There are very few Christian materials on marriage today that can be deemed trustworthy. Little advice is based on adequate theological reflection in accordance with what the church believes about the nature of God and his Kingdom, whilst more are written and published by authors who apply psychological theories derived from a narcissistic and individualistic world, and who thereafter give these theories a religious face and call them “Christian”. That’s what we, the Christians, are feeding on.

These things we read have come to fuel our understanding of marriage and family. As a result of that, many Christian communities congratulate themselves on their focus on marriage and family through their worship services, their weekend conferences on “rekindling the fire of marriage” and the like, and through their other church activities. Meanwhile, many of the young adults who are yet single, just keep longing to eventually find that spouse who will share that experience of a “fired up” marriage with them so as not to feel left out. That’s what our Christianised notions of secular romanticism has done to our church, besides various other factors affecting our views on marriage and family.

I recently discovered a theologically refreshing and mind-blowing writing on marriage and family (ironically, in a book that isn’t new to me). Unlike other books specially focused on marriage, this book writes about marriage and family within the context of the sacraments of the church, because the author comes from a tradition in which marriage is a sacrament (and for good reason too). The book is For the Life of the World written by Alexander Schmemann, and published in 2004 by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press in New York. Here are some excerpts which jump out at me in polemic response to the “popular” rendition of Christian marriage and family:

…How is marriage related to the Kingdom which is to come? How is it related to the cross, the death and the resurrection of Christ? What, in other words, makes it a sacrament?

Even to raise these questions seems impossible within the whole “modern” approach to marriage, and this includes, often enough, the “Christian” approach. In the numberless “manuals of marital happiness”, in the alarming trend to make the minister a specialist in clinical sexology, in all cozy definitions of a Christian family which approve a moderate use of sex (which can be an “enriching experience”) and emphasize responsibility, savings, and Sunday School – in all this there is, indeed, no room for sacrament. We do not even remember today that marriage is, as everything else in “this world”, a fallen and distorted marriage, and that it needs not to be blessed and “solemnized” – after a rehearsal and with the help of the photographer - but restored. This restoration, furthermore is in Christ… this restoration infinitely transcends the idea of the “Christian family,” and gives marriage cosmic and universal dimensions.

As long as we visualise marriage as the concern of those alone who are being married, as something that happens to them and not to the whole Church, and, therefore, to the world itself, we shall never understand the truly sacramental meaning of marriage… family in itself, can be a demonic distortion of love…

A marriage which 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. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of “adjustment” or “mental cruelty”. It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God… In a Christian marriage, in fact, three are married; and the united loyalty of the two toward the third, who is God, keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God.