The difficulty I have with this is that it suggests that people married without those rites (in other churches, or as adherents of other faiths, or in secular settings) are not "really" or properly married. I'm not keen on setting up a situation where Christians look down on others with the view that "My marriage is better/more real than yours."
That’s a valid concern but the Orthodox have a liturgy* for that: blessing an existing marriage, which is a joyful service normally done by the way when receiving married couples into their Church. Their official position is that they don’t know the status of marriages they did not perform, so the Trebnik, or Book of Needs, also called the Euchologion sometimes, but sometimes the Euchologion is something else, provides the liturgical remedy. Also, someone who divorced and remarried before becoming Orthodox, especially if they were not received through baptism, is going to find it very hard to become ordained, whereas a large number of Orthodox priests now serving in North America were married elsewhere before converting.
It's interesting that you think that's a pastoral option; in all my reading on it I've come to the exact opposite conclusion. Imagine, for example, that you're getting married for the first time, but to someone whose spouse died; and you're only allowed a "penitential" wedding and marriage? As if it is something to be ashamed of? I think it's the exact opposite of pastoral. It's an exercise in public humiliation.
That’s nothing new in an Orthodox construct, because all Orthodox liturgies have a cathartic element, and as such, are in part exercises in public humiliation, especially by the Celebrant. Have you read the Pre-Communion Prayers, where frequently everyone, but at least the celebrant, accuses himself not only of sin but of being the worst of sinners?
There is also the part of the anaphora where the priest before communing steps out onto the ambo, bows to the congregation and says “Forgive me, for I have sinned.” The life of their priests is a bit of an antithesis to say, Creflo Dollar, in that it consists of continual self-abasement, and some quit after a few years and return to the laity.
This cathartic aspect to the Orthodox liturgical system, in which fasts are long and there is a constant theme of repentance, may seem alienating to Christians from other traditions, but its also largely hidden by the joyous celebratory superstrate, which tends to be more pronounced than in other liturgical rites, partially I think because of the, at times, imperceptible, contrast between the penitential and joyous strata of the liturgical text.
And by the way, there is no Orthodox service that approaches the Litany from the old BCP in terms of penitential characteristics. John Wesley wanted Methodists to attend the Litany** and fast on Wednesday and Friday, but needless to say, I’ve yet to meet one who does.
And of course when it comes to divorced persons, the Roman Catholics just would not remarry them at all, except with an indulgence, the refusal of which to Henry VIII having lasting and self-evident consequences.
Actually speaking of Roman Catholics, the most penitential liturgical rite I have found is the one used by Carthusian hermit-monks, but it is very hard to become a Carthusian especially over the age of 35, and since the monastic community is self-selecting, pastoral care issues are vastly different (still very present, but different).
In the bigger picture, I think Christians need to remember that marriage, as a human custom, far predates the Church and has always occurred outside the Church as well as inside it; we do not "own" marriage, and although we might want to regulate it in line with Christian norms, any definition of marriage which makes it something particular to the church is, among other problems, spectacularly historically and socially dishonest.
I agree, and I am not worried about that because the Orthodox bless the existing marriages of people who convert. In the Early Church,
oikonomia on this issue was even extended to polygamists (this is most likely what Paul meant when he told Timothy the bishop should be “the husband of one wife.”)
*It was hard to not write “app.”
** The Litany either being that of the 1662 BCP, or after the Peace of Paris, in the new United States, the condensed recension of it composed by Wesley, the ill-fated
Sunday Service Book.
