I’m getting married in a few months. Isn’t that strange? Some of you have been reading my work for years, watching this blog go from just a place to organize my little stories to a place where I grapple with the hardest thoughts and emotions I’ve ever had. I didn’t think that my upcoming nuptials would be on that list.
All of us girls grew up with visions of our future wedding. We saw our poofy gowns, our handsome grooms, our happily ever after. I expected those. But I didn’t expect the sadness. I love my fiancé and I am excited for our life together, but I can’t help but feel the pain of this blessed time of single life ending. Marriage, joyous as it is, marks an ending, an ending of childhood and memories and a name. Tatiana Federoff is going to be gone forever. Nobody will have that name now, least of all myself. When I, God willing, join the joyous throng of saints in heaven, it will not be under the name of Tatiana Federoff. It will be as if Tatiana Federoff has died.
Morbid, huh? But I’m sitting here comforted in the morbidity because I am thinking about what marriage is. What is it? A sacrament. And all sacraments are meant to kill us in one way or another.
Think about it: baptism kills the original sin in us, with the water representing a joining in the death of Christ. Confession, too, kills the sinful man each of us becomes after that first death, with each time spent in the confessional another bullet to that person’s heart. Communion enters us into the Body of Christ, a body that died (and rose!) and calls each of us to do the same. Confirmation? The death of the child so that the new adult can rise up. Marriage and Holy Orders? The death of the will to the will of God, and a death of sorts to the person who enters into them and is substantially changed. The Sacrament of the Sick? Prepares us for the final bodily death, of which St. Francis says no mortal can escape. There’s death woven into every one of the sacraments, which is odd if we’re creatures not originally meant to die (Gen 2:17).
We’re not meant to die, no, but death is part of us now. Maybe death is put into the sacraments because there’s death everywhere thanks to Adam and Eve, whose marriage was confirmed in the death of prelapsarian innocence. Maybe even God can’t work against death completely now, as our human wills have become so set upon it. But He can give us new life through death, and He can promise that new life through every one of the greatest channels of grace that He gives us. Sacraments are visible signs of invisible realities, but we know that one sacrament can be a sign of several realities at once. What if they’re all telling us of the inescapability of death but reminding us the same promise given in Genesis, that one is coming (and has come) to crush the head of death itself? Death may strike at the feet of Christ, as the scripture tells us, but Christ will defeat it. And through the sacraments, we are struck and we crush, too, grinding our way through death into heaven.
This was just a short post. But I hope it helped you to read as much as it has helped me to write.
Love etc.
-Tatiana
Surrender the Brownies 