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"Married to Death"

A Bridegroom's Reflections on his Wedding Day

by Subdeacon Adam Deville

There comes a moment in life at which one's perspective begins to shift from the unending gaze of youthfulness to the finite view of adulthood. There comes a point when the significant milestones of early life have all been crossed and one enters a new phase, acquiring a new outlook. There comes a time when one begins to think of death.

Such thoughts do not typically occur on one's wedding day! For marriage, to be sure, begins in joy but - as Fr. Paul Evdokimov reminds us - “...the hour has not yet come.”That “hour”- as the word is invariably used in John's gospel - pertains to the hour of Christ's death. When one is baptized into Christ, one dies with Him; when one is married in Christ, one dies to self. In all things, one seeks that transposition of self which can only come about through death, so that, with Saint Paul, one may say “It is no longer I who live but Christ Who lives in me.”

The life and death of Christ is powerfully illustrated in the icon of Christ the Bridegroom. About an hour before I was married at St. Elias, I took my bestman - himself engaged to be married in the spring of 2004 - into the church to show him this icon. He and I had been having ad hoc discussions about what Christian marriage, properly so called, requires and entails, but I knew that all my disquisitions would be powerfully supplemented - if not supplanted - by that one sacred image which conveys everything I could hope to say in an hour or more. It is an exceedingly simple, and therefore exceedingly powerful, image.

For those of you unfamiliar with this icon, its most salient feature is a downcast Christ crowned with thorns and pierced through with many arrows. It makes that point that Saint Paul articulated so powerfully in his letter to the Ephesians: Christ loved His Bride, the Church, so much that He was willing to suffer and die for her.

That text from Ephesians is part of the epistle reading for many Christian weddings, and for all weddings that take place in churches of the Byzantine tradition. These are the lines that are of especial focus to us here:

Wives, be submissive to your husbands as if to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of his body the Church, as well as its Saviour. As the Church submits to Christ, so wives should submit to their husbands in everything... . Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church. He gave Himself up for her, to make her holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the word, to present to Himself a glorious Church, holy and immaculate, without stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort.

This text is, in our day, one of the more (as is said) “controversial”readings, controversial not because of what it says so much as how people hear it. That hearing typically trips up at the phrase “wives, be submissive to your husbands ...in everything.”In an age when even the slightest hindrance to one's self-determining liberty is said to be an intolerable injury to one's self-esteem, such an admonition is thought to be part of what ideologues call, pejoratively, the “patriarchy”of Western culture.

Read fully and understood properly, however, it should present no stumbling block for two reasons at least. First, it is a model of equanimity in making strenuous requirements of both men and women. Second and more serious, as my bestman realized - and, in turn, had to stress to his betrothed, who had not heard the text properly - the requirement made of wives is but a minor spot of difficulty compared to what husbands must do: they must be prepared to die for their wives! Husbands must pattern their love after Christ, who “loved the Church”and “gave Himself up for her.”From a husbandly perspective, it may be said that uxorial submission is a slight bit of self-denial compared to the supreme sacrifice of self-immolation seen in the Cross!

Such comparisons, however, are out of place: in marriage, there is no room for a bean-counting mentality, no need to measure - like a Pharisaical accountant - each other's number of sacrifices and amount of self-giving. When it comes to dying to self, there is no limit, and in such contests one must not look for commendation but only say “we are worthless slaves: we have done no more than what was our duty to do”(Luke 17:10).

One's duty in marriage, we may say, is an undying love of death without which there will be an inevitable death of love. Without a ceaseless dying to self, the marriage that sustains a couple's love will not be able to sustain the tyrannical pull of the individual ego. One must die in marriage; marriage must kill one's selfishness. Otherwise, selfishness will murder the marriage.

Such language is not meant to be macabre for a marriage is not a funeral. And yet there are certain parallels, reminders, and connections threaded throughout the rite of crowning itself. As Fr. Evdokimov explains:

“The wedding rite symbolically summarizes the entire married life. The betrothed have already exchanged rings; they have already been crowned and they partake of the one cup of life. It is only in the evening of life that this cup, symbolic of fullness, will be taken, when the shadow of the crowns will fall upon it... [and] the spaces of the heart that do not exist as of yet... are created by suffering. In order to be loved by the other, one must renounce oneself completely. It is a deep and unceasing ascetic practice. The crowns of the betrothed refer to martyrdom.”

In addition to these liturgical reminders, there are further symbolic ones at St. Elias: the very “crown”(the chandelier) under which the couple, also crowned, stands on their most joyous of days is the same one under which they will weep and mourn as they are separated when the one buries the other. One spouse will see the body of the other spouse lie in its coffin awaiting burial - a burial that may well take place in the parish cemetery a few feet up the hill from where guests once stood to congratulate the new husband and wife. It is here, in this church - where one first died to oneself in the “funeral”of baptism and later died to oneself in the “funeral”of marriage - where one will, when dead in body, be sent on one¹s way with a real funeral to (one prays hopefully!) what Scripture tell us will be precisely a wedding feast of the Lamb in heaven, where there is no more death or sorrow but only life everlasting (cf. Revelation 21).

Meditating on this thought of our eventual separation is a spiritually salutary practice. In the first instance, it keeps our focus off the often-petty details and disagreements that occur in any marriage: we remain focused on higher things. It encourages a deepening of love here, now, today so that later, in the future, down the road, we may be sustained by that love when difficulties, disease and ultimately death claim us. At that moment, we will have few causes for regret if our love will have been pure. It is far better to die to oneself now and be purified in one's love than to endure the fiery ordeal of posthumous regret and recrimination for all the things left unsaid, all the wounding words which were said but cannot be taken back, and all the affection whose manifestation one postponed for another day.

Meditating on the fact that one's spouse will one day be taken from us reminds us, moreover, that this person is not one's own possession, not an extension of oneself, but a separate person, fashioned in the mind of God and given to us precisely as gift. One does not own one's spouse; one receives him or her from God, to whom one will be accountable on that great and terrible Day of Judgment when the Lord will ask how one treated this inestimable treasure.

In realizing that one's spouse is a gift from God, we are given to ask the natural question: how would God treat him or her and, by extension, how does He want us to treat this person? The answer to that is very simple: we are asked to love this person as God loves him or her, with an undying love that knows no end, that does not count the cost, but pours itself out entirely, withholding nothing. In so doing, we love with that love of Christ then, which nothing greater can be conceived. For perfect love is love crucified.

Adam A.J. DeVille and Anne-marie Sandstrom were crowned in marriage at St. Elias on 30 August 2003 and are awaiting the birth of their first child in June 2004. Adam, a sub-deacon in Eparchy of Toronto and Eastern Canada, is a Ph.D. student at the Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Canada, where he is writing a thesis on the Roman papacy and Orthodoxy in response to Ut Unum Sint. He is also the text editor for the Institute¹s scholarly revue, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

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