How does the unity between two people take place? Is it by passion? That is by human love in its fervor or by the love that Jesus of Nazareth has shown – the love that is founded on a Divine covenant? And the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard tells us that the commandment saying “Love thy neighbor as yourself” means that you must love your neighbor as yourself. In that we are in the realm of religious duty thus transcending that of desire. So marital unity is not accordingly an “ipso facto” (just a fact); it is a commitment before God.
The first mention of marriage in the course of the Scriptural Texts is what came in Genesis: “God created Man in His image. In the image of God He created them. Male and female He created them”. In this account of the creation, there is a negation of the legitimization or sanctification of the relationship within the single gender or what is called in some countries of the West “same sex marriage”; especially that that Divine word ends by saying: “Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth” not meaning that the purpose of marriage is getting children but multiplying as a fruit of that relationship.
In another account in a later chapter of Genesis, it says that God made of the rib that He took from Adam a woman and He brought her to Adam; so Adam said “this now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”; and then it says in the chapter: “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one body.
What is the one body? It does not mean the body as the visible expression of the human being since that is impossible. The “body” in Hebrew thought means the “person” or the “entity” itself since the Hebrews had no duality between the soul and the body. In our modern days we say that the male and female are in a unity of two souls or two hearts; an expression used not denoting any desire but emphasizing the realization of a “pure wedding” as the Orthodox say in their wedding ceremony.
The New Testament speaks of marriage as a perennial relationship for life; thus in principle, it denies separation of husband and wife. And Matthew adds to the Old Testament, the phrase “what God has brought together, no man shall put asunder”. The phrase “except in the case of adultery” is not found in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. Maybe it is good to mention here that the Church of Old, gave permission for a second marriage to the less-guilty partner but not to the guilty.
In the Eastern Church of nowadays, there is a certain economia of a practical nature that allows divorce for the two partners but that does not mean that the Church has changed Her doctrinal position concerning the perennialness of marriage. Legal permission for divorce in certain cases does not mean that She has opened the door for the dissolution of the tie of marriage. But in the case of looseness among them the loose partner gets the sanctions or penalty. But we will say nothing further concerning this subsidiary topic.
What makes the marriage bed honorable and clean as St. Paul says is an assertion on Paul’s part that the marriage relationship is from the Lord and is rooted in Him. The epitome of what Paul says is in his letter to the Ephesians: “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church giving Himself for Her”. In fact this is a reciprocal relationship of love between the husband and wife, the content of which is clearly love. It is the love of Christ through His death. Thus there are no limits to marital love; there are no conditions of behavior one puts on the other in order to love him. Both the husband and wife are of the flesh of Christ and His bones (Eph. 5: 30). Paul ascertains that both of them are one flesh but he had said before that each one of them is in Christ and says it later more clearly that both of them together are also in Christ.
This drives me to say that if the above vision of marriage does not come down on the spouses from Above, then their marriage is carnal, in this world and of this world. I say this in the light of what I have experienced with the cases of divorce we have in the region I live in; I have found that the spouses who live in the love of the Lord do not resort to our court of law. They understand that the tie between them has come down on them from Above.
I am not a child to think that families do not go through times of crises of disagreement. You do not get to know your wife before she started living with you. You get to know some of her qualities during the period of engagement when it is long enough. Yet each one of you has “things” that do not show before marriage; or that new defects show in you or in your spouse after the marriage. In orher words, relations get worse due to one discovering the other after marriage. Or the one who seemed innocent before is not so any more and you find it hard to have known all his tendencies before marriage.
That is why homogeneity is difficult sometimes, or if fact what is difficult is the dramatized overemphasis on this homogeneity. That is also due to weakness in temperament, little patience and the conviction as to whether to go on with life of one’s family or not. Recently we hear much of this: “I do not love him” or “I do not love her”. And that is a terrible aggrandizement of desire; and desire does not last long with the same intensity; and alone on that we cannot build marriage after we have built it on both desire and God’s love. And that is mercy from God.
I know that among the psychologists there are marriage counselors. Some of them have helped much; and science is great when it is successful. We do not avoid Science, but our approach to married life is a Divine approach based on the word of the Lord and continuous prayer. Thus the family subsists in its prayer.
When I was a kid, we used to gather around my father and he would tell us about his memories during World War I. And he used to say: “So and so married in the year 1916”. And I used to know that that was a period of famine. So I gathered from the stories of my father that difficult circumstances do not do away with the coming together of a man and a woman in one life. But during the times of those stories, in the 1930’s, my father never told us that people would divorce. And we used to understand that the bride would come “adorned with chastity” to her bridegroom. And It never occurred to her mind to sin against chastity; as if people used to mutually preserve the virtues of each other and their commitments.
We have changed much since the times of my father. And now there is no room to talk about the reasons why that happened. And the reasons are many. But we can refuse to take lightly the sanctity of marriage which is accomplished in the Lord. And we can affirm that it is the pattern for spiritual wholeness and that what the Lord has said before, He has said for all times.
“Male and female He created them” to make the good and blessed human togetherness so that each gender will be made holy through the other. That is the steadfast will of God and His final word.
Translated by Riad Moufarrij
Original Text: “الوحدة الزوجية” – An Nahar – 04,08,2012
