Browsing tag: housewife

  • Choose Your Destination

    Choose your destination before you set out on a path.

    Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy.  Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden (Rule of St. Benedict, 1.8-9)

    So . . . if you’re thinking that this is a description of our culture today, actually it’s not.  This is St Benedict describing corrupt monks in the 6th century.  The mental outlook that surrounds us now was already an option then.  It has always been appealing to think that you can do whatever you want now and be fine in the end.  But a closer look at real experience shows that choices have consequences.  You’ve got to choose your destination in order to figure out the right path to get there.

    The monks that St Benedict approves of are the coenobitarum, which is Latin for koinos bios, which is Greek for common life, which is English for what I aim to discuss here. Life in community is the focus of St Benedict’s Rule.  He invites you to choose as your destination community with God and your fellow human beings.

    St. Benedict also refers to the eremitarum, which is the Latin transliteration of the Greek eremitēs, which means “one who lives in the desert” and gives us the English word hermit.  He himself lived as a hermit for three years.  He describes the hermit as ready with God’s help to grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind (Rule of St. Benedict 1.5).

    When I first started to think of the housewife-mother as a domestic hermit, it was because of the experience of being overwhelmed by the demands of life in a family with children.  And yet I also felt isolated, grappling with all sorts of interior struggles.  I don’t think my experience is unusual.  I think that many people flee the domestic life exactly because of this combination of exterior harassment and interior aridity.

    My goal here is to provide some support for Christian families.  I’m going to write from the perspective of someone who finds goodness difficult and not always attractive.  If you’re very good already, I won’t be at your level.  If you’re hanging on by your fingernails and thinking of letting go, I have a few tips for how to claw your way to survival.

    Most people dislike philosophy, so I’ll just note that I would situate myself in the Existential Thomist line.  If you’re interested in pursuing this topic, I would suggest that you NOT try reading St. Thomas Aquinas on your own.  I would suggest that you read Jacques Maritain instead.  Start with his Christianity and Democracy. The difference between reading Maritain and reading Aquinas is like the difference between drinking a gin-and-tonic and chewing the bark of the cinchona tree to extract the quinine.  In the case of Aquinas, you really do want someone else to distill it for you.

    You don’t need to be a philosopher to notice how challenging it is for Jesus to say, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” John 14:6.  His way of life is a narrow path uphill, and that’s not where the crowd is heading.  Meanwhile, you have myriads of alternatives immediately available.  A lot of nice people are rushing off in other directions, and who can tell yet where they will end up?  But Jesus insists that only his path leads to life (Matthew 7:13-14).

    He didn’t say you have to climb quickly.  There’s no quota of miles you must get through in a day.  You can sit down every ten feet and rest, if you need to.  And you don’t have to get to the end to experience the life.  You just have to be on the path–or in the vicinity of the path, retrieving someone from the landscape.  You can backtrack and retrace your steps, again, because that’s just what you have to do to keep everyone together. And you may find that your children have more energy than you do for the challenge.  They hate to walk, but they love to run.  If you point them in the right direction, soon they’ll get far beyond you, and you’ll be calling to them to wait up.

    Choose your destination: are you aiming for eternal community with those you love and with your Creator?

     

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  • Housewife Manifesto

    Housewife Definition

    And finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy.  (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 74-77)

    Despair is a housewife with a television
    peering through channels at the world passing her by.
    She seeks hope, but what a difficult decision
    to turn off the screen and go sing a lullaby.

    So, what do you do all day, Ms. Smith?  Do you play
    with them, the tedious darlings—what sort of game?
    How sad for you, when you could have had (and with pay)
    lovers, success, fame and letters after your name.

    Are those stretch marks on your breasts we see (not real ones!?)
    that nursed babies.  We can fix that for a small fee
    reverse the decline in your value.  A man runs
    from paying bills, sagging flesh and mortality.

    It’s true, she replies with a sigh.  After dinner
    diapers and dishes, it’s only games, day and night:
    Play Fair, Tell The Truth, You Can’t Always Be Winner
    Don’t Pull Your Sister’s Hair, Say You’re Sorry, Don’t Fight.

    It wasn’t my intention with the marriage vow
    to fail pitifully, give up ambition, beauty.
    I made kids, not money.  But thirty years from now
    thanks to me, there may yet be a society.

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  • The Call: Awake!

    Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” Romans 13:11 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.8)

    This “sleep” is the spiritual stupor of ordinary people who imagine that the front line is somewhere else. They think that they themselves have no responsibility for the outcome of the battle. They presume that they will suffer no consequences for their complacent inaction.

    I myself had an experience of a call involving Scripture and a stirring up from physical sleep, on a particular occasion.  At about 2 a.m., the morning of June 19, 2012, I woke up with the urgent sense that I should post verses of Scripture online.  So I thought, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

    But the urgency increased.  I felt that I must check what the readings for the day were–not in the Upper Room guide to prayer that I’d been using for twenty-two years, but in the Catholic Missal, which I had downloaded on my phone at some point but had never even opened before.  I fumbled with my phone in the middle of the night and read the readings: 1 Kings 21: 17-29 (the Lord sends Elijah to confront Ahab). Then there was Psalm 51 (“…in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense….). The Gospel was Matthew 5: 43-48 (“love your enemies“).  Then I checked the daily Bible verse and saw Acts 17:30-31:

    God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent, because he has established a day on which he will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.

    There was a “share” feature on the app to connect to Facebook.  It was urgent that I must do so immediately.  I signed in, and I posted the verse.

    This experience had never happened to me before.  It hasn’t happened again since.  Afterwards, trying to come to terms with it, I explained to God that this was the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time.

    First of all, these days God does not “demand” anything.  God is lucky if anyone condescends to acknowledge that he might exist.  Second, if God wants to get a message out to all people everywhere, my Facebook page is not the place to do it.  Third, people these days don’t repent.  A few religious people make a practice of repenting routinely, but the people who do most of the sinning aren’t interested in repentance at all.  There must have been some mistake.  The angel tapped the wrong person on the shoulder.  I don’t have the credentials, the platform, the authority, or the influence.

    But St. Benedict actually gives some insight into the call of God.  Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts his voice again: “Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?” Psalm 34:12 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.14-15)

    There’s a promise here, and it’s not just pie in the sky bye ‘n bye.  The promise of God for those who will heed him is a good life beginning here and now.

    With this conclusion, the Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings.  Therefore our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.  As the Apostle says, “Do you not know that the patience of God is leading you to repent?” Romans 2:4 (RB Prologue.35-37)

    The call to each of us is to translate into action daily the teachings that we believe to be true.  How do we live them out in ordinary life within a culture that has explicitly rejected them and that organizes itself along opposing principles?

    Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service.  In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.  The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love.  Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation.  It is bound to be narrow at the outset. (RB Prologue.45-48)

    Every Christian home is such a school.  If the home is spiritually chaotic, then the child may emerge into adulthood unfit for any good purpose.  Discipline costs effort every day.  But the rejection of discipline costs far more. Everyone pays the price in illness, despair, loneliness and worse.  Rather than raging at evil in others elsewhere, let us combat it where we are.  The battle for good against evil will be won or lost in our own homes.

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  • The Challenge

    This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord. (RB Prologue.3)

    St. Benedict is of course not the first to describe the Christian life as a spiritual battle: St. Paul used that figure of speech in his letters.  On the face of it, however, it seems a bit histrionic to associate the domestic life with anything as dramatic as “battle.”  Surely the metaphor is overblown.

    But then you hear of another teenager who has committed suicide; of another husband who has abandoned his family; of another wife who has had an affair.  You see people with all sorts of destructive habits hurting themselves and their children.  The national abortion statistics come in for the year.  Then it’s your own friends whose marriages rot out.  Their cute kids grow up and do shocking things in the janitor’s closet in high school.  You watch a four year-old fall apart emotionally because she realizes that her father just doesn’t care.  You watch a seven year-old learn to be stoic.  A battle?  It’s a rout; a massacre; a spiritual slaughter.  And if you abandon your post, not only you but your children will join the list of casualties.

    So there is a war raging.  Whether or not you want to fight, it will involve you.  But how can obedience be a weapon?  Isn’t that a hopelessly unfashionable idea?  In Discipleship, the WWII-era Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the point that obedience to the commands of God is inseparable from faith in God. “You complain that you cannot believe?  No one should be surprised that they cannot come to believe so long as, in deliberate disobedience, they flee or reject some aspect of Jesus’ commandment.”

    Following the epistle of St. James, Bonhoeffer was explaining to a modern readership how false it is to think that an experience of faith must precede an act of obedience.  On the contrary, you must take action to obey in order to experience faith.  Bonhoeffer stepped away from the trend of Germanic philosophy since Kant and rejected the primacy of the thing in the mind over the thing in action.  He stood against Nazi Germany and lost his life as a result.  His side–our side–won that war, but insidious theories of self-invention spread through the post-war culture.

    These days a call to obedience sounds like an insult, to many people.  In the postmodern context, we are self-referential by default.  We find ourselves sequestered inside labile minds, no longer even able to rely on the modern concept of the coherent individual, who at least knew who he was and what he wanted.  More than in previous ages we need to obey the commands of God so as not to be constantly tossed about by our own confused thoughts and erratic feelings.

    But once we’ve obeyed the revealed commands of God—then what?  There’s all the rest of mundane life to live.  Must each individual at every moment debate every choice that needs to be made?  In a chaotic and arbitrary culture, willfully given over to the cult of randomness, it would be less exhausting to have some templates handy, some aids for the organization of behavior. A rational person faces relentless buffeting by the sheer nihilism of the surrounding environment.  A Domestic Rule would be helpful, to provide some guidelines for self-regulation.

     

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  • The Motivation

    Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.1)

    When I first thought of writing a domestic rule, the idea was completely sarcastic. In the culture that surrounds me, there are no two things so disdained as domesticity and regulation. But it irked me that out of twenty centuries of Church history, nobody had ever written a rule for married people raising children. It irked me so much that gradually I came to entertain more seriously the idea of writing one myself.  The question is not what the Christian life should look like in its mature state. There are innumerable resources to tell us that. The question is how to raise infants from formless chaos to that mature state, and how to survive the process.

    I feel sure that the things I’ve learned as an ordinary Christian wife and mother have been learned before by many women who were not able to record their experiences in writing.  For many centuries, only a tiny fraction of the population could read, much less write. Writing materials were too expensive to waste on merely personal reflections. So, written documents tended not to contain mundane details.  Even when education and materials became more widely available, how many mothers had the leisure to write anything more than a personal letter to a specific child at a specific moment? They were too tired all the time, and nobody ever asked.

    Out of all the famous leaders of any denomination, only John Wesley, to my knowledge ever asked his mother, Susanna Wesley, to write down her thoughts on raising children.  The only way to account for such a gaping hole in Christian teaching is to acknowledge that the Church for most of its existence has taken for granted that ordinary people would perform the tasks of child-rearing as a matter of course. Nobody ever wrote a domestic rule because nobody ever imagined a society without families.

    Then the twentieth century came along and gave the world atheist experiments in total annihilation of the family. Western countries resisted totalitarian ideologies only to yield to decomposing forces that have dissolved all the primary bonds. Mothers kill their children and call it freedom. Brothers and sisters train to compete against each other, not to love each other. The bond between father and son has become a fight for dominance.

    These existential topics were on my mind, but I hesitated to take on the extra work involved in doing this project.  I started putting pen to paper only after hearing of four healthy people who suddenly died, within a week or so of each other. There was a family friend who went in for surgery and died on the operating table. A business contact dropped dead of a heart attack while working out in the gym. A seventeen year-old shot himself “accidentally.” A woman bled to death giving birth to her fourth baby. It occurred to me that I might not have much time left myself. Before I go, I want to record some parenting advice for my own children as they raise families.

    What follows is not a polemical essay but a personal testimony.  What I myself have learned in the course of struggling to live an ordinary Christian life as that deplorable relic, a housewife, I now proclaim to you. I write so that you may live joyful lives. And I hope that I can spare you many heartaches and miseries by carefully and honestly parsing out the elemental details that are so often taken for granted.  Anything objectionable in what follows I have carefully considered and have decided to include anyway, as an alternative to something worse that I fear more.

    A rule is not a set of laws to obey. A rule is a pattern, a multi-faceted template, to which one can turn when it’s not clear what to do next. The goal is not to be domestic nor to be regulated, but to live a Christian life—even in domesticity. How does one raise children in happy homes that everyone is not always trying to escape from? As my own template I’m taking the Rule of Saint Benedict. Of all the choices I’ve made, this is one of the few that seemed, quite simply, obvious.

     

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