Marriage Rites

Recently, I unexpectedly attended a wedding of two people I’d never met, which puts marriage in my mind.

There are certain repeated themes in the Byzantine rites of betrothal and crowning that may be helpful to remember when thinking about the nature of marriage.

7th century Byzantine wedding ring
depicting Christ joining the right hands 
of the bride and groom.
Inscribed: ομόνοια 
- Louvre

The betrothal includes prayers for salvation, procreation, love, unity, and faith and ends with a prayer describing the bestowed rings as biblical symbols of authority, glory, truth, and compassion. Of these themes, love is the one most remember and, if understood rightly, it is the most important. Understood rightly, it includes and does not neglect any of these other essential aspects of married life.

The crowning rite then reiterates these themes. Importantly, the joining of the right hands signifies unification. The prayer here remembers the creation of Adam and Eve, which implicitly recalls the prelapsarian united and good humanity (ἄνθρωπος), now reunified by the mystery of crowning. Emphasizing this unity, the priest asks God to yoke the couple like Adam and Eve and to crown them in one flesh. He also again prays for the blessing of offspring – an essential intention of marriage.

One meaning recalled by the crowning that follows and by a troparion sung during the dance of Isaias is the crowns of martyrdom and the self-sacrificial love martyrdom entails. This kind of love - the kind that will lay down life for the other - is the kind needed also in marriage.

From the troparion, in Tone 7:

“Holy Martyrs, who fought the good fight and were crowned, intercede with the Lord to have mercy on our souls.” 

I occasionally get out the service book from my own wedding and read it. I think rereading these services prayerfully can help a marriage. They provide good instruction on healthy and holy matrimonial life and a corrective to destructive self-centeredness.

For today's feast of Ss. Constantine and Helen, Equals to the Apostles

Perhaps so his baptism would cleanse as many sins as possible, St. Constantine the Great, ἰσαπόστολος, postponed it until he was near death. In the meantime, just for example, he ordered the poisoning of his son Crispus and the scalding suffocation of his wife Fausta (326). His sins were great. Then his glorification shows God’s great mercy. His baptism was by the Arian Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia (337). Then his canonization demonstrates one significant thing that extra ecclesiam nulla salus does not mean. This implicit acceptance of a baptism from a heretical hand shows the mysterious workings of God’s grace.

Confession and Eucharist

The mysteries of the Church - like the Church herself - are each human and divine. They are each an act of God performed through humans upon humans. As with the rest, this is also so of confession and eucharist. Each is both of God and of man. Each is both of the God-man. If I may say so, however, there is a manner in which confession more greatly emphasizes the human and eucharist the divine.

This is so in reference to the forgiveness of our sins. Both confession and eucharist are for the forgiveness of our sin, so why do we need both? Because the Church, which is the assembly of those in Christ, is both human and divine.

God knows what you’ve done. He knows your sin. He knows also whether you approach him in penitence. If you do, He receives you in mercy and forgiveness into communion with himself in the eucharist, which we receive for the remission of our sins and for life everlasting. If you do not, perhaps you eat and drink judgment and condemnation upon yourself. The eucharist offers you the divine seal of your forgiveness in Jesus Christ by uniting you to him - by making you a part of his own body. The miracle of the eucharist - to paraphrase Taft - is not simply to make bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, but more importantly, to make you, together with all the people of God, the members of his Church, into the body and blood of Jesus.

The human members of this body, however, do not know what you’ve done. They do not know your sin. The Church, as both a human and divine institution must offer its members both human and divine forgiveness. For humans to forgive, they must hear confessions, and so James taught us in our apostolic infancy to confess our sins to one another, not only to whisper them into the wind that only God can hear. God has become a man and he is acting through men in his Church. As a man, he waits to hear your confession spoken with your lips. Your lips, and the ears of the priest who hears what they speak, are entirely human. They are dust and to dust they shall return. It’s true. But it is also true that they are taken on by God himself in his incarnation. They are being raised up and given eternal life. They are being divinized. For the Church in her humanity to offer you human forgiveness and reintegration into her human community, she must hear your human confession. This human forgiveness is necessary for you because it is being made divine and what sins humans forgive are forgiven also by God.

Blessed are those like Christ

            In his hymn, “On the birth of our Lord,” the thirty-first of the Hymns of Virginity, St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose feast is today, employs many images to describe poetically the one who surpasses our everyday speech. He describes Christ as atoning Hyssop, Libation, and Lamb (str. 4-5). Christ is the Priest and the Sacrifice (str. 5). He is the Treasurer and the Treasure (str. 2, 7). He is Fountain, Instruction, Remembrance, Trust, Rock, Curdled Milk, and Justifying Wall (str. 7-8). He is the Gate and the Yoke (str. 9, 11). He is represented by the Eucharistic images of the Grape-Cluster of mercy and the Ear of Wheat (str. 13-14). He is the Furnace, the Mirror, and the skilled Sailor (str. 10, 12, 15). It would be easily possible to multiply images of Christ endlessly, and Ephrem has begun to try. “Christ [is]… above every name that is named” (Eph 1:20-21). No single poetic image, however profound, can ever completely contain or express the inexhaustible mystery of Christ. The use of many, therefore, benefits the attempt to grow in understanding.

Icon of St. Ephrem writing

            Each of Ephrem’s images of Christ has in common a salvific character. Characteristically, in this hymn, he presents an image of Christ at the beginning of each strophe and ends each strophe with the exclamation, “Blessed is…” the one who benefits in the way particularly emphasized by this particular image.  In other words, blessed is the one whom Christ saves or blessed is the one who becomes more like Christ. Many of these images emphasize Christ’s redemptive and atoning role. Others, three in particular, especially struck me and seem to emphasize theosis – becoming like Christ – as the means of salvation. These are the Furnace, the Mirror, and the Sailor (str. 10, 12, 15).

Some thoughts on Job

The Book of Job does not allow any disparagement of Job’s innocence. As Wisdom scholar Roland Murphy points out, “Job’s innocence is assured by divine pronouncement.” All attempts by his friends fail to place any blame on him for the agonies he suffers. The Lord turns against him “without cause” (Job 2:3). Job, while being unique and even rather inhuman in the perfect blamelessness attributed to him from the beginning of the text (1:1), is remarkably human in his insatiable, unanswerable demand to know why he is crushed “without cause” (9:17). 

I do not think this demand of his lessens his uprightness. It seems to me that it is good to struggle with God and that Job’s very struggle with God is a part of his righteousness. His struggle with God makes him an Israelite in heart if not by birth (see “יִשְׂרָאֵל, Israel” in Gen 32:28).  

To justify and circumlocute the agonies of human life rather than crying out with them to God is the business of Job’s friends, who “never speak to God,” but only about God (Murphy 38, emphasis mine). What is more, what they say about God is not right, says the Lord (42:7). Contrariwise, Job continually speaks to God, complains to God, challenges God, accuses God. Throughout all, he sincerely and honestly maintains relationship with God, however turbulent, regardless of what God has let happen. There is no fault in Job.

Human suffering is a mystery that “humans do not have the wisdom to solve” and that God does not solve for us even when he at last replies to Job’s entreaties (Murphy 41-42, Job 38). It seems to me that the wisdom of Job is to fear the Lord in all eventualities and to maintain relationship with God unconditionally, even and especially when we do not understand.

The scene in the following video clip from The Apostle (starring Robert Duvall) is a good illustration, I believe, of relating to God from within our inexplicable suffering. 

Encouraging Children

The Proverbial Rod of Discipline

My mother raised me with the proverbial rod of discipline. What I mean is that my behavior while I was growing up frequently merited corporal correction from my mother. She used a wooden paddle. Upon this paddle, which has now passed to me, is carved the following: “Prov. 22:15.” So, when I say she raised me with the proverbial rod of discipline, I mean that she raised me the proverbial rod of discipline. I did not know at the time the words of this verse, but I knew what it meant. Because of my mother’s just, moderate, loving, and even-tempered use of this paddle, its message was not lost on me. I knew paddling not as an act of angry violence, but as a response to behavior that I myself knew to be foolish. I knew better was expected of me than I had provided.

Proverbs 22:15 – “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” – helped me in the path away from folly and toward virtue even before I knew its words. I still think it is an important verse and that many in the modern age dismiss it too quickly, but it is not this Old Testament verse I want to focus on at the moment. Rather, I want to look at a New Testament verse that provides an important balance to the more numerous passages of Scripture that encourage the discipline of children, Colossians 3:21: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.”

This verse often comes into my mind when I find myself being too hard or harsh with my children, or when I set my expectations too high. It is an important reminder that the role of the parent is primarily one of encouragement, rather than force. I can force my children to memorize information and I can force my children to behave properly – to a limited degree – but it is more important to help form my children into people who freely choose a life of virtue and faith.

St. Paul

Saint Paul
6th century Byzantine
ivory relief
(Musée de Cluny)

Today being the Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul and I having recently finished a semester studying Paul, I thought I would share some of my reflections on this great and infuriating figure of Christian history. His power to unite and divide remains strong even after the passing of nearly two thousand years. Just last month, a friend shared with me that he wouldn’t mind at all if the Church tossed out all his epistles and he never had to listen to one again. Well. That’s not going to happen.

My image of Paul has shifted considerably over the years. Perhaps fittingly enough, my introduction to Paul’s writings was in the context of religious contention between a Protestant mother and a Roman Catholic father. Paul was my father's confirmation name and my mother's inspiration. Raised between these divergent perspectives, somehow I ended up initially with a mostly Protestant lens on his writings. Paul always sounded like a sola fide Protestant to me, and having embraced a rather polemical form of Roman Catholicism at the time, I consequently did not like him. I found him bristly and rankling to my doctrinal sensibilities. Mainly, I thought his statements about people being justified by faith and not by works (e.g. Rom 3:28; Gal 2:16) conflicted with certain opinions I held radically to the contrary, e.g. that people are justified by faith and works. I preferred the discussion of faith and works in James 2, and found it a comforting counterpoint to Paul, even interpreting it as anti-Pauline. Once, my anti-Pauline fervor rose to such a pitch that I found it necessary to confess the sin of sacrilege against Paul to a priest, who responded, “that’s one I’ve never heard before.” All this is to say, Paul and I have a history. We have had words. I usually directed all this bile against his ideas – as I poorly understood them – and not against his person, but there was never anything “warm and fuzzy” about the image I held of Paul. I remained mostly ignorant about the life of Paul, as opposed to some of his ideas, until comparatively recently.

Now having read – academically, devotionally, and liturgically – all of Paul’s epistles, my image of Paul has evolved considerably both doctrinally and personally. I have come to love him. What I love most among his writings is his emphasis on love in 1 Cor 13. I have discovered also that this passage serves as a good examination of conscience

I now see Paul as a broken and magnificent creature, turned from his own intentions and understandings and taken over by Christ Jesus (cf. Phil 3:12) to establish his kingdom. Rather like a mule in the hands of a skilled trainer, he was stubborn and powerful, but also lowly – “the least of the apostles” (1 Cor 15:19) – and obedient to his master. Raymond Brown, in his Introduction to the New Testament, gives an image that particularly struck me: 

Here was a Jew with a knapsack on his back who hoped to challenge all [the grandeur and power of Greco-Roman culture] in the name of a crucified criminal before whom, he proclaimed, every knee in heaven, on earth, and under the earth had to bend.

Paul was a wise man, an educated man, an intelligent man, made to speak like a fool (cf. 2 Cor 11:21) for the Christ’s sake. Here is one trembling in awe before his crucified former enemy who comes before him as his God and trembling not at all before any other. He is fearless and resolute at times, but not immutable, ever. He is entirely, beautifully, infuriatingly human. He entirely, beautifully, wholly belongs to God and to God’s Son Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.

         I am now overwhelmed with gratitude to Paul and his spreading of the gospel to us Gentiles. Paul gave us Jesus. Or else, Jesus gave us himself through Paul.  

         St. Paul, pray for me , a sinner.