Marriage (Crowning)

An Orthodox wedding is really two services grown together. The first is the betrothal, in older practice performed separately and now usually served at the beginning of the wedding, traditionally near the doors of the church. The priest blesses the rings and places them on the couple's right hands, and they are exchanged three times: two lives handed over to each other. The prayers call on the God "Who hast espoused the Church as a pure virgin from among the gentiles" — from the first minute, this marriage is set inside the great marriage of Christ and His Church.

Then the couple are led into the middle of the church for the crowning itself, the heart of the mystery. Candles are placed in their hands, psalms are sung, and long prayers remember the married saints of both Testaments, from Abraham and Sarah onward, asking for the couple the same blessing.

A Western visitor usually notices what is missing: no one says "I do," and there are no vows. (In some uses the priest first asks the couple whether they come freely — but even this is a question, not a vow.) The Orthodox understanding is that marriage is not a contract the couple perform; it is a grace God performs. The couple bring their free consent and their whole lives; the Church asks God to do what no promise can do — make the two one. So the central act is not spoken by the bride or groom at all. The priest crowns them, saying: "The servant of God, N., is crowned unto the handmaid of God, N., in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," and then, three times, "O Lord our God, crown them with glory and honour" — the words of the psalm: "hast crowned him with glory and honour" (Psalm 8:5).

The crowns carry a double meaning the tradition loves to hold together. They are royal: this man and woman are made king and queen of a new creation, a household. And they are the crowns of martyrs: a true marriage is a daily laying down of one's life, and the Church does not pretend otherwise. St. John Chrysostom saw yet another meaning — crowns as the sign of victory over unchastity, worn by those who come to marriage unconquered. At the end of the service the priest asks God to receive their crowns into His kingdom: the marriage is aimed past death.

After the Epistle and the Gospel — the wedding at Cana, where Christ made water wine — the couple drink from a single cup of blessed wine. The prayer asks God to "Bless now, with thy spiritual blessing, this common cup, which thou dost give to those who are now united for a community of marriage" (in the public-domain Hapgood translation). The common cup is not Holy Communion, though in earlier centuries the crowning was joined to the Divine Liturgy and the couple communed together; the shared cup remains as a sign that from now on every sweetness and every bitterness will be drunk together.

Then comes the moment everyone remembers: the priest joins the couple's hands, and, followed by the best man holding the crowns in place, leads them three times around the table on which the Gospel rests — the so-called dance of Isaiah, the couple's first journey as husband and wife, made in a circle because love has no end, around the Gospel because Christ is now the center. The choir sings "Rejoice, O Isaiah! A Virgin is with child, and shall bear a Son, Emmanuel, both God and man: and Orient is His name; Whom magnifying we call the Virgin blessed," followed by hymns to the holy martyrs — the same hymns sung at an ordination, the other mystery in which a life is crowned by being given away.

Because marriage is a mystery and not merely a contract, the Church surrounds it with pastoral care — including a distinct, more penitential order when a second marriage is permitted after divorce or widowhood. For the practical questions of engagement, preparation, and marriages with non-Orthodox Christians, see marriage-preparation-and-mixed-marriages.