I thought I would continue my posts on family/marriage. I found this article from Touchstone magazine today while perusing Park Cities Presbyterian's website. Peter Leithart from New St. Andrew's College in Moscow, ID wrote a wise and much needed article on marriage where he quotes Alexander Schmemann. The article's central theme is that marriage is a kind of death--but good death. Here's how Leithart closes out the article:Nearly four decades ago, Alexander Schmemann argued that the problem with modern marriage "is not adultery or lack of ‘adjustment’ or ‘mental cruelty.’" Instead, he wrote, the problem is the "idolization of the family" that identifies "marriage with happiness" and refuses "to accept the cross in it." God’s presence as a "third party" in the marriage spells "the death of the marriage as something only ‘natural,’ and directs it to its true end of the kingdom of God.
In short, Schmemann continued, with characteristic elegance, the glory of marriage is "that of the martyr’s crown. For the way to the Kingdom is the matyria: bearing witness to Christ. And this means crucifixion and suffering. A marriage that does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage."
3 comments:
Marriage is a kind of death, yes, but it is also a kind of resurrection. We worship neither death nor resurrection and so we don't worship marriage, that is, we don't idolize it. But there are many wonderful Easter Mornings in a marriage that God blesses.
Yes, it's only through death that one experiences the resurrection. Thanks for visiting the blog, Paul!
I think what I was also trying to get across in this post was that our culture tries in vain to avoid eye contact with death. And, yes, we as Christians also do not celebrate death. However, Christ's death was victory. He was not victorious in spite of the cross but rather because of it. And only a repudiation of one's rights--which is what Christ gave up by letting the ones he created kill him--will, as Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov says, "keep the streets from running with blood." This kind of death--this victorious kind--or "good death," as I called it in the post--is what is called for in marriage. But it is lost to our culture, b/c as mentioned earlier, death is something we would rather avoid or sweep under the rug.
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