by Archimandrite Aimilianos
of Simonopetra, Mount Athos.
Nobody
would dispute that the most important day in a person's
life, after his birth and baptism, is that of his
marriage. It is no surprise, then, that the aim of
contemporary worldly and institutional upheavals is
precisely to crush the most honorable and sacred
mystery of marriage. For many people, marriage is an
opportunity for pleasures and amusements. Life,
however, is a serious affair. It is a spiritual
struggle, a progression toward a goal—heaven. The
most crucial juncture, and the most important means, of
this progression is marriage. It is not permissible for
anyone to avoid the bonds of marriage, whether he
concludes a mystical marriage by devoting himself to
God, or whether he concludes a sacramental one with a
spouse.
Today we will concern ourselves primarily with sacramental
marriage. We will consider how marriage can contribute to
our spiritual life, in order to continue the theme of our
previous talk.We know that marriage is an institution established by
God. It is "honorable" (Heb 13.4). It is a
"great mystery" (Eph 5.32). An unmarried
person passes through life and leaves it; but a married
person lives and experiences life to the full.
One wonders what people today think about the sacred
institution of marriage, this "great mystery",
blessed by our Church. They marry, and it's as if two
checking accounts or two business interests were being
merged. Two people are united without ideals, two zeros,
you could say. Because people without ideals, without
quests, are nothing more than zeros. "I married in
order to live my life", you hear people say,
"and not to be shut inside four walls". "I
married to enjoy my life", they say, and then they
hand over their children—if they have
children—to some strange woman so they can run off
to the theater, the movies, or to some other worldly
gathering. And so their houses become hotels to which they
return in the evening, or, rather, after midnight, after
they've had their fun and need to rest. Such people are
empty inside, and so in their homes they feel a real void.
They find no gratification there, and thus they rush and
slide from here to there, in order to find their
happiness.
They marry without knowledge, without a sense of
responsibility, or simply because they wish to get
married, or because they think they must in order to be
good members of society. But what is the result? We see it
every day. The shipwrecks of marriage are familiar to all
of us. A worldly marriage, as it is understood today, can
only have one characteristic—the murder of a
person's spiritual life. Thus we must feel that, if we
fail in our marriage, we have more or less failed in our
spiritual life. If we succeed in our marriage, we have
also succeeded in our spiritual life. Success or failure,
progress or ruin, in our spiritual life, begins with our
marriage. Because this is such a serious matter, let us
consider some of the conditions necessary for a happy,
truly Christian marriage.
