by Maria McDowell
The upcoming Great Council, decades in the making, is an opportunity
for Orthodoxy to present to the world a vision of the fruitfulness of
love ripened through relationships in which we are simultaneously
co-workers in one another’s deification and co-workers with God through
whom all creation bears life.
The Synod is an opportunity for the
Orthodox Church to posit a vision of relationships as the very means
through which human persons grow in love in the image of God and towards
an ever deeper relationship with God. God is love, and it is in love
and by love that we come to know God.
Orthodox anthropology unapologetically asserts the goodness of the
human person. This notion of goodness, rooted in creation and telos,
beginning and end, is made evident and possible through the
Incarnation. The Incarnation underlies the possibility of deification,
the practice of embodied virtue through which we attain the image and
likeness of God. As beings created in the image of God who is
ever-in-relation, we too become who we are in relationship. Not just any
relations, but relations marked by the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and
self-control (Gal 5:22-23). God’s presence is evidenced in the fruit
borne by the one who acts (Matt 12:33). We are to be known as Christians
by our fruit, especially by the fruit of love (John 33:35). These
fruits of the Spirit are given by God, and therefore an indication of
God’s presence (1 John 4:16), and require our participation, our
appropriation, our co-working with God. As co-workers with God, the
mission of the Orthodox Church could be framed as an ongoing effort to
recognize the work of God in the world and join that work wherever it is
in solidarity and service. This can be done secure in the knowledge
that to nourish the fruits of the Spirit wherever they are is to enter
into God’s already existing work in creation. Love bears life, and God’s
own nature of love overflowing into life is the model for this.
Such a vision recognizes that all relationships are loci for theosis,
and provides criteria by which Christians can affirm the many
relationships in which human persons engage: Does this relationship
nourish, ripen, and harvest the fruits of the Spirit? Does it help its
members become better lovers of God and neighbor? Is it life-bearing?
Different relationships require different practices to encourage
fruitfulness. Monastic relationships are shaped by commitments to a
particular community, the sharing of all goods in common, and sexual
abstinence. Married relations are shaped by fidelity to a single spouse,
as well as by supportive commitments to a wide range of family members
including but hardly exclusive to children. These two relationships
hardly exhaust the relationships through which God works: we are all
members of families, ecclesial communities, and societies, as well as
residents of particular regions and countries. We are workers,
caretakers, friends, and acquaintances. Each of these relationships can
be a place in which love bears life.
Yet such a vision is too risky for “The Sacrament of Marriage and Its Impediments,”
as such a vision allows for relationships which stretch the narrow
terms by which the document defines marriage, asserting that marriage
without sacrament is merely “State-recognized cohabitation” (I.9). A
broader vision may be an avenue to recognize the life-bearing
fruitfulness of relationships which are a significant target of this
document: same-sex marriages. The “free union of man and woman is an
indispensable condition for marriage” opens the document. The phrase
“man and woman” is repeated seven times. The document decries secular
society which threatens Orthodox Christians by its insistence on
recognizing “new forms of cohabitation” (I.8) and explicitly rejects all
same-sex civil unions (I.10).
So great is this perceived homosexual threat, a threat which in some
traditionally Orthodox countries is met with state- and Church-condoned
discrimination and violence, that the many relationships in and through
which God works are not recognized as deifying: non-procreative
relationships entered into by the elderly; the adoption of children by
choice rather than need; religiously mixed marriages in which love, joy,
hope, and even faith, flourish. The very possibility of allowing that
same-sex relationships may be a place in which God works results in a
statement that treats as collateral damage all relations that do not
conform to its canonical strictures.
As a result, the document elevates the “institution of family” (I.1),
later capitalizing ‘Family’ as if it is a platonic form to which all
families must correspond. Restricting the legitimate family to only its
“traditional” (I.8) boundaries, it fails to account for the varied
family formations found in society and Church. Further, this elevation
of family signals no awareness that family is often a primary source of
violence.
It is notable that the establishment of sacramental marriage between
the tenth and twelfth centuries coincides with the emergence of a new
paradigm for female sanctity: the battered wife as the saintly ideal.
Lest we imagine this is merely a thing of the past, it is worth pointing
out the recent resistance to legislation which protects women and
children from family violence by the Moscow Patriarchate, which views
such legislation as a guise for “an anti-family ideology of radical feminism.” Almost one-third of women experience violence at the hands of an intimate partner, who also commit over 38% of all female homicides.
This is a reality of family and marriage which cannot be adequately
addressed by pastoral tools which are more focused on purging the church
of same-sex relationships than caring for the complex family situations
lived out by Orthodox Christians everywhere.
Without a vision which seeks to participate in God’s already-present
work in the world, which nurtures the fruits of the Spirit wherever they
are found, the Church simply fails to be Church, a loss that God’s
world simply cannot afford.
This essay was sponsored by the Orthodox Theological Society in
America’s Special Project on the Great and Holy Council and published by
the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University.Maria McDowell, an independent scholar of Christian ethics and Orthodox theology, belonged for many years to the Orthodox Church and is now a communicant in the Episcopal Church U.S.A.