Embracing Theosis: Nuptial Union as Sacramental Love
A surprising detour into neuroscience, sex, and pair-bonding—charting strange new territory beyond my usual innovation, cognition and philosophy.
“This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church,” wrote St. Paul of married love (Eph 5:32). Sexual union in a Christian marriage is a mystery (in Latin, sacramentum) of divine love. Intellectually formed Catholic spouses are invited to see their conjugal intimacy with sacramental vision, as a participation in God’s own life. In the insight of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the human body has a “nuptial meaning” – it is created to express love and thus to make visible the invisible mystery of God. Through an Eastern Christian (Ruthenian Byzantine) lens, enriched by the Cappadocian Fathers and Byzantine liturgical theology, this nuptial mystery shines as an icon of Christ’s love for the Church and as a path of theosis (divinization). In the marital embrace, husband and wife offer themselves as a living liturgy: a dynamic communion of persons, a personal self-gift, and a holy union that leads them together toward God.
This essay examines how a spiritually mature Catholic couple can deepen their sexual relationship through a theological lens, integrating John Paul II’s teachings with patristic wisdom (St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor) and contemporary science on bonding and desire. The goal is a meditative yet concrete reflection: to frame sexual union as a mystery of sacramental love, liturgical iconography, and ascetic transformation on the journey to deification.
The Body as an Icon of Divine Mystery
St. John Paul II taught that the human body, in its masculinity and femininity, is theologically meaningful. “The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible – the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial and thus to be a sign of it”. In other words, our bodies are iconographic. Just as an icon uses visible imagery to convey heavenly truth, the very physical union of husband and wife is a sign and participation in a higher reality. The love expressed in “one flesh” communion (Gen 2:24) reflects and actualizes God’s own covenant love. John Paul II described an “exhilarating journey” of nuptial meaning: from the human body to the mystery of sexual difference, to the fruitful union of husband and wife, to Christ’s union with the Church, and ultimately to the eternal communion of the Trinity. In short, eros leads to agape; the embodied love of spouses becomes a window into the “mystery of God himself”.
This sacramental understanding of the body resonates profoundly with the Eastern Christian vision. The Eastern Fathers speak readily of earthly things as icons of divine realities.
As Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) summarizes, “Marriage is not only a state of nature but a state of grace. Married life, no less than the life of a monk, is a special vocation, requiring a particular gift or charisma from the Holy Spirit; and this gift is conferred in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony”.
The very ontology of marriage is sacred: the couple’s union is a visible sign of God’s faithful love, a channel of grace for the spouses’ salvation. The Cappadocian Fathers and their theological heirs applied the Trinitarian image of unity-in-diversity to marriage: man and woman, distinct persons, are made one flesh in a fruitful unity that images the loving communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. While the Trinity is a mystery of one nature in three Persons (transcending any direct analogy), the harmony and self-giving love in a Christian marriage are meant to reflect Trinitarian life. As John Paul II often noted, God is a communion of Persons, and “man, who is made in the image of God, finds himself only by making a sincere gift of himself”. In marital intercourse, spouses enact this sincere gift through their bodies; their physical love becomes theology in action, revealing God’s own life-giving love.
In Byzantine liturgical theology, the whole human person – body and soul – is involved in worship and sanctification. Just as icons, incense, chant, and ritual actions all mediate the presence of God in the Divine Liturgy, so the bodies of husband and wife mediate grace in the “liturgy” of married life. The marriage service in the Eastern Church explicitly celebrates this sacramentality. During the Rite of Crowning, the priest invokes God’s presence to “join together this servant and this handmaiden” and repeatedly prays, “O Lord our God, crown them with glory and honor!”. The crowns placed on the bride and groom signify that the couple are being crowned as king and queen of a “little church” (their domestic church), but also crowned as martyrs – witnesses who lay down their lives in love. This crowning, the visible sign of the sacrament, bespeaks an invisible reality: the couple receives a special grace of the Holy Spirit to live a union that reveals the Kingdom of God. In Eastern thought, every married couple is called to be an icon of the wedding of Christ and the Church, which will be consummated at the eschatological “marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7-9). Thus, the marriage bed itself, kept pure and honorable (Heb 13:4), is a sacred space – a bridal chamber of grace where Divine Love meets human love.
Eros in an Eastern Christian Key
Modern Catholic discussion of sexuality often contrasts eros (desire, passionate love) and agape (selfless, benevolent love). Yet the Eastern Fathers insist that true eros and agape coincide in God. Purified eros is an image of divine love. According to the Orthodox theological tradition (e.g., St. Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Maximus the Confessor), God Himself has a kind of ecstatic longing, a divine eros, for his creation, which moves Him to unite Himself to us. “God is love” in the fullest sense (1 Jn 4:8), which means that in Him exist agape (goodness and benevolence), philia (friendship), and eros (desire for union) in a transfigured, infinitely holy form. The human desire that a husband and wife feel for one another – the longing to possess and be possessed in love – is not sinful in itself; it is very good, an energy meant to lead beyond itself. As Fr. Thomas Hopko explained, “Erotic love is no sin when it is free from sinful passions. It can be the utterly pure desire for communion with the other, including God”. All the great spiritual writers testify that divine-human love is the pattern for all human erotic love. The Bible itself unabashedly uses the language of sexual desire as a metaphor for God’s love: “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isa 62:5). The Old Testament prophets likened God’s covenant with Israel to a marriage bond, and lamented infidelity to God as adultery (cf. Hos 2, Ezek 16, Jer 2-3). The Song of Songs – an exquisite love-poem full of sensual imagery – was preached by St. Gregory of Nyssa and others as an allegory of the soul’s union with God. Far from shying away from eros, the tradition sees holy desire as the fire that carries the soul into communion with God.
For married couples, this means that their erotic love can be a foretaste of divine communion. St. John Chrysostom, the great Antiochene Father, extolled the power of spousal love in remarkably strong terms. “The love of husband and wife,” he taught, “is the force that welds society together. Men will even sacrifice their lives for the sake of this love”. He noted how even Scripture’s heroes compared the intensity of friendship to the love of spouses – “Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Sam 1:26) – to illustrate the unparalleled bond of marriage. Chrysostom was clear that God established sexual love for noble purposes: to overcome loneliness, to propagate life, and as a powerful school of selfless affection. “From the beginning,” he writes, “God appears to have made special provision for this union; discoursing of the two as one… For there is no relationship between human beings so close as that between husband and wife, if they be joined together as they should be”. In marriage, two persons become one without loss of individuality – a living icon of the unity-in-diversity of Christ and His Church. The East emphatically defends that eros belongs within marriage, blessed by Christ. At the Wedding at Cana, Jesus not only attended but lavishly turned water into wine to celebrate the feast (Jn 2:1-11). The first sign of the Messiah’s glory was given in the context of rejoicing over a newlywed couple, hardly a denial of the goodness of marital festivities and physical love. “Perhaps we do Jesus an injustice by ignoring his love of parties, his love of the life of the flesh,” one theologian muses. The East would agree: the delights of the body, when rightly ordered, are to be received with thanksgiving, not puritanical fear. Pleasure is not an end in itself, but it is a God-given catalyst for union and joy – a taste of Eden’s bliss where the first couple were “naked and not ashamed” (Gen 2:25).
None of this negates the need for asceticism and purity of heart. The Church Fathers warn that eros must be healed by grace due to our fallen tendency to selfishness. St. Maximus the Confessor observes that because of sin, we often love others in a disordered way – seeking to use them for pleasure or pride. But in Christ, eros can be transformed into a self-transcending love that actually seeks God through the spouse. The Orthodox Faith Catechism puts it succinctly: “Erotic love can be utterly pure desire for communion… All forms of true love – goodness (agape), union (eros), friendship (philia) – are found in God and can exist in man. There is no form of true love which lies outside the spiritual life”. The calling for spouses is thus to baptize their eros – to let marital desire become a road to God by making it a genuine gift of self, integrated with agape. When the husband and wife love one another in the Lord, their union of bodies and hearts “maketh of two one,” says Chrysostom, “so that the two are one flesh” – and he adds that this harmony in the home redounds to the good of the children, the Church, and all society. In sum, eros is not the enemy of spirituality; it is raw material to be sanctified. The Byzantine tradition invites couples to cherish their romantic and physical love as a participation in God’s own passionate love for creation, always subject, of course, to the pedagogy of chastity, sacrifice, and mutual reverence.
Self-Gift, Asceticism, and Theosis in the Marital Embrace
If marital sexuality is a mystery of sacramental love, it demands a particular ethos: a way of living shaped by Christ’s Cross and Resurrection. Pope John Paul II often said that the meaning of married love is total self-gift – “man can only find himself by making a sincere gift of himself”. In the marital act, the spouses renew the vows of their wedding with their bodies, saying in effect: “I give myself completely to you, holding nothing back.” This entails faithfulness, permanence, and openness to life. The Byzantine marriage rite underscores this totality by the act of crowning and the shared “common cup.” After crowning the couple, the priest leads them in a procession around the Gospel book – the Dance of Isaiah – while a hymn to the Martyrs is sung. The bride and groom are thus led as royalty and martyrs, circling the Word of God, indicating that their path forward is one of following Christ together to Calvary and glory. Indeed, one of the troparia (hymns) in the service prays: “Holy Martyrs, who fought the good fight and have received your crowns: Entreat the Lord to have mercy on our souls.” Marriage is presented as a martyrdom of love. “Every true marriage involves an immeasurable self-sacrifice on both sides,” Ware explains. The crowns are “crowns of joy, but they are also crowns of martyrdom”. The husband and wife die to their old individual selves and become one; they are henceforth to live for each other and in Christ. In the crowning formula itself, each is “crowned unto the other”, indicating that your life now belongs to your spouse and vice versa. This is the essence of asceticism in marriage – not the renunciation of sexual intimacy, but the renunciation of egoism. The fasts and disciplines the Church proposes (such as periods of abstinence for prayer, or the general call to temperance) all aim at this interior freedom, so that husband and wife relate in tenderness and patience, not in lust or domination.
St. John Chrysostom, once perceived as austere, in fact preached that “Marriage is not a hindrance to spiritual life, but a pathway to holiness when lived in Christ.” He urged husbands and wives to view themselves as companions on the journey to heaven. He even put words on the lips of a loving husband to his wife: “I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself… My most ardent dream is to spend this life with you in such a way that we may be assured not to be separated in the life reserved for us”. Such passionate devotion, far from being at odds with holiness, is the very context in which virtue is honed. The married couple practices daily the asceticism of charity: forgiveness of each other’s faults, bearing one another’s burdens, enduring sickness and hardship together, restraining anger, and learning to communicate with honesty and kindness. Their sexual relationship, too, becomes an ascetic school of sanctity. It calls for reverence and self-control as much as for ardor. There are times when love requires abstaining or postponing gratification out of care for the other (for example, during illness, or after childbirth, or in mutual agreement for prayer as 1 Cor 7:5 describes). In those moments, the spouses’ continence, freely chosen in love, is just as sacred as their act of lovemaking – both are offerings to God. Conversely, when they do come together in proper freedom, it is an act of caritas that can be prayerful. St. Francis de Sales recommended that Christian married couples pray together before marital union, and even Chrysostom advised husbands and wives to sign themselves with the cross and recall Christ’s presence in the bridal chamber. This doesn’t lessen the joy or spontaneity of sex; rather, it hallows it, ensuring that their physical desire truly incarnates tender, personal love and openness to God’s will (such as the gift of a child). In such a context, the pleasure of sex is experienced not in a vacuum of self-seeking, but as communion: a one-flesh union brimming with affection, trust, and the very creative power of God.
All of this is ordered to theosis, the divinization of the human person by grace. The Eastern Fathers constantly taught that our destiny is to become by grace what God is by nature – to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). Marriage, when lived in Christ, is one of the chief means of this divinization. It is a Mystery in which the Holy Spirit saturates human love and transforms it into a vehicle of God’s presence. “The Trinitarian mystery of unity in diversity,” writes Kallistos Ware, “applies not only to the doctrine of the Church but to the doctrine of marriage”. Spouses become co-creators with God (in procreation) and co-strugglers with God (in virtue and prayer). Their home is a domestic church – as Chrysostom beautifully says, “a small Church” – where the couple and their children grow together in holiness. In the marital embrace, specifically, the couple image, in a tiny way, the blissful union of Christ, the Bridegroom, with His Bride. The ecstasy of human lovers is an image of the ekstasis of God’s charity, where each Person of the Trinity lives in and for the other. Of course, the analogy limps – God’s love is perfectly spiritual and utterly pure, while even the best human love is earthly and mixed with imperfection. Yet, by grace, the marriage act can be knit into the divine love. The spouses can truly encounter Christ in one another’s bodies: “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses,” observed C.S. Lewis – how much more so one’s spouse, who is one flesh with you. With eyes of faith, the couple can perceive that their union is triadic: husband, wife, and the Holy Spirit who unites them and dwells in their bodily temple (1 Cor 6:19). This sacramental awareness elevates sexual intimacy into a kind of worship, an act of thanksgiving to God who has called two persons into the miracle of one life. Not without reason do Eastern Christians sing Psalm 128 at weddings: “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children like olive shoots around your table... May you see your children’s children. Peace be upon Israel!” The psalm paints a portrait of beatitude – a small Eden – which is what a holy family is. Marriage becomes a path of glory to glory, as each spouse is slowly divinized through steadfast love, forgiveness, humility, and the refining fires of shared life. Theosis is not manifest in visions or extraordinary phenomena, but in the quiet miracle of a couple who, after decades, have become true icons of Christ’s love: loving, forgiving, and interceding for each other “so that both are saved” (cf. 1 Cor 7:14).
The Neurobiology of Bonding: Nature and Grace in Harmony
Modern scientific research, far from debunking this lofty vision, actually illuminates how our bodies are designed by God to support lifelong love. The neurobiology of sexual bonding reveals a remarkable alignment between nature’s chemistry and the demands of sacramental union. For example, during intimate touch and especially at orgasm, the hormone oxytocin floods the brain (in both men and women, though especially in women). Oxytocin – famously nicknamed the “love hormone” or “cuddle hormone” – promotes feelings of trust, relaxation, and emotional attachment. It’s the same hormone that bonds mother to infant during breastfeeding, and it plays a similar role between mates: fostering a sense of safety and affectionate calm. Researchers have found that oxytocin release during sex triggers neurological rewards that reinforce the pair-bond, linking the pleasure of intimacy with a specific beloved partner. In fact, oxytocin works in concert with dopamine (the neurotransmitter of pleasure and reward) during sexual activity to literally wire the brain to associate one’s spouse with deep satisfaction. This is a biological insight into why marital fidelity – exclusive and faithful attachment – is the natural ideal: the brain chemistry of sex is ordered toward bonding two people into one. Additionally, studies have shown that in males, vasopressin (another bonding hormone) surges after intercourse, promoting protective, loyal behavior toward the partner and offspring. In short, the human body has embedded mechanisms to make sex a powerful glue between husband and wife.
Consider also the emotional-psychological dimension. Regular, loving sexual intimacy correlates with lower stress levels, better mental health, and increased relationship satisfaction for couples. There is evidence that stable, affectionate sexual bonding literally buffers spouses from anxiety and even improves physical health (by boosting immune function and cardiovascular health). In a very real sense, “the two shall become one flesh” is not just poetry – biology bears it out. When a man and woman share a life and bed over the years, their biochemistry and psychology begin to function in sync, creating an intimate ecosystem of love. This natural knowledge should inspire awe for the Creator’s wisdom. God incarnationally uses our hormones and nervous systems as instruments of His grace. The pleasurable arousal of desire serves a purpose: to draw the spouses out of themselves into mutual self-gift. The deep afterglow of satisfaction and bonding serves to cement their union and strengthen the emotional foundation for parenting and family life. Even the alternating rhythms of sexual desire and satiety can teach the virtues of patience and tenderness. From a spiritual perspective, one can say grace builds on nature: the sacrament of matrimony elevates these biological processes into channels of sanctification. Rather than seeing the body as an opponent of the spirit, the Christian view (especially clear in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body) sees the body as integral to the spiritual life. “The flesh is the hinge of salvation,” wrote Tertullian. We are body-soul unities, and in marriage, our bodies become a communication of our souls. Thus, contemporary science’s insight – that consensual, affectionate sex strengthens the emotional bond and well-being of the couple – simply corroborates the Church’s age-old claim that faithful conjugal love is life-giving and good. Far from the caricature of religion being anti-body or anti-pleasure, authentic Catholic theology rejoices in this coniunctio caritatis (union of love) that God has inscribed into our very physiology.
It’s worth noting that these findings also underline the ascetic warnings the Church gives about casual or impure sex. If our brains and hearts are wired to bond through sex, then treating sexuality as a transient thrill or a consumer good damages our capacity to form lasting communion. The “hookup culture” that severs sex from personal commitment ends up fragmenting the self; it is, in a sense, anti-sacrament: instead of revealing God’s faithful love, it trivializes and obscures it. Studies have indeed suggested that individuals with a long history of promiscuous encounters or pornography use may find pair-bonding and sustained satisfaction in marriage more difficult (due in part to dulled oxytocin/dopamine responses). Science here echoes moral theology: if you bond and break, bond and break repeatedly, the fabric of your ability to trust and give is frayed. Conversely, when a married couple cherishes exclusivity and cultivates their intimate life with tenderness, they build up a treasury of trust. Their brains reinforce the virtuous circle: sex renews their affection, and affection makes sex ever more intimate. Grace then perfects this nature – the couple who also prays together, forgives each other, and serves God will experience not only the natural joys of union but the supernatural joys of a love suffused with the Holy Spirit. Their bedroom truly becomes an extension of the church and the banquet of the Lamb, where the love of God is poured into their hearts (Rom 5:5) in quiet and mysterious ways.
Toward a Sacramental Vision of Marital Sexuality
In sum, a Catholic married couple seeking to deepen their sexual relationship can find a wellspring of inspiration by viewing their union through this sacramental and spiritual lens. Rather than oscillating between secular hedonism and prudishness, the Church proposes a synthesis: a vision in which sexual love is fully embraced and wholly consecrated. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body gave language to this vision in the West, speaking of the “language of the body” by which spouses communicate total self-gift and fidelity. The Eastern tradition complements this with its rich emphasis on mystery, iconography, and theosis. Together, these perspectives help couples see that:
Their physical love is a true icon – a window into God’s love. By delighting in each other’s bodies in the covenant of marriage, they image the delight of God in His people. Their bed is undefiled and precious, a locus of encounter with divine grace.
Their marriage is a domestic church, and the marital act is in a sense a liturgical act. It has its rituals of love, its moments of self-offering and blessing. Just as the Eucharist is the renewal of Christ’s covenant, so in marital intimacy the spouses renew the covenant of their sacrament. Approaching the marriage bed with prayer, respect, and joy, they “offer their bodies as a living sacrifice” (cf. Rom 12:1) in thanksgiving.
Eros and agape converge for them. What begins as biological passion is elevated into holy affection and self-donation. In their ecstasies, they taste a bit of God’s own ecstatic love; in their fidelity and sacrifices, they partake of Christ’s agape. Over the years, eros infused with agape becomes tenderness, a bond that is simultaneously passionate and deeply benevolent, reflecting the very heart of God.
Their union is oriented to sanctification and theosis. Marriage is a path to God. Every joy and every struggle in their intimate life can sanctify if embraced in Christ. When they practice patience, chastity, or mercy toward each other, they die to self and rise in Christ – this is marital kenosis leading to marital glorification. In embracing each other, they are also meant to be embracing Christ, welcoming Him into their midst. In fact, the ultimate purpose of their love is to help one another become saints. Spousal love is heroic when lived fully: it pulls each out of selfishness into a genuine concern for the other’s soul. Thus, day by day, through mutual love, they are being divinized, transformed “from glory to glory” by the Spirit (2 Cor 3:18).
Such a vision is indeed challenging. It demands maturity, formation, and often healing of one’s own wounds and misconceptions about sex. Yet it is also profoundly liberating. It frees couples from the dullness of secular routine and from the scruples of misguided religiosity, inviting them into the adventure of grace. To see the marital embrace as sacramental is to realize that God is actively present in that most intimate moment. God rejoices in their joy – the Creator himself, who designed the thrill of erotic love, smiles upon their pleasure so long as it is rightly ordered. At the same time, God is working through that intimacy, forging an ever deeper communion between the two, teaching them how to love as He loves. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). This scriptural truth, proclaimed at so many weddings, is the cornerstone of a sacramental vision of sexuality.
For Byzantine Catholics, the liturgical texts keep this vision at the forefront. In the wedding liturgy, after the candles, crowns, common cup, and processions, there is no explicit “I do” – instead, the consent is implicit and the sacrament is effected through prayer and blessing. The absence of spoken vows in the Byzantine rite emphasizes that it is really Christ who is the minister of the marriage, the One who unites the couple and carries out the sacrament. Likewise, in the icon of the Wedding at Cana, we see Christ in the center with the newlyweds, often with the Theotokos beside Him, and the wine jugs brimming. This is the reality in every Christian marriage: Christ is in the midst of the couple’s life, ready to change the water of ordinary existence into the wine of divine love. The spouses are not alone in their marital bed; Christ sanctifies it from within. When they struggle – perhaps with mismatched desires, or times of dryness, or external trials – they can turn together to that third presence: “Lord, they have no wine” (Jn 2:3). And the Lord will quietly supply new wine – maybe through better communication, maybe through a rekindling of affection, maybe through patience that deepens their bond. Little by little, the couple who lives this way finds that their relationship has become transparent to God. They begin to experience what St. Maximus and St. Symeon the New Theologian describe: the human love becomes filled with God’s love, eros transfigured by agape, to the point that one beholds the beloved spouse with the eyes of Christ. This is theosis in microcosm – to see the other as Christ sees them and to love the other as Christ loves the Church.
Finally, it must be said that this vision is not a lofty ideal for a few, but a real calling for all sacramentally married couples. The grace of the sacrament is given ex opere operato – objectively – but it calls for free cooperation (synergia in Eastern terms). The more a couple actively seeks to live their marriage in holiness, the more this grace bears fruit. The advice for couples, therefore, is to pray together, frequent the Eucharist and confession (to draw strength from the source of Love), and consciously invite God into their marital intimacy. Practical steps might include praying a simple prayer or blessing before relations, or at least cultivating an interior awareness of gratitude to God during and after their union. It also includes honoring each other’s dignity and never using or coercing one another – in this way, their conjugal acts remain true acts of love that “speak the truth” of the wedding vows in the body. With time, this approach greatly deepens the meaning and pleasure of sex because it integrates body, soul, and spirit. Rather than a momentary high followed by emptiness, the marital embrace becomes part of a continuous growth in communion. In a world starved for authentic love, a husband and wife who thus reverence and enjoy each other stand out as a sign of contradiction – a living icon of sacramental love. Their very happiness, tenderness, and longevity of love become evangelical. As Chrysostom noted, when harmony and holiness prevail in a marriage, “neighbors, friends, and relatives praise the result”, and many are drawn to seek the source of such love.
In conclusion, the sexual union of a married couple, seen through a spiritual lens, is a true mysterion – a participation in God’s own life and an image of His love. It is liturgical (offered in Christ, with Christ, through Christ), iconographic (revealing the unseen divine reality in visible human love), and ascetical (requiring self-denial and leading to self-transformation). It is also deeply human and joyful, involving the whole person. By integrating the insights of Theology of the Body with the wisdom of the Eastern Fathers and even the findings of science, we arrive at a hopeful and exultant theology: that the marriage bed is undefiled because it has been made an altar, where two can become one flesh and simultaneously one spirit in the Lord. Here, the words of St. Paul attain their full resonance: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her… This is a great mystery” (Eph 5:25,32). The mystery beckons married believers to keep plumbing its depths. In the courage to give themselves to each other anew – body, soul, and spirit – they discover ever more the presence of the God who is Love. Such couples become hierophanies (manifestations of the sacred) in our midst. Their union, blessed by God, becomes a path of theosis, a way in which divine love takes flesh in our world. And in that sanctifying embrace, they echo on earth the endless marital joy of heaven: “Let us rejoice and exult and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His Bride has made herself ready” (Rev 19:7).
Sources:
Holy Scripture (Gen 2:24-25; Song of Songs; Isa 62:5; Hos 2; Eph 5:25-32; 1 Cor 7; Rev 19:7-9, etc.)
St. John Paul II, Theology of the Body (1979–1984) – e.g. Audience Feb 20, 1980; Audience Dec 1, 1982; etc.
St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians (Homily 20); On Marriage and Family Life (transl. Catharine Roth).
St. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs (allegorical interpretation of divine eros).
St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua and Capita de Caritate (on divine love and union); Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names IV (on divine Eros).
Byzantine Marriage Rite – cf. Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective by John Meyendorff, Appendix V.
Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, The Orthodox Church (ch. 14 on Marriage).
Fr. Thomas Hopko, “God is Love,” in The Orthodox Faith: Spirituality.
Kristina Bloomsburg, Fargo Diocese News, Jan 8, 2024 – reflections on TOB.
Brittany Balke, “Byzantine Marriage” series (CatholicMom.com) – on martyrdom and community.
Scientific literature: Bosch & Young, “Oxytocin and Social Relationships” (Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2018); Harvard Health Publishing on oxytocin.
Additional Patristic and contemporary sources as cited in-text, etc.