Browsing tag: society

  • 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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  • Zip It

     I said, I have resolved to keep watch over my ways that I may never sin with my tongue.  I have put a guard on my mouth…. [Psalm 39:1-3]  (Rule of St. Benedict 6.1-6)

    Keep your mouth shut? It’s awfully hard to do.

    It’s especially difficult in a competitive environment, where talking is part of the game, and the loudest ones seem to win.  Across languages and cultures, human beings exercise dominance by imposing verbally over others.  The powerful say whatever they want.  Everyone else has to be careful, and whisper.  Sometimes speaking at all can feel like a fight for survival.  In this as in everything else, the Christian message is paradoxical.  Do you fear being completely ignored, if you keep quiet while everyone else has a say?  Then trust God, and hold your tongue.

    If you follow this teaching, expect to spend many hours of your life listening to other people declaim nonsense.  There are some who will talk at full speed as long as anyone will listen, never pausing for breath.  Curiously, though, as soon as you try to reply, the intense focus of which they are clearly capable dissolves into wandering attention and distracted mannerisms.  They have the energy to speak, but not to remain silent.  Talking requires much less effort than listening.

    Do not imitate them.  In the short term, they seem to dominate the group.  But in the long run, the verbose end up deleted.  Just because people have no choice but to hear you doesn’t mean they are persuaded.

    The goal is not to seal yourself into hermetic isolation, however.  There is a time to communicate what you think.  The monosyllabic sphinx is a tiresome companion too.  When people are sincerely interested in you, don’t weary them by making them guess what’s going on.  It’s on you to communicate in a coherent way.  But what thoughts are actually pouring forth from within you?

    For some, it’s perpetual dissatisfaction.  They can complain about anything, and they will.  If the temperature drops, they complain about the cold.  When it warms up, they complain about the heat.  If it rains, they complain about getting wet.  If it doesn’t, they complain on behalf of the parched vegetation. Keep your mouth shut? You wish you could tell them!

    Others spew malice.  They sidle up, masquerading as sociable.  Beware those who insinuate nasty things about people behind their backs, while attempting to draw you in with flattery.  As soon as you’re out of earshot, they’ll be hissing derogatory remarks about you too.  If you must comment on someone who’s absent, try to think of something positive to say.  Malicious gossips will learn to avoid you, because it repels them to hear others praised.

    Good words come from the good within you.  If only this were enough!  But the thing is that dishonesties characterize the social conventions of every society.  Cultures define themselves by the peculiar sorts of dissembling they require.  Figuring out what you’re not supposed to say is one of the biggest challenges of a foreign environment.  Some are so hateful that you live in fear of tripping a mine whenever you open your mouth.  You have to be careful about speaking the truth.

    It’s safest to refrain from asking questions.  But if you see someone making a potentially dangerous mistake, you must in good conscience speak out.  The other person will likely reject your advice.  Sometimes your intrusion will provoke such resentment that the chill will never thaw again.  But you’re not actually doing anything wrong, if you’re motivated by love.  It’s just that not everyone will want to hear it, even if you’ve got it right, even though you care.

    There are also, inevitably, moments of personal struggle, when you simply must express how you feel, whatever the consequences.  Every human being needs friends.  When another person hears and understands, there’s an enormous relief, quite apart from solving any problem.  Just remember that those who love you enough to listen also need support from you.  Listening is a mutual comfort.

    Sometimes in acute distress we lash out at the person closest to us.  This is human, but it’s also terribly unfair.  Pull yourself together and apologize.  Even in the most loving, most intimate relationships, you’ve got to maintain a proportion of courtesy.  Honesty, like vinegar, is unbearable on its own.  More oil than vinegar goes into a salad dressing, and the same is true for relationships, even close ones.  Try to balance your honesty with some balm for the feelings of the other person.

    Cherish those who care enough about you to listen.  And with strangers, keep your mouth shut.  You won’t get into trouble for what you don’t say.

     

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  • Curb Your Urge

    For this reason Scripture warns us, Pursue not your lusts Sirach 18:30.  (Rule of St. Benedict 7.25)

    We live in a culture where it’s supposed to be fun to let yourself go.  People announce that they’re about to let themselves go, and then they do it.  Not only do they not feel shame: they expect you to pat them on the back.  Most of the time they act with good humor, and with no thought of harming themselves or anyone else.  The binge is benign these days.

    Until it’s not.  The fact is that we have countless people who are suffering the tragic consequences of their own impulses–or worse, of someone else’s.  Some of them refuse to admit responsibility.  But others are discouraged, because they’ve tried and failed to change.

    Self-control is not an instant thing.  It’s the work of a lifetime.  It’s the practice of a life well-lived.

    If you want to be an athlete or an artist or any sort of skilled worker, you start at the beginning and practice basic moves first.  Checking your own impulse is one of the most basic moves of all.  It’s an element of any future action.  It’s not just that refraining from one action frees up time and energy for an alternative.  Curbing your impulse also builds strength and skill.  These in turn open up new possibilities that would otherwise have remained out of reach.

    A century of Freudian psychology has led us to assume that checking an impulse means repressing desire.  When you repress a desire, you don’t act on it, but it comes out in some other, weird way that you don’t control and that you may not even be aware of.  So you might as well let yourself go.

    Suffering the consequences?  That’s someone else’s specialty.  Next, please.

    The difference between self-control and repression is that self-control does not suppress desire.  Self-control nurtures and trains desire.  While the binge lets desire loose, without regard for other people, self-control keeps desire on a leash and exercises it with consideration for others.

    The lure of the binge is easy pleasure fast.  But the thrill tends to decrease with repetition.  You work harder to get less.  And you suffer the side effects.  With self-control, on the other hand, you start small, but the enjoyment increases with practice.  And the horizons are infinite.

    The best the binge can claim is not to have harmed anyone else.  But self-control allows you to do good to others actively.

    People who can’t control their impulses only get along with others who want to do the same thing at the same time in the same way.  When a whole collection of individuals are all out of control together, they meld into a mob.  The mob tramples any divergent individual.  But then the frenzy burns out, and the mob disperses.  The same individuals go back to competing ruthlessly against each other.  They separate, each alone with an ungoverned desire.  The endpoint is a life without any relationships at all: just interactions that serve the appetite.

    But self-control allows you to live in community.  Christian community aims not to meld but to harmonize individual desires.  It’s a complex challenge, but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we do make a life together.  This calls for active participation on the part of each one, rather than a passive letting go.

    Life in a family is a training ground for harmony.  Baby learns to sleep at night long enough for Mom to get the rest she needs.  Baby learns to go for longer without eating, so that eventually the child’s habits match the habits of the family.  In practice this effort takes years, and every time a new baby arrives, another individual process is thrown into the mix.  Easy is not part of the deal.

    But the endpoint is paradise, which Jesus describes as a banquet Matthew 22:1-14; 25:1-13.  A banquet is a fancy dinner where people dress their best, eat together and enjoy each other’s company.  When you have a family sitting down to a meal together, you have a foretaste of heaven.  The food may be simple.  The clamor around your table may not sound divine.  But consider what you’ve achieved: you’ve taken human beings from a state of chaos to a state of sociability.  Even if it’s not yet heaven, it is the foundation of civil society, and that’s something no one should take for granted.

    Ultimately: heaven.  Here and now: a functioning society.  Earliest of all: a family meal.  But it all begins with harmonizing individual impulses.  And so, each one of us must achieve a measure of self-control.

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  • Eat Your Vegetables

    Raising Kids

    …we must be vigilant every hour… (Rule of St. Benedict 7.29)

    The kid who is old enough to chew solid food will also be smart enough to realize that you’re cooking peas with his pasta.

    He’s willful enough to feel insulted.

    He’s passionate enough to throw a screaming fit.

    Because you’re a Christian mother–loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle and self-controlled–you don’t beat him with your wooden spoon at the end of a long, hard day.  Instead, you pour yourself a glass of wine, turn up the music, get down in his face with the bag of frozen peas and say: WATCH ME.  Then in defiance of his will you add the peas to the ziti while he howls and kicks on the ground at your feet.

    So what if he removes every pea from his bowl and refuses to eat even one?  So what if he peers into each tube of ziti and sticks his finger in it to expel each internal pea?  You’ve held the line.  You’ve retained your principles.  That was the Battle of the Peas, and you won it.

    When he’s a little older, you’ll no longer permit him to remove all vegetable matter from his personal space.  Even if he won’t taste the broccoli, he must tolerate it.  He may not remove it to the table, or throw it on the floor, or foist it onto someone else’s plate.  He must suffer the presence of the hated green thing.  When at last he resigns himself to its existence, you’ve won the First Battle of Broccoli.

    Then there’s the Second Battle to fight: he’s got to taste the broccoli.

    When he gags and vomits at your dinner table, you feel disheartened.  You’ve already toiled through years of cooking for an ungrateful, complaining family.  Now you want to give up and never eat again–not with them.  But the night is darkest just before the dawn.  The little boy who gags on his broccoli will one day volunteer to cook dinner for his whole family (Fettuccine Alfredo; extra Parmesan; no peas).

    Far, far more important than the presence or absence of vegetables are the social principles he has internalized:

    1. Everything the cook serves must be TASTED.
    2. The one who provides dinner must be THANKED.
    3. If you want it different, do it YOURSELF.

    The first two principles are essential to civilization.  The laws of hospitality are older than Abraham. Flaunt them at your peril.  The third undergirds a free society.

    So persevere.  One day you’ll reap the rewards of having trained your children in good habits.  When you feel yourself flagging, just take a look around at the consequences of giving up.  Habits of self-control and principle go far beyond food choices.  Children who’ve learned that food consumption is not an act of self-worship will later be able to put other forms of consumption into context.  Habits acquired in childhood are difficult to break.

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  • Communicate Artfully

    As often as anything important is to be done in the monastery, the abbot shall call the whole community together and himself explain what the business is; and after hearing the advice of the brothers, let him ponder it and follow what he judges the wiser course.  The reason why we have said all should be called for counsel is that the Lord often reveals what is better to the younger. (Rule of St. Benedict 3. 1-3)

    You have a dream of a regular dinner time.  The whole family gathers together and discusses all sorts of interesting things.  Children express their opinions freely but respectfully.  The assertive ones voluntarily fall silent and listen as the less cogent ones share their thoughts.  Lively debate ensues and does not degenerate into a ping pong of opposing assertions.  No one goes off on a rant.  You pay attention to them all and praise each one for saying something sensible or insightful.  Your spouse asks for your opinion.  You arrive together at a decision that takes everyone’s wishes into account and that all adhere to with good humor.

    And then you wake up and realize you’re still in the madhouse.  Some of them don’t speak at all: they just scream and scream at the precise pitch to unravel all your nerves.  They can’t understand anything you say, and they want it all now.  They stick their fingers into electric pencil sharpeners and throw themselves in front of moving vehicles and spread five pounds of flour across the kitchen floor daily.

    When you’ve wrestled away the paring knives clenched in each small fist and extinguished the flames from the cardboard waffle box set on “toast” in your oven, you may feel that your own mind is teetering on the brink.  The teaspoons seem to be disappearing, but you’re afraid to tell anyone, because it sounds–well, crazy.  When you catch your son stashing them in the air vent, you’re so relieved not to be insane after all that you don’t even mind the pilfering he’s been doing.

    Your only chance is to outwit them. You must become cunning. Offer them two choices, either one of which is acceptable to you, and let them decide. Guess what they’re going to do next and get there first. If it can cross your mind–no matter how bizarre a thought it is–it can cross their minds too, but they will actually do it.

    It’s easier to redirect them than to halt their motion. So when you forbid them one action, make sure to tell them what they are allowed to do instead. They can be happy for thirty minutes just running around in circles. After all, they don’t need good reasons, do they? They just need suggestions that channel their impulses in a way you can live with.

    Negotiate. If it’s terribly important to them but just a matter of preference for you, let them have their way. Save your energy for the essential things.

    And take the time to communicate with your spouse. Just because you had a hard day doesn’t mean the other person had it easy.  There are wrong times for dumping a to-do list on the other working adult in the household:

    1) Before your spouse is even out of bed in the morning.

    2) After the lights are off at night.

    3) As soon as your spouse walks through the front door.

    4) When he or she is in the middle of getting a necessary task done.

    Beware of DDS (Domestic Drone Syndrome): when you can’t remember the last time you said anything to your spouse that didn’t involve a chore.  Try a heartfelt, positive comment once in a while. Watch Monty Python’s The Argument Clinic and laugh together.

    Most important: let’s try our best not to blame our spouses when things go wrong.  Life can be hard. Sometimes it’s scary too.  It’s not the fault of the person you married.

     

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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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