Glory and Honor Quotes

“And just as Christ is always drawing his people closer to himself, so in Christ-centered marriage each spouse is constantly endeavoring to provide an atmosphere in the home which helps the other to draw closer to Christ, to be always flourishing in the spiritual life. This certainly is another tremendously important reason for marriage. As the Monk Moses of Mt. Athos states, “Two people come to the communion of marriage to help one another in their salvation.” Fr. Alexander Elchaninov hints at this with these remarkable words:
“In marriage the festive joy of the first day should last for the whole of life: every day should be a feast day; every day husband and wife should appear to each other as new, extraordinary beings. The only way of achieving this: let both deepen their spiritual life, and strive hard in the task of self-development.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“When you’re old your body once again goes through dramatic changes, but nobody warns you ahead of time. Old, reliable parts start unexpectedly failing. Now it seems there’s a wry joke hidden inside the saying, “The two become one.” We used to be two whole people, but now we have only one functioning pair of knees, one reliable pair of ears, one pain-free right thumb. We’re being gradually whittled down from two to one.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“The older I get, the more clearly I see that I need my husband. The last decades of life are unpredictable, and potentially tragic. It doesn’t stop being tragic just because tragedy is so likely. I heard that the wife in an elderly couple I know was losing her mind to dementia, and was sad to hear it, but accepted the news in the usual way; it’s just one of the unfortunate things that can happen when you’re old. But if you imagine that it was a couple in their twenties and heard the wife had begun gradually and irreversibly losing her mind, you wouldn’t just say, “Ah, what a shame.” It would be horrifying. Well, it’s just as horrifying to lose your beloved at the age of 70 or 80. The fact that everyone is treating it as “just one of those things” would only make you feel more alone.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“But many things we do have meanings beyond their simple physical effects. The basic purpose of food and drink is to keep the body alive, yet we eat and drink for many other reasons—having a slice of cake at a party, a cup of coffee with a friend. While marriage is the right setting for sex, the sexual union of two people means much more than making babies.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“One couple I know made a vow on their wedding day to “out-serve” each other. My husband and I evolved a pattern of making decisions based on who feels most strongly about the matter. If I want Chinese food, but he really wants Italian, we get Italian. If I really want him to watch a Jane Austen movie with me, he does, until he falls asleep 45 minutes later. It doesn’t matter who “won” last time, because a next time is always coming up. The future just keeps rolling into the present, and more good things to give and to receive will always be appearing.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“Getting married is about the most far-reaching, life-changing thing most people ever do, but they go into it knowing less than they would if they were planning to buy a ferret.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“We learn some deep truths along the way, but usually immediately after it would have been really useful to have known said truth. Whatever height or holiness might have resulted would be entirely the Lord’s doing, not our own.

But that’s true of everything we undertake, isn’t it? We don’t know what we’re doing a lot of the time. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. We don’t know whether what we just did (or said) was the right thing to do (or say). And yet grace still emerges, sometimes at the most unexpected places.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“This dilemma of wanting to be loved and known in all of our ugliness can lead us down some painful roads. We may live in constant anxiety, for example, hiding our ugliness as best we can and hoping someone else will overcome it. We can become angry people who reject other persons first before we, ourselves, feel the pain of rejection. Or we can enter a relationship but attach an invisible note to every act of kindness: “Okay, I’ve done this for you, now I’ve earned your love; now please accept me fully and love me.” But since this ultimately doesn’t work in a relationship, the relationship is drained over time.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“These are worthy goals, but they also rarely last. If each spouse is fundamentally dependent on the other for meaning, for happiness, for fulfillment, what happens when that steady stream of affirmation runs dry? Husband and wife often find that old exiled feelings resurface—emptiness, rejection, despair, loneliness, insecurity. Since these are unbearable, pressure is reapplied on the spouse to chase those feelings away. This popular scenario—that ultimate meaning, happiness, and fulfillment are found in another person—is a form of relational idolatry, and it is unworthy of the glory and honor of marriage.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“Self-centeredness—that toxic residue from the fall—spills beyond the boundaries of Eden to infect us all. What can we expect, then, when two fallen persons enter into the intense closeness of marriage? Preference collides with counter-preference; desire with desire; ego with ego. Habit, routine, style, taste—even relatively neutral qualities such as these—find their sovereignty challenged when one person enters a relationship with another. Marital conflict comes not because two fallen persons have come together, but because the fallenness has come between them. Allies become enemies. If either husband or wife forgets their common origin and ailment, and is not pursuing personal repentance, each is more likely to see the tother as the enemy. Their common enemy—the devil and his elixir of self-centeredness—is forgotten as they turn against each other. The wild optimism with which they began their union gradually devolves into a gloomy posture of self-preservation.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“Herein lies another dimension of the glory of virginity before marriage. If it is our vocation to be married, rather than to enter monastic life or to remain single in the world, then our time of singleness is our time of catechesis [religious preparation]. It is our time to prepare and to learn about the glorious intimacy of marriage. We must learn how to be a devoted individual, to shed our own wants and desires and focus upon another. We must become diligent in our prayer and devotion to God. Finally, we must ready ourselves for the intimacy of coming to the “altar” of the marriage bed.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“Joy is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness comes and goes, and is a feeling that is entirely centered on what happens to us to make us feel good. It can be said, then, that happiness is rather shallow. Joy, on the other hand, comes from love.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“Rarely does a film express the sentient that one finds in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013), wherein an aspiring nun is sent outside the abbey to meet an aunt, her only living relative. After a series of dramatic events, she meets a traveling musician with whom she has a brief affair. He invites her to join him as he prepares to travel to his next city. She asks him what they will do there, and he responds that they might walk together along the beach. “And what then?” she asks. “We get married,” he offers. “And what then?” “We get a house and a dog.” “And then?” “We have children.” “And then?” “We live our lives.” When he falls asleep, she rises and puts on her nun’s habit, returning to the monastery, having observed the trajectory of the romance and perceived it as fiction. No such romance would thrive: for when the obstacles to it are removed, it would be deprived of the “love” that gives it life. In choosing to die to the world, Ida chooses true love. The love offered by the musician is a diversion without vision. It is the amor [romantic love] for which the world dies.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“Amor [romantic love] justifies any manner of emotional disasters in the impossible search for the one lover who satisfies a person’s unique psychological, emotional, and sexual needs. The search for the impossible creates a thrilling, visceral experience of being alive as long as the search continues, motivated by the lover’s amor. The myth of the one lover who properly activate the lover’s imagination promises an exciting future, but it does so based on the activation of latent memories and the creative stirring of them through the imagination, a faculty of humanity’s fallen mind.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“When the goal of marriage becomes “the goal of self-fulfillment,” the prospect of fulfilling that goal can become almost as terrifying as failing to do so. For that fulfillment, inevitably, will settle into boredom that itself must be transcended through passion. As long as the root cause of discontent remains undiagnosed, the same treatment will be applied again and again. We can see this phenomenon in the multiple divorcee who treats spouses as stepping-stones on the path to some indefinite bliss.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“That is to say the person approaching a religious way of life must first purify the mind with good behavior, then strive to discern the futility of impermanent things and the transitory character of what seems pleasant, and then finally take wings and long for the bridegroom, who promises eternal goods.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“The success of amor [romantic love], then, can be found not only amid those “happily” abandoning self-restraint in their pursuit of transgressive love, but also in those sullen and lonely ones who consider life a failure without such love in their life.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“When humanity, rather than the God-man Christ, becomes the deliverer, we clearly see the articulation of a new religion. For Christians, Christ is the center of all being. For those seeking new experiences, existence becomes a search for the fleeting satisfaction of desire and the pursuit of “inspiration,” which amounts to a movement away from the spiritual and toward the emotional. In such a state, the emotional can seem all-consuming and worth the sacrifice of surrendering self-control to this tide of emotion.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“To develop “naturally,” this kind of love requires secrecy and obstruction. The presence of an obstacle to the consummation of romantic love is so essential that in the archetypal courtly romance of Tristan and Iseult, when Tristan and Iseult (who is married to Tristan’s lord, King Mark) finally flee to the wilderness for three years after a risky affair under the King’s nose at court, they live together chastely. When the barrier is removed and romance is finally attainable, it atrophies. Later, romance returns when the lovers are again separated.

This strange paradox, in which lovers risk life and limb in order to consummate an affair only to witness the affair fizzle when all obstructions are removed, is not unusual in court love poetry. Unfortunately, the same paradox has become common in modern marriage: passion thrives when love is young, and it especially swells in the face of societal obstruction, rival courters, or external hardships. When parents are disapproving, or there is a social taboo, passionate amor binds the lovers together in direct proportion to the difficulty of conducting the affair. However, when the lovers are together day-after-day and night-after-night, the passion wanes and boredom replaces the professed “love.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“In the icon of the Wedding at Cana, we see the married couple in the context of all of those who constitute the communities in which they live, reminding us that in marriage we do not live in isolation, and that we are responsible to hold up marriage as the primary human relationship in our lives while maintaining and growing loving relationships with others.”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage

“At the same time, I keenly realize that for most, if to all, of us who are married, our own experience of marriage does not always seem glorious. Those who are having a lot of struggles in their marriages, falling far short of the ideal in many ways, may feel that there’s no point in striving for the ideal since it appears so unrealistic, and hopelessly unattainable. But if a real effort is being made to preserve and improve one’s marriage, there is glory in that struggle itself—even when it seems like “nothing is working.” For we should consider this struggle in working on our marriages to be a vital part of the general ascetic struggle of the Christian life to which we are all called, and which is indeed the very life-giving struggle that helps us to be increasingly purified and holy, and filled more and more with joy, love, and peace, and all the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal 5.22-23).”
― David Ford, Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage