May 17, 2004

Profanity:The Failure to see the Divine Mystery

I bow again to my mentor and friend Elisabeth Elliot Gren for this masterful essay on women, marriage and the home. I was only going to lift out on paragraph to deal with the subject I was writing about but I found that it might not make sense out of context, even though I was going to talk about the weddings taking place today in Massachusetts. There is still meat here for the chewing even though this was written about 1975...And on a little different topic. The profound changes in our culture then are being matched today by changes in how we relate to each other and how we view our deepest relationships.

On Motherhood and Profanity


"OK now, which one of you clowns put that bag of M 'n' Ms in the grocery cart?" The mother looks harried.

Two boys, maybe five and seven, eye each other and race away toward the gumball machine near the supermarket door. There is an infant strapped to a plastic board on top of the groceries, and a two year old occupying the built-in child seat in the cart. The mother picks up the M 'n' M candy bag and starts toward the aisle to return it. The two year old screams and she relents, throws the bag in with the rest of her purchases, patiently waits her turn at the check-out, fishes five ten-dollar bills from her purse, receives her small change, and pushing the cart with the babies in it, herds the two boys through the rain to the station wagon in the parking lot.

I go with her in my mind's eye. Jump out in the rain. Open the garage door. Drive in. Close door. Babies, boys, bags into the house in how many trips? Phone rings. Answer phone, change baby, wipe muddy tracks from kitchen floor. Feed baby, put groceries away, hide M 'n' Ms, start peeling vegetables, take clothes out of dryer, stop fight between two older children, feed two year old, answer phone again, fold clothes, change baby, get boys to:
1) hang up coats,
2) stop teasing two year old,
3) set table.
Light oven, put baby to bed, stop fight, mop up two year old, put chicken in oven, answer phone, put away clothes, finish peeling vegetables, look peaceful and radiant--husband will be home soon.

I see this implacable succession of exigencies in my mind's eye. They come with being a mother. I also see the dreams she dreams sometimes--write a novel, agents call, reviews come in. TV interviews, autograph parties, promotional traveling, a movie contract--preposterous dreams. Try something a little more realistic. Cool modern office, beautiful clothes, make-up and hairdo that stay done all day. A secretarial job perhaps, nothing spectacular, but it's work that actually produces something that doesn't have to be done over at once. It's work that ends at five o'clock. It means something.

I know how it is. I have a mother. I am a mother. I've produced a mother (my daughter, Valerie, has a two year old and expects another child soon). I watched my own mother cope valiantly and efficiently with a brood of six. ("If one child takes all your time," she used to say, "six can't take any more.") We were--we still are--her life. I understand that. Of all the gifts of my life surely those of being somebody's wife and somebody's mother are among the greatest.

But I watch my daughter and other mothers of her generation and I see they have some strikes against them that we didn't have. They have been told insistently and quite persuasively that motherhood is a drag, that tradition is nonsense, that what people have always regarded as "women's work" is meaningless, that "roles" (a word we never bothered much about until a decade or so ago) are changing, that femininity is a mere matter of social conditioning, that it's time to innovate. If the first-grade readers show a picture of a woman driving a hook-and-ladder and a man doing a nurse's job, see what happens to the conditioning. Abolish the stereotypes and we can abolish the myths of masculinity and femininity.

I hear this sort of claptrap, and young mothers often come to me troubled because they can't answer the arguments logically or theologically. They feel, deep in their bones, that there is something terribly twisted about the whole thing but they can't put their finger on what it is.

I think I know what it is. Profanity. Not swearing. I'm not talking about breaking the Third Commandment. I'm talking about treating as meaningless that which is freighted with meaning. Treating as common that which is hallowed. Regarding as a mere triviality what is really a divine design. Profanity is failure to see the inner mystery.

When women--sometimes well-meaning, earnest, truth seeking ones say "Get out of the house and do something creative, find something meaningful, something with more direct access to reality," it is a dead giveaway that they have missed the deepest definition of creation, of meaning, of reality. And when you start seeing the world as opaque, that is, as an end in itself instead of as transparent, when you ignore the Other World where this one ultimately finds its meaning, of course housekeeping (and any other kind of work if you do it long enough) becomes tedious and empty.

But what have buying groceries, changing diapers and peeling vegetables got to do with creativity? Aren't those the very things that keep us from it? Isn't it that kind of drudgery that keeps us in bondage? It's insipid and confining, it's what one conspicuous feminist called "a life of idiotic ritual, full of forebodings and failure." To her I would answer ritual, yes. Idiotic, no, not to the Christian--for although we do the same things anybody else does, and we do them over and over in the same way, the ordinary transactions of everyday life are the very means of transfiguration. It is the common stuff of this world which, because of the Word's having been "made flesh," is shot through with meaning, with charity, with the glory of God.

But this is what we so easily forget. Men as well as women have listened to those quasi-rational claims, have failed to see the fatal fallacy, and have capitulated. Words like personhood, liberation, fulfillment and equality have had a convincing ring and we have not questioned their popular definitions or turned on them the searchlight of Scripture or even of our common sense. We have meekly agreed that the kitchen sink is an obstacle instead of an altar, and we have obediently carried on our shoulders the chips these reductionists have told us to carry.

This is what I mean by profanity. We have forgotten the mystery, the dimension of glory. It was Mary herself who showed it to us so plainly. By the offering up of her physical body to become the God-bearer, she transfigured for all mothers, for all time, the meaning of motherhood. She cradled, fed and bathed her baby--who was very God of very God--so that when we cradle, feed and bathe ours we may see beyond that simple task to the God who in love and humility "dwelt among us and we beheld his glory."

Those who focus only on the drabness of the supermarket, or on the onions or the diapers themselves, haven't an inkling of the mystery that is at stake here, the mystery revealed in the birth of that Baby and consummated on the Cross: my life for yours.

The routines of housework and of mothering may be seen as a kind of death, and it is appropriate that they should be, for they offer the chance, day after day, to lay down one's life for others. Then they are no longer routines. By being done with love and offered up to God with praise, they are thereby hallowed as the vessels of the tabernacle were hallowed--not because they were different from other vessels in quality or function, but because they were offered to God. A mother's part in sustaining the life of her children and making it pleasant and comfortable is no triviality. It calls for self-sacrifice and humility, but it is the route, as was the humiliation of Jesus, to glory.

To modern mothers I would say "Let Christ himself be your example as to what your attitude should be. For he, who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his prerogatives as God's equal, but stripped himself of all privilege by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born as a mortal man. And, having become man, he humbled himself by living a life of utter obedience, even to the extent of dying, and the death he died was the death of a common criminal. That is why God has now lifted him so high. . ." (Phil. 2:5-11 Phillips).

It is a spiritual principle as far removed from what the world tells us as heaven is removed from hell: If you are willing to lose your life, you'll find it. It is the principle expressed by John Keble in 1822:

If on our daily course our mind
Be set to hallow all we find,
New treasures still, of countless price,
God will provide for sacrifice.

Today, in churches, townhalls and and backyards, gay couples are "getting married" they are entering a legal contract to be "spouses for life." Good for them. Im glad that they are happy. Im glad that they get the rights that I think everyone married or single should get in this country...

We have had a law on the books here in Hawaii for a long time that gives anyone the right to contractually join with anyone else and have the same legal benefits as "marriage" provides. Under the Reciprocal Beneficiaries Law, passed in July 1997, the state of Hawaii offers domestic partnership benefits to employees. The legislation gives same-sex couples the broadest package of rights and benefits ever accorded gay families in the United States. It would also allow me to give my brother or a friend the right to a "community property" style legal relationship, so that estate taxes can be lessened. It would allow me to place my mother or a roommate of any gender on my healthcare plan at work. I would just have to pay for it.

Marriage was never meant to be a diseminator of social benefits, or a means test for preferential treatment by governments, agencies or the church. We have profaned the sacred by doing so. Its not something you can just choose to do. If it was, many of us that longed as single people to get married would have...It falls between race and childbearing...Yes, unlike race, which you have no choice over, you can choose to not be married. Yes, some people cant have children naturally, but you can go out and adopt one and that child may not have a say in that choice. Marriage is a different thing, You can want it with all of your being, but if you are not asked, or if you are not acceptable to the asked, you cant be married. So why do we tie benefits to it? That is discrimination of the highest order.

Who created marriage? God did. In Genesis 2 we read:
"and God took the rib which He had taken from the man and made the woman out of it and brought her to the man who said..."This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman for she was taken out of man." There fore a man shall leave his father and his mother and he shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh."

God took two opposites and made them one. Like the opposing poles of magnetism, the opposite draw toward each other. It is the deepest emotional tie you can have. I can tell you that this doesn't happen in the same way in homosexual relationships. It isn't conditioning or society, its the fact that you are two similar people trying to be together. Its not the same, as much as we want to try. The relationship is different than that of a man and a woman... This is hard to explain... Its like the Greek myth of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection in the pool. You are striving to complete yourself with your own image rather than the opposing image of the opposite gender. I am not saying that you cant love someone deeply who is your gender (I have) or that you cant live with someone that is of your gender, what I am saying is that the mystery of the two becoming one was reserved by God for the man and the woman. It is the energy that builds families and nations, and it is more needed today than ever.

This is not the ranting of a Born again fanatic who doesn't understand how it is to be gay. The greatest love of my life was, perhaps is, is the better term, a gay man. I watched him try to transition into the straight life and while I have known many, many people that have done this, he was not successful. It was tragic for him and for me, but we both knew that it was best to go our separate ways and not strive for what couldn't be. I found myself in love with a woman I had met and traveled with. Nothing sexual went on but the experience allowed me to see that these relationships can be very intense and provocative. In the long run it was futility, I knew that and prayed it through to burnout. She never knew...

We profane marriage by demanding more of it than God intended. We cheapen it by using it as a social welfare tool. It is a social/spiritual contract that was meant to benefit and nurture two people and their children.

It is Profanity to scream at these people who want what everyone else seems to have, and it profanity to go against the Word of God and encourage these people to commit the sins of sex outside of God's plan. I believe that giving out marriage licenses to everyone is likely the legal thing to do under the circumstances, but all the paper on the planet and all the "I Do's" said wont change the fact that the only marriages that count are the ones that God has ordained and blessed. Sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman according to the Bible is a sin. God will not bless such a union. Its sad but true. By saying the opposite we are speaking profanity.

May God help us all.