Six chords of sorrow
Archimandrite Aimilianos on Marriage
One of the things about writing a newsletter is the constant pressure to break NEWS. I always recall what Mary Lou Forbes, my editor at The Washington Times, told me when I was a cub editor and sometimes writer: “Always bring something new to the article.”
As of today-ish, there are more than 17,000 publications on Substack, and probably nearly as many writers writing them. A good chunk of them are stream-of-consciousness open diaries, but there are a ton of sober-minded NEWSletters covering serious topics.
I don’t have much to add to them. The daily news cycle used to be extremely important to me, but after escaping DC, that’s not so much the case now. Now, my “news” is wisdom from the past. I spend far, far more time “consuming” material that is well off of the daily news grind. Most of it is actually new to me.
I have one confession, though: I spend a lot of time on X, née Twitter. I’m going to go ahead and excuse myself by noting that as a call center guy, I have a significant amount of downtime while in “ready state.” This means that while I’m on duty, I have to be ready to pick up a call at any moment. I actually don’t have a choice—the system doesn’t allow me to not answer the phone. Besides, that would hurt my numbers…
It prevents anything like deep work, which invariably leads to doom-scrolling on X.
The algorithm nailed me: it knows I’m interested in the so-called gender wars, or the sexism debates, or whatever. Given what you see on X, you might wonder how the sexes have managed to produce any new generations at all. Men are “red-pilled,” or MGTOW (“Mig-TOW:” Men Going Their Own Way.) Women feel entitled to demand the Six-Six-Six (ahem): Six-figure income, Six-pack abs, and Six-feet tall.
In the Christian world, young men are video-game and porn-addicted weirdos, and young women have all the entitlement of the secular women, but slap a Jesus fish sticker on their tumblers and calling it discipleship.
It’s a bloody mess. No matter which direction my Situation goes, I have exponentially decreasing desire to have anything to do with the dating pool.
So, when at trapeza, I read the chapter “The Church at Prayer” by Elder Aimilianos called, “Marriage: The Great Sacrament,” it landed hard. To be completely honest, when the bell rang and I put the book down gently as though I’d just received some devastating news. In a way, I had: it—for a day or so, anyway—told me there was no hope for me, personally, and likely not for anyone else since we’re now on X number of generations of rejecting the social frameworks that make successful marriages possible.
Marriage, the Elder reminds us, isn’t just about having fun or being fulfilled. It’s about suffering together. It is, as I was instructed in marriage prep, about “getting each other to Heaven,” although he doesn’t quite put it that way. He goes well beyond that simple instruction, though. He says,
“Marriage is a journeying together, a shared portion of pain, and, of course, a joy. But usually it’s six chords of our life which sound a sorrowful note, and only one which is joyous.”
I doubt there’s a serious Christian alive who would dispute this, but I think we’ve all fooled ourselves into thinking our marriages would somehow be different. “Sure," there will be struggle,” we might have thought in the beginning, “but we have good intentions, we pray, we study the Bible, and we know that the Lord has our backs.”
We forget that marriage isn’t a refuge—it is the battlefield. And in forgetting that, we tear each other to shreds with friendly fire.
I’m about halfway through the chapter. I was so moved by it I recorded the first half of the chapter or so. Take a listen, if you’d like.
Facts. So true.