Browsing tag: saint

  • 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. (Rule of Saint Benedict. Prologue.3)

    St. Benedict is not the first to describe the Christian life as a spiritual battle. St. Paul talks about the armor and weapon of the Christian in his letter to the Ephesians.  It might seem a bit histrionic, though, for me to characterize life in domesticity as a spiritual battle. For that matter, the use of military language to describe the spiritual life of Christians has been generally out of favor for a long time. But there is a point where a struggle deserves to be called a fight.

    I certainly felt that a spiritual enemy was prevailing when my fourteen-year-old came home from Catholic high school and told me that her classmate’s sister had committed suicide. The classmate found her sister’s body, hanging by the neck in her closet. In a bid for comfort, the classmate decided to have sex with her boyfriend. Then he dumped her. Then she left the school. The bleakness and wrongness of that series of events does demand some response, some mobilization of effort, some marshalling of troops, so to speak.

    Transferring my daughter to a different Catholic high school yielded better academics and more resources, but no escape from brutality. There a sixteen-year-old shared publicly that her boyfriend sent her to the emergency room with a perforated vagina. The parents of the boyfriend see no evil, hear no evil, where their progeny is concerned. Nothing is wrong, and no one is bad. This indifference too strikes me as a spiritual rout, a defeat not merely at an individual level, although it’s individuals who sustain the wounds. If nice people are loveless, are they Catholic?

    You can say the Lord’s Prayer over and over, “Thy will be done,” but a call to “obedience” is a socially risky teaching to espouse. It sounds strange, in a culture where we’re constantly being told to break all boundaries, emancipate ourselves, be free, and so on. Obeying the revealed commands of God is hard enough if you accept, say, the Ten Commandments. Obeying the teachings of the Catholic Church may seem so wildly incompatible with survival that it doesn’t even bear considering. But if you’re going to live at all, you’ll be taking actions along certain principles, whether you’ve thought about them yourself or are just doing what everyone else seems to be doing. In fact, you will be following someone or something, whether or not you call it obedience.

     

    The call to follow Christ is a call to obey a Person. Christians are supposed to be able to know what Christ wants through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The accumulated revelation of the Church over two millennia is supposed to help us individually understand how to live this life. But whether we understand how or not, we’re still here and doing something. It would be helpful to have some templates that correspond to situations that ordinary people face today. Can you call this obedience to God? I hope so.

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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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