Fr. Alex Goussetis: Welcome to Family Matters. My name is Fr. Alex Goussetis, and today I’m speaking with Dn. Stephen Muse. Our topic is: Marriage Encounter at the Altar of the Heart.

Dn. Stephen, PhD, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Licensed Pastoral Counselor, is director of Clergy in Kairos, a nationally recognized week-long intensive stress and wellness program for clergy and their spouses at the Pastoral Institute in Columbus, Georgia. Prior to his entry into the Orthodox Church in 1993, he pastored a Presbyterian congregation for 11 years and helped begin an outpatient psychiatric clinic. He is founding church planter of Holy Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church in Columbus, and has served on the Assembly of Canonical Bishops’ Pastoral Praxis Committee, the OC Task Force on Spiritual Abuse, and is a past president of the Orthodox Christian Association of Medicine, Psychology, and Religion, and now serves on their advisory board.

Dn. Stephen has published a number of books for adults and children, most recently Words into Spirit: Pastoral Resources for Confession, with co-editor Fr. Vasileios Thermos. His work has been translated into Russian, Greek, Swedish, Serbian, and Romanian. He and his wife, Claudia, have been married for 39 years and have four children, five grandchildren, and 12 godchildren. Welcome, Dn. Stephen!

Dn. Stephen Muse: Thank you, Fr. Alex. I appreciate the chance to think about these things.

Fr. Alex: The Center for Family Care recently sent out a survey for the purpose of gathering data for our ministry. Basically, we asked people, “What resources that we produce are most helpful to you?” The most popular responses centered around marriage, improving communication, resolving conflict, marriage enrichment, and so forth.

Well, we’re listening, and we welcome today an experienced counselor who is grounded in the Orthodox Tradition. Dn. Stephen, over the past 40 years you’ve served as a parish pastor, a psychotherapist, and marriage and family therapist. What have you learned in your encounters about what makes for a healthy and vital marriage?

Dn. Stephen: Well, I think the first thing that I would say and probably what goes to the heart of it is that healthy couples are vulnerable. They feel as safe with each other and they share what I call a play space, kind of like between a mother and a child, but, of course, as we grow, this play space, this freedom, this safety between us changes as we change. And so we have to protect that shared space that allows for spontaneity and exploration, and most of all for the reality of the other, for the spouse to actually affect us at a deep level. Healthy couples privilege one another’s voice, and they have a genuine interest in their spouse, who actually remains, to some degree, unknown and beyond our own projections.

In this sense, vulnerability is not easy. It’s so much easier to be defensive, and negative emotions or passions, as we would speak of when they become deeply entrenched, they’re more mechanical. Passions are easy; they don’t really require active attention or intention. They grab us and possess us, and this is in contrast to the very fine quality of attention that’s receptive to the divine grace. So if you’re sitting at the dinner table with your spouse and you don’t have any real conversation, you can be pretty sure that you’re drifting into something mechanical, because real conversation, where we encounter the other person, requires an active, intentional presence.

Another key I think is that couples with good marriages are charitable with each other, that there’s a renewable source of eros that’s evident in a good marriage. If you think about it, every couple begins with a big deposit of eros in their bank account. This is the gift of falling in love and seeing each other through a very fresh lens and seeing all kinds of possibilities ahead. And some couples share their emotional capital in ways that make them even richer. I think of the Greek philotimo that St. Paisios talks about often, that is that sense that a sort of a simple—not limited to, but a simple village peasant who’s very much grounded on the earth and is humble gives to someone—their guest or something—and if you give anything to them, they give back twice as much. So this becomes something that is like multiplying the bread, and I think that quality is in couples that are really healthy.

So marriages become troubled essentially by wasting the emotional capital in negative emotions, and then this accumulates with judgments and disappointments that then leads to dueling self-protective defenses, and it’s just a mechanical cascade, sometimes over many, many years of pain and grievance. And it drives people apart in direct proportion to how much they want to be together. It destroys the vulnerability. It’s a strange thing, but people divorce because they don’t know how to handle their bank account. They may have such an attachment with each other that they spend the energy of that fighting with each other than loving each other and privileging the space with philotimo.

Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae said something I really love. He said, “Unless I am loved, I am incomprehensible.” It’s love that makes the other person deeply interesting to us. A month or so ago into COVID, Claudia and I were at the dinner table, and we started remembering events in our lives over the last 39 years and talking about them, and gratefulness began to emerge. After half an hour or so, both of us had tears streaming down our face and were hardly able to keep talking, and I said, “You know, I think we’re attending each other’s funeral while we’re alive,” and she shook her head: “Yes, I think so.”

This is the place of the heart, and there is an immense gratefulness for every detail of life, and we can’t really have deep marriages without having an awareness of death that sobers us and helps us remember ourselves with gratefulness. I think that’s the heart of a good marriage, and that’s essentially a eucharistic reciprocity. When we lose that, and to the degree that we lose that, we live in the past; we live in our minds of judgments and regrets, and we no longer even show up with our partner. We live in response to our own mind. So I need a windshield wiper working to clear the projections off my heart again and again so I can encounter my spouse freshly and realize she or he is way beyond my comprehension, of being beloved to God. And if I’m oriented this way, I’m in the right way.

Fr. Alex: That’s a very powerful beginning, Dn. Stephen. Thank you. Refining it even further, just from an Orthodox perspective, what are some of the distinct contributions maybe from our particular tradition as it relates to marriage?

Dn. Stephen: Well, I think fundamentally an Orthodox understanding of marriage is so much more than a social agreement, a political union, or even shared affection and biological procreation. It is the recognition that marriage as a kind of type of Christ and the Church is a mystery, and that it involves Christ at its heart and has to do with the formation of persons. So marriage is a means of grace or an invitation to martyrdom in which the husband and wife learn to love and be loved by Christ in and through one another, finding the divine through the ordinary. I think it’s as much a mysterion as the eucharistic table.

And in this way eventually what happens is, just as in the Liturgy we go out to welcome the world into the heart of Christ that we have received, the marriage welcomes the larger community at the table of their love out of a growing humility and interest. I would say that everything I’ve learned and hoped for in marriage from an Orthodox perspective could be summed up in what I call the diologos prayer—“diologos” from “dialogue” and referring to the intersection between the mystery of grace and our existential freedom and our psychic lives. But it’s very simple. I use the word “world,” but you can put “spouse” in it: “Lord, love the world—love my spouse—through me. Let me love the world—my spouse—through you.” And the third one, which is often most difficult: “Let me be loved by you through my spouse—through the world.”

So this is a three-way trinitarian recognition of something going on in the marriage, from every direction, that moves it far beyond anything that can be given by nature itself. It puts our GPS coordinates with the uncreated, and this gives us a kind of binocular vision. I think that this is what not only gives us an Orthodox view of marriage, but it gives us a way—Christ is actually a way to be married, and I think that’s the primary distinguishing point.

I would say that couples are good together when they share the same spiritual goal, and they agree on that, on the GPS coordinates. This involves a struggle, because we may profess one direction, but our operating mode is very different, and that brings pain from the past, unresolved things, and so the place of healing for that is the marriage. So we get two chances to really be martyred, maybe a third if it’s a blood martyr, but the first one is the marriage itself, because the love of that marriage will reach deep into every unhealed place in us, and we will confront that in the marriage. And then when we have children, the child’s vulnerability and their life growing up awakens us to that level within us. So God is attempting to heal us and perfect us, raise us toward the place where we are humbled and vulnerable to divine grace.

Fr. Alex: You compared Eucharist with marriage, which maybe on the surface people might have a difficult time reconciling, but they’re both mysteries; they’re both sacramental. So we should see that connection being made in all the sacraments as a way of uniting ourselves to God as well as to our spouse.

Dn. Stephen: Yes, I think this is very important. I think that it’s appropriate to see that if the Eucharist at the holy altar is the chiasma of the liturgical worship, the place where heaven and earth cross, the very center of it, we enter and receive this and we go out into the world, and then we begin to realize that the chiasma of the Liturgy, the cosmic Liturgy, is the crucifixion, the death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. We don’t stop at the Liturgy. The holy koinonia cannot be separated from the koinonia of life. If these two are separated, both are lost. Christ is consubstantial and unites heaven and earth, and we move in and through him in this way. So I think it’s very important that we make a mistake by separating the sacraments out as seven or whatever. There’s only the mystery of the consubstantial theanthropos.

Fr. Alex: Having all this as a wonderful foundation, let’s move now to the more practical dimension for couples who want to improve their marriages. What are some suggestions you might consider?

Dn. Stephen: All right, here’s some maxims. Get your GPS coordinates in place. Make love your aim. Be vulnerable. Own your feelings and identify your projections. This is really hermeneutics; it’s another way of saying: Encounter your spouse, not your own mind. We live in the past. Archimandrite Meletios (Webber) says in one of his books that we live in the past because our mind is afraid of what we don’t already know; we’re afraid of the unknown, because that’s an existential fork in the road where something is asked of me, invited of me, in the communion encounter. This is where real life occurs, and we fear it, so we like to live in what we already know and protect ourselves. But of course, that destroys the marriage.

Speak frequently the language of confession and forgiveness. When you confess to your spouse and you ask for forgiveness, you’re saying: You matter, and that your life, independent of my needs, is valuable enough that if I recognize I hurt you, it hurts me. Abolish “always” and “never” language: “You always….”, “You never…” This means that you’re not really there, not listening; you’re just reacting. It’s a quick way to see it: a little alarm clock goes off when that happens.

Look beyond the marriage to the One who loves you and your spouse through the marriage. That’s Christ. Keep Christ at the center. Live in the present and encounter your spouse for the first time every time. This is an ascetical orientation. It’s an active thing that must be pursued. Be interested in your spouse’s perspective before trying to get them to see or agree with yours. Remember your spouse is mortal and also immortal, beyond your comprehension, because we don’t become ourselves fully except in the love of Christ, and this is an eternal event.

Be grateful for life in any given moment. Life cannot be destroyed. The life that gives rise to the phenomena of nature and all that we see is not full, true life—that’s Christ, who remains invisible to us in a certain way, except that now we are Christ as the Church; he’s given us himself. Receive what Christ gives you through your partner. Learn to distinguish and be aware of the changing play of sensations, feelings, and interpretations. If we had more time, I would go into that. Most of us have a big difficulty with that. We use interpretations and think they’re feelings; we don’t pay attention to how our sensations are working, and so it limits our intimacy and communication and, in a lot of cases, we’re afraid of the very poignance of experience that would accompany intimacy, so we do things to destroy it.

Identify and be responsible for your deeply felt longing, and if you get stuck, get help, because marriage and growth are worth it. Don’t wait for years.

Fr. Alex: These are all excellent suggestions, and I hope the listeners have pen and paper, and if not maybe to just relisten to this podcast to incorporate some of these excellent suggestions by Dn. Stephen.

When we look back at the history of the Church, we have this very long list of saints, and we’re blessed to have them as role models, examples, and for these holy people to intercede and pray for us. But it seems, at least on the surface, that they’re mostly monastic saints and ascetics, and we know that marriage is a path to salvation, so why is it we don’t have more examples of holy married saints?

Dn. Stephen: This is a very interesting question, and it’s one that deserves some serious thought. I’m not a historian enough to answer in that aspect, but let’s remember that St. Paul tells us that the apostles’ wives accompanied them in their apostolic journeys, so I think that there’s no doubt that they had martyrdoms as well. And St. Peter’s wife was martyred along with him in Rome, according to what sources we have.

One thought is that when Christianity became suddenly the state religion in the Roman Empire with Constantine, that’s when you see the Desert Fathers’ numbers start to swell, because they responded to the delusion of Christianity among the masses. Suddenly, for many, it was the thing to do to have cachet in the new Constantinian Rome, and the ones that were fleeing to the desert recognized that real Christianity involves an intense, life-long struggle. It’s a martyrdom, of something that is not really obtainable in the world apart from Christ. So the Desert Fathers and the monastics later had a clear aim of martyrdom, and the whole life of the cenobium is ecclesial and ascetical struggle and worship, and it’s a struggle with self-love, to learn to be humbled in our pride and our egotism.

Fr. Schmemann, in his Journals makes a comment that when we convert to Christ only on the surface—I’m paraphrasing it—and he’s just a cherry on top of what we already want in the world without him, it’s a tremendous tragedy. In Clement of Alexandria, in his Miscellanies in the second century, he points to how marriage and family life can form us through struggles of life in the world. This is what he writes:

True manhood is shown not in the choice of a celibate life; on the contrary, the prize and the contest of men is won by him who has trained himself by the discharge of the duties of husband and father, and by the supervision of a household, regardless of pleasure or pain—by him, I say, who in the midst of his solicitude for his family, shows himself inseparable from the love of God and rises superior to every temptation which assails him through children and wife and servants and possessions. On the other hand, he who has no family is in most respects untried. In any case, as he takes thought only for himself, he is inferior to one who falls short of him as regards his own salvation, but who has the advantage in the conduct of life inasmuch as he actually preserves a faint image of the true Providence.

Now that’s written from the masculine perspective, but I think it’s wise also for the wife. But it’s interesting that that’s coming very early, early second century. And there’s another related quote from Elder Thaddeus, and he writes:

It’s easier in a monastery. Here we are free from all the shocking things of the world. [...] Even the holy Fathers say that the only difference between monastics and lay people is that lay people are married. It’s easier for monastics, because we don’t bear the burdens of married life. They don’t have to strive to raise children to be good Christians and lead them on the right path. A monk strives for himself only. Of course he must pray for the whole world, but it’s much easier for him. A lay person can achieve a much higher level of spirituality and meekness and humility than one who’s lived as a monk in celibacy all his life, yet has not striven to achieve perfection. He who does not pray has no use for a holy place, for holy things.

The point that I raise with these two is not to say one is better or worse but only to say that it’s possible to be a monastic and, without the struggle and the orientation of martyrdom, not to learn to love, not to open up the way St. Silouan does and weep for hours for the whole world in love. That’s bearing the fruit of martyrdom. In marriage, I think what has often happened is that we fall prey easily to the three giants of worldliness that St. Mark the Ascetic says stand in the way of salvation. The first is forgetfulness: we forget what we’re doing. We start letting the worldly ethos and the rhythm of politics and the daily news and the things around us lure us out of recognition that this is not our home; our home is in the eschaton. So once we have forgetfulness operating, then we get lazy. Our struggle, our ascetical struggle, our watchfulness, our attention to Christ and the marriage goes down. The negative emotions start to affect us more because our spiritual immune system is weakened by this. And finally we end up ignorant of spiritual things, and I see this often in my practice, that people start wondering if God even exists, because by the time they’ve fallen this far, the heart is not receptive to grace in a way that lets them know the reality of God.

So in response to this question, I think we would do well to ponder the deep, profound meaning of Christ’s words that “If you love father or mother, wife, husband, children, or your own life more than me, you’re not worthy of me.” This is huge, because this is an ontological recognition. It is the recognition that our natural life is not the source of our life. The source of our life is the divine energies of grace in the Person of Christ. If we are fed by this life-giving spring, we live forever. All of Eve’s children die, and all who seek to find life only by drawing it from the broken cistern of natural life, a marriage that doesn’t have a eucharistic heart, will lose our life. If marriage is to produce saints, then it is necessary to remind ourselves daily in our marriages, our GPS coordinates, that we are not children of this world but of our Father in heaven who is without origin, and we strive to live according to this.

So this brings St. Maximus the Confessor’s words into poignancy when he says, “Our very being is on loan to us.” This is what we need to realize in order to approach each moment with interest and truly come face to face with Christ in and through one another. Then we might see some married saints.

Fr. Alex: Thank you for providing all these amazing resources, and especially those quotes regarding married life, because we don’t necessarily hear those very often, and it’s good for those of us who are married and live in the world to be encouraged by what this path, this holy path, is to be.

We’ve been blessed to be speaking with Dn. Stephen Muse. Our topic has been: Marriage Encounter at the Altar of the Heart. Thank you so much, Dn. Stephen, for being with us today.

Dn. Stephen: Thank you, Father.