Mount of Transfiguration
Even in the very first chapters of the book of Genesis, at the beginning of creation, God wills to give us a word about the relationship in which a husband will:
"leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
Nor is this primacy of teaching about marriage so surprising. The great majority of men and women who have lived in the world through countless ages have participated in such relationships. It is bound up with our human condition. If we are not married, then we are the children and grandchildren of those who have been married. And even if no Christian, or even a secular civil ceremony, has taken place, the essence of human marriage is that a man and a woman leave their parents and commit themselves to each other. Cleaving to one another, with the sense of being stuck to one another like glue. The same word is used in various passages in the Old Testament to describe the way in which the faithful should join themselves to God.
We can be sure that the sacrament of marriage, as a means of grace, has great benefit to those who have faith, and is the proper beginning of a Christian marriage. This refers rather to the quality of a marriage than to its essence. If, as Christians, we are married, then undoubtedly we should all desire above all things that our marriages be grace-filled and spiritually fruitful. But just as fatherhood and sonship are human relations and not simply Christian, so marriage is also, in the first place, a human relation. All those men and women who participate in it are equally called to be fruitful within it.
There is indeed nothing essentially sinful about marriage, though it has been deprecated by various groups within the Church from time to time. Indeed the Church has had to declare in the canons of councils that marriage is ‘an honourable estate’. We must always remember that the words we quoted from Genesis are spoken of Adam and Eve before they fell into sin, and not as a concession to their exiled state after having sinned. Marriage is therefore to be understood as a human relationship which has always been within the will of God and for the blessing of humanity. It is not a lesser relationship. Yet, just as the fall of Adam and Eve led to the dominion of sin over them, and the corruption of their relationship with each other and with God, so the blessing of marriage became distorted. Marriage was established to be lived in the communion of the Holy Spirit, just as all of human life is only truly life when lived in the presence and grace of the Holy Spirit. In such a relationship of man, woman and God, there was the means of a true union, and an openness to one another. There is no shame in such a relationship.
Apart from God, it becomes oppressive, a means of the dominion of one over another, a place of pain and shame, of secrets and lonely silences. This negative experience of marriage is part of the curse which comes upon man through sin, and which God describes in Genesis. He speaks to Eve saying:
I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Without the presence of God, a marriage can be two lonely people clinging together for comfort, and both unable to truly meet the aspirations of the other. The relationship is unbalanced by false desires, both to please the other at all costs, or to use the other as a deceptive means of finding personal happiness and satisfaction. This is rooted in the fall and is a distortion of the meaning and value of marriage.
A recent television documentary placed a modern young woman in a remote South American tribe for a month. For a while she was overwhelmed by the simplicity of their lifestyle, and it seemed as if she had found a place where an echo of the Garden of Eden had been preserved. But as she came to know the women of the tribe more intimately they shared with her how their relationships with their husbands were distant, lacking in affection and often violent. Apart from Christ,relying only on our fallen humanity, all of our relationships are broken like this. And to some extent, human marriage always tends to that painful experience which the documentary found in the jungle, and which women in particular have lived with for all of human history.
We do not escape this brokenness simply because we are Orthodox Christians. Just as we do not escape any of the other marks of the fall. Sin is a spiritual malaise which affects and infects all aspects of our humanity, and is rooted in the misdirection of our will. If we continue to struggle with sin, even as faithful Christians, then we should not be surprised that the human relationship which most closely brings two human wills together provides plenty of opportunity for our human weakness and sinfulness to be made manifest. If a marriage is to be transformed into some reflection of the relationship which God desires then we must acquire the Holy Spirit who alone has the grace to unite a husband and wife in any spiritually meaningful sense. We must abandon our own will, not seeking even the will of our partner in marriage, but desiring above all things, to do the will of God in our relationship of marriage.
The Feast of the Transfiguration shows us the Divine glory filling the humanity of Christ, the incarnate Word of God. But it also provides us with a vision of the Christian experience in which we ourselves are called to participate fully in the communion of the Holy Spirit. In the presence of the transfigured Christ the Apostles Peter, James and John see the uncreated light, the Shekinah glory which had transfigured the face of Moses, and which even today transfigures the faces and bodies of those faithful saints in which God chooses to manifest Himself in such a way.
In the presence of Christ in His glory, they cry out: "It is good for us to be here". And in every sense, it is good for us to be in the glorious presence of the Word. How much so this is the case for a Christian marriage. There is a sense in which marriage is ‘a high mountain’, as the Mount of Transfiguration is described. There is an effort in attaining its summit. But with that effort and in the companionship of Christ, there is a glory which is spiritual and transfiguring, proceeding from Christ Himself. I recently took part in a 100km sponsored walk over four days with a colleague from work. We were raising money to help build a school in East Africa. After the first day,I found that I had excruciating pain in my right knee which meant I could hardly walk. And then the pain started in the left knee and every step for three days was agony.
I had plenty of opportunity to apply the painful lesson to my own spiritual life and my relationship of marriage. I could not abandon the walk having committed myself to it, and it seemed that God did not choose to take the pain away. Yet He gave me the strength to keep on, forcing one step to follow another, until finally, and unbelievably, I reached the end of the walk on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in North-East England. This was a small experience of the Mount of Transfiguration in my own life. I had persevered, through God’s strength alone. I reached the high place;I was a different person.
Is this not a lesson I should apply to my marriage, and which we should all apply? That each day may be painful, and filled with disappointments and frustrations, yet God will provide the strength we need to persevere and to ascend to the high place where we will see the light of Transfiguration.
A marriage can never be more spiritually fruitful than the spiritual lives of those committed to one another within it. For most Christians in such a relationship it continues to reflect their own weakness. But as with all aspects of our lives, as we abandon our own will, we provide an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to take control and bear spiritual fruit. Our marriages are no different. If we enter into a marriage for our own sake, and if we live as married people in fulfilment of our own will, then we resist the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit who brings all human activity to fruition, and without whom all is barren. Without the Holy Spirit our attraction becomes lust, our different interests become annoyances, our separate identities become isolation.
The experience of Peter, James and John in the presence of the divine glory was not at the beginning of their relationship with our Lord, rather it was a manifestation of the reality of his divine personhood as the end of His earthly ministry approached. They had already spent months and years in His presence and had united themselves to Him as their own life. And in our own relationships, and especially in that of marriage, we should not expect that the glory comes easily and without cost. Each difficult day brings us closer to the summit. If we persevere and if it is the divine glory we seek, then these transparent relations are made possible in the communion of the Holy Spirit.
It is only on the Mount of Transfiguration that we are able to cleave to one another without fear, or self-will, and find a true and life-giving unity which is not oppressive or diminishing. It is only in the presence of Christ that we can truly say: "It is good for us to be here".
