Our Orthodox Christian faith teaches us that there is a deep truth that forms the foundation of our most important relationships. This truth is that we do not serve Christ as isolated individuals, but as part of a group committed to sharing in each other's joys and bearing each other's burdens. There is a Greek word that contains the essence of this truth. That word is koinonia.

Koinonia means community, in its most profound and mysterious sense. It is easy for us to miss this kind of subtler truth of our faith, especially truths which are most clearly communicated in Greek words.

I'm reminded of a story I heard recently. At a recent Greek Orthodox youth event, they played a round of Orthodox Jeopardy, with different categories of answers needing questions. A teenager said, "Father, I'll take lines of the Liturgy for $300." The answer read, "the last line of the Liturgy." The teenager says, "What is, ‘Can the parish council please pass the tray?'" No, I don't think that's right! The next teenager answers, "What is, ‘Di Euchon ton Agion Pateron Imon.'" Wonderful! Unfortunately, the priest organizing the event couldn't resist asking the teenager, "Can you tell me what that means-Di Euchon ton Agion Pateron Imon?" The answer? "It's over."

Now, if we are unclear on the most basic elements of our worship, we are all the more likely to be unclear on more difficult truths like koinonia. We cannot let this stand. We cannot allow our community of faith to weaken to the point where our people do not understand our worship, let alone its meaning and purpose.

So I want to make the truth of koinonia more clear for you. There are three points I want to emphasize. The first is that because we are created in the image of the Holy Trinity, we are created for relationship. The second is that the worldly culture which surrounds us denies and disfigures this truth. And the third is that in order to reclaim koinonia, we must reclaim the most central human relationship of all-holy marriage.

The great Orthodox teacher Bishop Kallistos Ware has said, "The human person is created for relationship." At the heart of this teaching is the recognition that we are created in the image of God. What does this mean? As Christians, we proclaim that when we say "God," we mean the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We understand that God Himself is not in isolation. "God is love," we read in 1 John 4:8. God is love because God Himself is community, is relationship. Bishop Kallistos goes on to say, "God is not a unit, but a union. God is love in the sense of shared love, the mutual love of three Persons in one."

We can only truly understand ourselves, we can only lay claim to the image of God within us, when we recognize that like God the truth of who we are is centered in community. The truth of our very nature demands that we fully embrace our relationships with others.

There is another Greek word that opens this truth for us-prosopo. We encounter the centrality of relationship in the most fundamental of places-the very word for person. Prosopo-the Greek word for person-means "face."

Let me tell you a story of one of the Desert Fathers, St. Macarius the Great. St. Macarius was a holy monk who lived in the Egyptian desert. Walking in the desert one day, he found lying on the ground the skull of a dead man. He nudged the skull with his walking stick, and the skull spoke to him. St. Macarius said to it, "Who are you?" The skull replied, "I was a pagan high priest; but you are Macarius, the Spirit-bearer. Whenever you take pity on those who are in torments, and pray for them, they feel a little respite." St. Macarius said to the skull, "What is this alleviation, and what is this torment?" The skull answered, "As far as the sky is removed from the earth, so great is the fire beneath us; we are ourselves standing in the midst of the fire, from the feet up to the head. It is not possible to see anyone face to face, but the face of one is fixed to the back of another. Yet when you pray for us, each of us can see the other's face a little. Such is our respite."

Think of what this teaches us. St. Macarius learned that in hell, people are bound together back to back. Hell's greatest torment is the denial of the sight of the face of another. It is the experience of not being able to relate to anyone else

Prosopo-person-means "face." It is deeply significant that we cannot, without a mirror, see our own faces. Our faces are only seen by others. Without relationship, without koinonia, our faces are like flowers in the dark.

How different this truth is from what the culture around us proclaims. It is so easy for people to deny koinonia, and the world has always done so. Indeed, it can be said that the very essence of the fall of Adam and Eve in Paradise was the rejection of relationship. When God asked Adam if he had eaten the fruit of the tree, what did he say? "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate." (Gen. 3:12) And what did Eve say? "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." (Gen. 3:13) Adam and Eve each chose to think only of themselves, of their own needs. They each chose selfishly, and sought to place the blame for their act on someone else.

This fallen selfishness continues to engulf our world today. Self-centeredness drives our society, and is communicated both openly and in disguise in countless messages that bombard us. Our media today is filled with examples. They saturate television, music, sports, and every other area of our culture.

One example that comes to mind is a new national recruitment campaign launched by the United States Army a couple of years ago. After years of testing and development, the Army unveiled a major new marketing program with the tagline, "an army of one." It was strange for me to hear an institution so deeply linked with team-work, community, and sacrifice being promoted with a phrase placing all the emphasis on the individual! Now, to be fair, the Army meant to also communicate that it was about one army with one vision and one mission. But, the recruiters who built the campaign also clearly stated that they felt the best way for them to reach young people today was to strike a note that on the surface appealed to self-centeredness.

Of course, this is one of the tamer manifestations of selfishness in our culture. Look at the Billboard "Hot 100" list of the most popular songs today, but only if you've got a strong stomach. The wicked glorification of personal pleasure at the expense of everyone and everything is stronger than it has ever been! For a long time, people have used the excuse, "well, we don't listen to the lyrics, only the music." Nonsense. Take a look at the lyrics. They can be found easily on the Internet-I assure you that any teenager can do so. Most of the songs I couldn't even begin to quote from here. But I'll give you a sense of what I mean. One of the top-selling recording artists today is a performer called 50 Cent. His song, "Hate It Or Love It," is a rap about the selfish and wicked life he leads, and the impoverished relationships that have been part of it. A few lines go like this:

Confusin' occurs, comin' up in the cold world

Daddy ain't around, prolly out committin' felonies . . .

From the beginnin' to end,

Losers lose, winners win,

This is real, we ain't got to pretend

The cold world that we in

Is full of pressure and pain

I thought it would change

But its stayin' the same

And it's not hard to see how this conviction that the world is cold can be used as justification for committing the kinds of wicked acts, like forced sex and drug dealing, that 50 Cent goes on to celebrate in the song.

Or think of one of the most popular shows on television, "Desperate Housewives." This show celebrates personal pleasure and the lifestyle of, ‘if it feels good, do it!' And behind this celebration is a message which says, ‘the only authentic goal in life is the satisfaction of your own most selfish desires, no matter what impact that satisfaction may have on others.'

Now, we must be careful to not draw the wrong lessons from these kinds of examples. We must not let ourselves fall prey to the dark twin of selfishness, the denial of the gifts which we have been given by God. We can and should strive in a holy way for excellence. To use the Army's old slogan, we should indeed seek to "be all that we can be."

God has blessed each one of us with talents which we should develop and multiply. But we must strive to excel with the full understanding that we become most fully ourselves when we love and serve others.

Once we understand how we are made for community, for koinonia; and once we understand how this truth is opposed by the world around us; only then can we understand the significance of the most fundamental human relationship of all-marriage.

In our Orthodox faith, marriage is a sacrament. No other human relationship is so honored. Not those of father and son, of sister and brother, of lifelong friends. The only other intimate relationship that is also a sacrament is that relationship which marriage most nearly resembles: the relationship of the individual with Jesus Christ, manifested in the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Our marriages are the building blocks of community. God teaches us to build up marriages, to build up families. So to truly understand koinonia, we must understand marriage.

What kind of relationship is marriage? What should a holy marriage be? There are two central dimensions of marriage.

First, God teaches us that marriage enables us to share in each other's joys. A traditional Orthodox wedding gift is an icon of the Conception of the Theotokos. This icon shows the parents of the Virgin Mary, Saints Joachim and Anna. Describing it, the Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Green explains, "The icon of the feast shows a married couple in the privacy of their bedroom. They are in a graceful embrace. This is how the life of a daughter begins. It is a reminder of the goodness of sexual love and of God's intention that we use it in joy."

The second dimension of marriage is the sharing of each other's burdens. St. Paul teaches in Galatians 6:2, "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." For us today, this is perhaps the more important teaching because of all the cultural forces pushing against any appreciation of marriage as demanding self-denial and self-sacrifice. We are to love each other as Christ loves the Church. And what did Christ do for the Church? He died for the Church! In Orthodox Christian weddings, the bride and groom are crowned. Brothers and sisters, the crowns we take at marriage are both crowns of glory and crowns of thorns.

Think how different this vision of marriage is from what our culture teaches! Think of how far this twinned reality of shared joy and shared burden is from the message of society that we should only think of our own selfish needs!

There is a prayer in the Orthodox ceremony of marriage that asks God to "Receive their crowns in to Thy Kingdom." This simple prayer shows us the ultimate purpose of marriage, the reason why God blesses the mutual sharing of joys and burdens which are central to marriage. Brothers and sisters, the ultimate purpose of marriage is the salvation of the married couple. They are each other's helpers, helping one another to heaven.

We are made in the image of God the Trinity, and thus are made for relationship. The world denies this truth. But we can reclaim relationship, we can serve Our Lord in true koinonia, beginning with the most basic of holy human relationships-our marriages. In marriage we help each other become more fully human, sharing in each other's joys and bearing each other's burdens.

We must strive together to redeem our relationships with one another. And we can begin with our marriages, the primal relationships which allow for the creation of all the others of importance: the bearing and raising of children, and the forming of individuals able to create and engage in all the other relationships on which our full community depends-extended family; true friendships; true charity.

Do not deny the image of God within you. Face the challenges of marriage, embrace both its joys and burdens. In marriage we face our spouse, and learn to face others. In facing others, we find our own face, our own personhood, our own prosopo, revealed.

Let me leave you with one final idea. Before the time of the Greek Fathers of the Church, the word prosopo had a connected but different meaning. It meant, in the time of the ancient Greek tragedies, "mask." Prosopo referred to the mask which actors would wear in the theater, the false face they would take on to play their role. Only later, as the great revelation of the Gospel began to shine in the Greek-speaking world did the word come to mean our true face.

We have a choice, brothers and sisters. We can let our true face be formed by entering in to holy relationships in the koinonia of the Church. Or, we can refuse to let our face be formed and instead wear masks of our own construction, in a selfish attempt to make our own way in the world. Find your face, and you will win the race. We must leave behind our masks. Only then can we truly face God.

Fr. Christopher Metropulos is founder, host, and executive director of the Orthodox Christian Network (OCN) and the Come Receive The Light national Orthodox Christian radio program (www.myocn.net). He is pastor of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he and his wife Georgia are raising their six children.