explicitly in the Holy Scriptures, husband and wife ought to deny one another only by mutual consent, and only for a short time. Thus, marital fasts (where the couple refrains from normal relations, for example, during fasting periods, on fast days or the night before communion) are fully appropriate in the Church, with the blessing and guidance of your parish priest. "Living together as brother and sister" is anomalous and ought be undertaken carefully, and rarely. The neo-monastic, Orthodox cosplay influence is not a pattern for normal married life in the Church.

Father David Bibeau once spoke at St. Elias in Atlanta, to a men's group. He said "you men are the priests of your households," and then he started talking about something of which I was previously unaware. He said that a startling percentage of families where the children continue to go to church as adults are families where the father goes to church weekly. The mother's influence is strong too, but not nearly as strong as the father's. Statistically, if you want your children to go to church, their father is going to have to take them and set the example and expectation. I'm not sure why that is, but I trust Fr. David and thus I believe it to be true. This means a huge part of the success of the marriage, if success is defined as leading one's spouse and children to salvation, hinges on the husband being willing to take on this role, being willing to die to himself and his desires, and take his family to Church regularly. It does not mean the wife cannot make up for that -- for sure if your husband will not go to Church, you go anyway, and take as many kids as you can. It does mean that if the husband is on board, the kids are far more likely to stick around into adulthood. Husbands should take this role seriously.

And yet, while we Orthodox do believe that the husband is the head of the household, it is in a priestly role, not a position of power, much less coercion or manipulation. The husband offers himself on behalf of the family.  He isn't the "boss" so much as he is the head servant. At Malachi and Hannah's wedding, Father Seth said God took Eve from Adam's side, not from his head, nor from his feet, but from his side. Not to Lord over him, and not to be under his feet, but to stand beside him. This is a good image.

One of our former (Lutheran) pastors once told his flock (including us) that we are too quick to pay attention to what God says to our spouse and too slow to listen to what God says to us.  And so, when St. Paul admonishes the wife to submit to her husband as to the Lord, that is not something for men to enforce, but for women to aspire to. Likewise, when St. Paul admonishes the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, even being willing to die for her, that is not something for the wife to insist upon, but for the husband to attempt to live out daily. The roles of husband and wife, in a God-pleasing marriage, are not competing for power and glory, but are complimentary, designed to enrich the union at the expense of the pride and selfishness of the individuals. In marriage, we learn to put ourselves aside and live for others. That is the way of salvation.