“The servant of God, ‘Aziz,’ is crowned to the handmaid of God, ‘Jamileh,’ in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!”

When Father Boulos uttered these words on the evening of the tenth of May in the year 1900, in a spacious hall rich in furnishings and ornament in the house of Abu Aziz al-Kirbaj, a mute stillness descended upon the hundreds of guests invited to the wedding, cloaked in a heavenly awe. Children and youths, maidens and young men, the middle-aged and the old — all held their breath as though listening to the fluttering of unseen wings. And Father Boulos himself, who in his

lifetime had bound in the tie of matrimony nearly a thousand of the sons of his flock preserved by the Lord, pronounced these words that night in a voice not his ordinary voice, so that his hearers imagined the Holy Spirit was speaking with his tongue. Perhaps that was because Father Boulos, in all the long life he had spent as a servant of the Lord, grasped for the first time the importance of his words, and his soul was illumined so that he saw marriage as a holy, divine sacra-ment and not as a simple church rite; or perhaps it was that the priest, from the day he received the honor of the priesthood until that minute, had never raised his

hand to bless the bond of a bridal pair like Aziz al-Kirbaj and Jamileh al-Bishtawi. But those present felt suddenly that they were in the presence of a power on high, and the hall — with all its candle flames, twisting, dancing, rising toward the heights — was transformed in their eyes into a pure temple in which a deep and holy sacrament was being accomplished. And so they wrapped themselves in silence and reverence.

There is no doubt that the sight of the bridal pair added awe and majesty to the scene. Aziz al-Kirbaj, the only child of his father and mother, was the handsomest young man in the