The Family - University, Monastery, Kingdom

Mont Saint-Michel

Everybody knows what a family is, right?  After all, we have all come from a family and we all belong to one, in some manner.  A family is "people who live together."  That, at least, is the way that we are programmed to think of family.  Of course, this has led to so many of the issues that we find in contemporary society today.  I am not especially interested in engaging in an apologetics here.  The relevant contemporary issues should be pretty obvious, however, and keep them in mind (and please feel free to comment below).

Despite the fact that the family is something distinct, primordial  and fundamentally relevant to each one of us as human persons, we really do not know what it is.  This is unsettling and startling. I think there are two reason for this lack of a straightforward definition.  First, the family is mysterious because it is so rich and deep.  An inquiry into its depths is irretrievable.  Obviously, this is good.  However, there is another reason as well: modernity has cloaked the essence of what a family has traditionally been understood to be.  It has to.  It has no choice.  It could not function otherwise.  It would perish if the familial was re-realized.  Naturally, this is also to say that the family and thinking attentively about the family is revolutionary: a revolution back to nature and truth.

This reason, by the way, is why I am not interested in addressing apologetics here.  The problem comes before contemporary issues.  Today's issues are merely symptomatic of the deeper tension.

So then, what is a family?

The family is a university.  It is more of a university, in fact, than most "universities" out there.  Indeed, it should be the family which informs the universities of today.  The family is a true whole, composed of persons who are dedicated to knowing what is True, Good and Beautiful, together as a community.  In order to celebrate our families, we must take this task seriously.  This is why it is so important that we read to our children, that we read together as spouses.  We should also take on family projects together.  Aside from ensuring that our families have a liturgical topography to their year, we should also seek to build and grow together.  We should seek to learn a language together, study music, history, art etc.  Imagine each Sunday all listening to a period of music together, moving from period to period each week, following the history of music as a family.  Each member of the family would participate in their own appropriate way: the baby would listen, the children could talk about their experience of the music and the adults could make their own suitable contributions.  Of course, you could do this with any subject.  This would not be homeschooling, per se.  This would be living a rich communal life together, regardless of the children's ages or schooling arrangements.

The family is monastic.  In the same way that the university should stem from the family, it is the structure of the  family which should (and does) inform the monastic life.  This may seem odd.  The word "monasticism" actually implies solitude, after all, a singular experience of transcendence. And yet this experience always takes place...in community. Genuine personhood is discovered in community.  The familial structure is the most basic example of personhood realized in community. This is why the family is the best analogy, one frequently used by the Fathers of the Church, for the Trinity.  Needless to say, the family needs to pray together (I would actually stress the importance of the Liturgy of the Hours as a top priority in this regard over even the Rosary, so do both).  On a larger scope, it is the responsibility of the family to follow the contours of the liturgical year.  This is not just church business, that we celebrate and are reminded of when we go to Mass.  Our families must be saturated by the liturgy in an organic manner.  We must eat, speak, act according to this Reality.  In the Middle Ages, people contemplated how the Christian should walk...we should have this same attitude.

The family is a kingdom.  Perhaps this truth of the family is most frequently forgotten.  We live in a culture without kings.  We may even have difficulty distinguishing between king and tyrant, though they are true opposites.  Meanwhile, we have high expectations of our fathers and husbands, though our expectations are utterly undefined and vague.  Fathers and husbands, by vocation, imitate Christ the King.  They must be kingly.  Wives and Mothers are queens and are called to possess all of the strength and grace that that position entails.  The family is political.  It is the fundamental political unit.  As such, it has a political sovereignty that must be protected and a political responsibility to the rest of culture and society.

Our families are the antidote to the society in which we live.  We will never overcome the enemy or prevail in our battles that we face in this culture as individuals.  Even before ourselves, we must look to our community, which, in a radical way, begins with our families.

Land and Liturgy

Anyone who has followed this blog since we started back in November can probably tell that we are interested in getting "back to the earth." Although we're not currently in a place where we can truly live the agrarian life, it is a family aspiration that we pray will be fulfilled someday. We often find ourselves longing for the day when we can truly immerse ourselves in the earth and face the challenges and joys that it will bring.

In the meantime, we have plenty of things to learn that don't require a plot of land. We have already begun to discover the joy that comes from working as a family. Even simple activities like brewing beer, baking bread and canning have already drawn us closer to one another and enriched our spiritual life. To my mind, this is where the old dichotomy between soul and body begins to fall apart. The soul of our family is enlivened by these earthy, bodily activities. It is a new way of discovering Christ, of encountering His presence in day-to-day life.

As expressed in this great blog post by D. Rose, however, the desire to live the agrarian life and do "old fashioned" things isn't simply an attempt to step back in time. What is attractive about the agrarian life isn't only its deep connection with the land and bygone days. To my mind, one of the things that makes the agrarian life most attractive is its connection to the Catholic liturgical year. In our fast-paced society, rife with deadlines, networking and constant communication, it can be so difficult to establish any kind of rhythm. What I notice about the lives of men and women of old is that their lives were regulated by liturgy, and that the liturgy was, more frequently than not, in dialogue with the seasons. The liturgy was not a detached "issue" that one could converse and read about. It was not just something that happened on Sundays and Holy Days. The liturgy informed each and every day of the year. To be "in season" was not simply a statement of fashion; rather, the seasons were seen as themselves liturgical.

To put it more clearly, living the agrarian life seems to provide at least some protection against the  "formlessness" of modern living, as  A. Ellison of Catholic Phoenix puts it so perfectly. To live in accordance with the cycles of the seasons, in a strange combination of self-sufficiency as well as absolute dependence on the yield of earth and sky...what could be more opposed to the open-ended, "on demand," anything-goes metronome that is, so often, modern life? And would this not be more conducive to submission to Providence than the illusion of endless creativity?

To that end, we're happy to enter into the newest rhythm of the liturgical season:

Yes, Carnival!! (But no, not that kind of carnival. The term actually derives from the Latin, "Carne--vale!", or "Meat---farewell!") This "unofficial season" is perhaps more tied to the flesh than to the land. As noted at Fish Eaters, during carnival " Catholics want to eat while they can and get the frivolity out of their systems in preparation for the somber Lenten spirit to come." The carnival season begins after the feast of the Epiphany and continues until Shrove Tuesday, or the day before Ash Wednesday (otherwise known as "Mardi Gras"). During this time, the Church calls her members to celebrate with dancing, social events, and of course, good food and drink. 

Naturally, as noted at New Advent, "It is intelligible enough that before a long period of deprivations human nature should allow itself some exceptional licence in the way of frolic and good cheer. No appeal to vague and often inconsistent traces of earlier pagan customs seems needed to explain the general observance of a carnival celebration." Apparently the Italians were especially prone to carnival excesses, so much so that Pope Benedict XIV instituted a plenary indulgence for anyone in the Papal States who took part in the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament for three days during carnival season. As for our family, we plan to enjoy a lot of hearty beef stews, expand our knowledge of cheese and, of course, continue to enjoy our Christmas brew (which is still a little green, but hopefully it will finish up before Lent begins!) 

Happy Carnival everyone!

"She Seeks Wool and Flax, and Works With Willing Hands"

“Kristina packed her wool cards, her knitting needles, sheep shears and her swingle, a betrothal gift from Karl Oskar, who had painted red flowers on it. A great deal she left because it would take up too much ship space, things she knew she would need later. She could not take her loom or her flax brake, her spinning-wheel or her yarn winder, her spooling wheel or her flax comb. She had been accustomed to working with all these implements; they were intimate and familiar to her hands; she knew that she would miss them in the foreign land.”

I can’t help using this blog post to spread the word about some of my new favorite novels by Vilhelm Moberg. The novels depict the immigration of a group of Swedish peasants to the new land. I found the books absolutely enthralling, though also heartbreaking. The novels take place only a century ago, which is almost unbelievable when you consider the use of technology in the story compared to our technology today. As an example, consider the passage above. Domestic activities like knitting, crocheting etc. are often thought to be  difficult and troublesome. And yet not only does Kristina, the wife of main character Karl Oskar, knit and weave the family’s clothing, but she also makes the yarn with her own hands. And she longs for her tools and the labor of her hands when she must part with them to cross the ocean and start a new life.

When I read books like this I long for that simplicity, that intimacy between the hand and the tool. And yet I am so lazy and easily intimidated. Case in point:  Last Christmas, my husband’s family gave me a drop spindle and several bundles of roving to be made into yarn for knitting. I was thrilled and touched by this gift, but I will admit that I was also intimidated. Never mind that women have been spinning for centuries. 

Fortunately, the Good Lord has a way of making things more accessible to little me. A few months ago (yes, almost a year after I received the spindle and roving), while at the downtown Open Air market, my husband sent me to sample the bloody Mary mix on the other side of the market. Thank goodness he did. Not only was the bloody Mary mix delicious, but on the way, I also happened to stumble (literally, in fact) upon a booth with homespun yarn, as well as other goodies like homemade goat cheese and goatmilk soaps. I glimpsed a drop spindle behind the counter and inquired immediately. Turned out, the woman who ran the booth was starting a spinning class in three weeks! Not only was she going to instruct the students in two types of spinning, but she was also demonstrating how to wash, card and hand-dye wool with natural plant dyes. I was beyond excited and signed up the next day.  I completed the class in October and am so grateful I took it.

In the meantime, you might wonder: what does this have to do with the Forgotten Altars project? There are a few reasons. Firstly, spinning is a meditative art. I’ve noticed that some activities (making bread, gardening, brewing, and even cleaning) are noticeably conducive to prayer. They make me want to pray and put me in a posture of openness, much like what I seek to achieve during contemplative prayer. Spinning may top the list when it comes to work that inspires prayer. The monastic “ora et labora” is particularly easy to achieve while spinning. 

Second, spinning is a feminine art that connects us to our ancestors. I once took pride in the fact that I didn't do anything "domestic," including cooking, sewing, crafting or anything of the sort. To do so would be old-fashioned and backwards. I think this mentality is common. Ironically, as women gain access more and more to the things that men do, they lose touch with what were once considered to be the feminine arts. Not just arts and crafts, but true art, techne. Women used to work with their hands. We lucky housewives of today have ready-made clothes and Clorox wipes that are pre-soaked in sanitizing solution for easy cleaning. These conveniences certainly make life easier, and I won't say that I don't use them myself. But at times I actually wish that I had the pressure these women had to truly be the matron of the household. To truly clothe my own children--not just by purchasing their clothes, but by spinning the very fabric with my own hands. When I am spinning, I feel a sense of kinship with women of past ages. 

 

And, on a practical level, spinning is the perfect activity for a busy housewife with little ones. It is meditative, simple and so enjoyable.  Children can do it too—my three-year-old is halfway there! In coming weeks, I will provide a few posts with more specifics on the process. In the meantime, here is a collection of a few artworks that depict women spinning.

Labor in the City, France, 15th century (A depiction of Aristotle's polis)

St. Margaret and Olibrius; 1450

Woman With a Spindle; Antoine Watteau

And one of my personal favorites...

The Child Mary Spinning; 17th century Peruvian

The Family As Icon

A few years ago I remember hearing a homily about the Holy Family. Rather than addressing the beautiful strangeness of the iconic family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the primary emphasis was on their normality. "They were just a normal family, just like you and me," or something along those lines. Yes, just like us, the members of the Holy Family were only human.


I remember being a bit puzzled by this homily. Yes, it's true that the Holy Family was composed of human beings, just like any other human family. But were they really normal? Were they typical? My suspicion is that they were anything but. After all, both parents were visited by angelic beings on several occasions. And although their son was fully human, He was also fully...divine. So why emphasize the normality of this truly exceptional family?

In his 1994 "Letter to Families," Pope John Paul II expresses what I think, to a certain extent, is at risk in  this treatment of the Holy Family. He says:

"Unfortunately various programmes backed by very powerful resources nowadays seem to aim at the breakdown of the family. At times it appears that concerted efforts are being made to present as "normal" and attractive, and even to glamourize, situations which are in fact "irregular". Indeed, they contradict "the truth and love" which should inspire and guide relationships between men and women, thus causing tensions and divisions in families, with grave consequences particularly for children. The moral conscience becomes darkened; what is true, good and beautiful is deformed; and freedom is replaced by what is actually enslavement."

What struck me as dangerous about the assertion that the Holy Family was "normal" was that the modern definition of the normal family has been dramatically altered. As Blessed John Paul II states, irregularity is now considered the norm. Just watch a few modern sitcoms and it's obvious. Although family situations like same-gender parents are obviously irregular from a Catholic perspective, they aren't necessarily considered to be out of place from a secular standpoint. In fact, a refusal to tolerate these arrangements and label them as acceptable may be one of the few modern vices, or to put it less "religiously," weaknesses.

What is even more frightening about this change is what Blessed John Paul II refers to in his homily: that is, that "what is true, good and beautiful is deformed..." The irregular instances that demonstrate the breakdown of the family are considered not only to be acceptable, but also desirable and attractive. Truly happy families are looked down upon with scorn.  After all, any family who seems that happy must have some dark, deep secret, right? We are unable to accept the beautiful as it is. We delight more in the twisted perversions that lie beneath the appearance of beauty. Horror movies wouldn't be nearly as popular if this weren't the case.

The tendency to shrink away from beauty and perfection in the religious sense manifests itself in more subtle ways, too. I, for one, feel enormous peer pressure to present my family as normal. Ask anything else of your family and you'll probably be called pretentious or snobbish. Catholics in particular must be on guard against this mindset. After all, are we not called to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect? Here's a story to illustrate my point. My husband and I chose a little-known Scots Gaelic name for our firstborn daughter. Although her name does have symbolic significance, she is not named after a canonized saint. When Catholics ask if there is a saint with the same name, my husband will often reply, "Not yet." The first time he said this, the questioner (who also happened to be a Catholic) was absolutely horrified. After all, he said, who are we to hope that our children will one day be saints?

And yet isn't that what we should hope for them? To be saints, to be the intimate friends of God, is what should define the family. It is what should motivate all our actions, words and thoughts. The Holy Family was, after all, "only human." But this does not simply normalize sanctity; rather, it elevates our humanity. This elevation is a calling, something to which we as families must respond. In a perfect world--in the New Creation--the Holy Family is, indeed, the norm. Until then, we less-than-holy families should strive not for normality, but for radical difference...yes, for perfection.

Castrating the Holy Innocents

A new sort of news has become startlingly frequent in the media during the days surrounding Christmas. Specialists: psychologists, psychiatrists, analysts, therapists, journalists (who seem to be able to assimilate all of the aforementioned areas of expertise), and all other -ists, have gathered together in a grand alliance and their message is brave.  It is certainly new.  Well sort of.  At least it is worldly.

It seems (certainly unbeknownest to ourselves, but really only because of how we have been educated) that parents are the single greatest threat to their children's freedom.  The Ists concur: it is a scientific fact.  For instance, and most relevant to recent media enlightenments, parents are the primary historical cause for the continuation of the last great social myths: gender roles.


Yes, ladies and gentlemen, according to media reports, we parents have treated our boys and girls like... well...boys and girls.  Yes, it sounds absurd when you put it like that. But to suggest that the Ists are just that--evidently absurd--cannot be fair.  Right?  Hm.

Perhaps the problem is in our language!  Perhaps if our ancestors had been as enlightened as our Journalists they would have never developed the words "boy" and "girl" to begin with.  So here then is the charge of the Ists:  we parents have been treating some of our Its like boys and then some of our Its like girls.  Now that sounds much less absurd.

We have been cookie cutting our Its into the form of our own inherited traditional, cultural outdated social norms.  But this is not fair to the Its!  This will cause suppression and/or depression.  The Its should be allowed to be free, to freely choose their own identity.  We do not want them to find themselves, we want them to create themselves.

The assumption here of course is that life is not a gift, with inherent purpose and meaning.  Freedom is not the ability to pursue one's purpose.  Life is a void and to be free is to be unformed within that void.

The assumption is that bodies are meaningless.   Our children's bodies are meaningless.  Their bodies are disconnected from themselves, identities which must be thought of as some dislocated ego floating in a void.

Of course I am then left with a question: according to this brave new line of thinking, how can we as parents protect our Its' freedom?

Clearly, we do not want them to receive any sort of  outside influence (it is never the case that a lack of influence is itself influential on a child's development).  This would immediately impede upon their freedom.  We would never want to engender them with our own "values", convictions, beliefs, customs, traditions (which of course were not themselves ultimately given to us but which our ancestors created out of thin air), etc.  We must always speak vaguely and non-objectively when the Its are present.

We should also hide their genitalia from them.  It is simply too dangerous to their freedom for them to ever come into contact with sexual difference.  They might, once they noticed this difference, develop words to distinguish these differences, like "womanhood" or "manhood."  They might think, since children often innocently believe that things have purposes (idiots), that this difference actually meant something and that they were called to respond to this meaning.

If they noticed such a seeming contradiction between their bodies and what we told them, they might think that we were trying to hide this meaning from them, that we were trying to force them into a matrix of genderless sterility, that we were trying to take their bodies away from them, that we were depriving them of purpose, that they were left without meaning and feel pressured to generate new and strange identities to compensate for this deprivation.  They might believe that they now lived in a totalitarian regime.

Another Forgotten Fast

Yes, I know, feast days with edible eyeballs and churches made out of bones may be more exciting than fast days. But it's amazing to me that an ancient fast that was traditionally observed several times throughout the year has been all but wiped out in contemporary Catholicism. The traditional observance of Ember Days is a beautiful custom that I had never even heard of until very recently (as in last week).

As noted in this great post over at the New Liturgical Movement's blog, the Ember Days fast dates back to New Testament times. Like many feasts and fasts, Ember Days was originally intended as a tribute to the bounty of the Earth and the cycles of the seasons. They were traditionally held in the winter, spring, summer and autumn months. The winter Ember Days fall on the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday following the feast of Saint Lucy (December 13). The fasts repeat in Lent, after Pentecost and in September. As noted in the great text, "The Golden Legend," a bestseller of the medieval period that dates back to 1275:

"Then let us fast in March which is printemps for to repress the heat of the flesh boiling, and to quench luxury or to temper it. In summer we ought to fast to the end that we chastise the burning and ardour of avarice. In harvest for to repress the drought of pride, and in winter for to chastise the coldness of untruth and of malice." 

The three fast days this week are also characterized by special devotions: thanksgiving on Wednesday, repentance from sin on Friday and charity on Saturday. Interestingly, for all those readers who are familiar with the temperaments, the winter fast is also meant to purify the phlegmatic tendency, which was believed to be especially dominant in the winter months. Again, Jacobus de Voraigne phrases it perhaps most appropriately: "In winter we fast for to daunt and to make feeble the phlegm of lightness and forgetting, for such is he that is phlegmatic."

Now that I know about this fast I've found that there's actually quite a bit of literature on it. In fact, I encountered a passage in Sigrid Undset's series "The Master of Hestviken" just the other day that refers to it: 

"Some days after, he had business that took him inland, and Eirik was to accompany him as far as the church; it was a Wednesday in the ember days, and Sira Hallbjorn [a priest] insisted that all who could should attend church in the ember days." 

For readers who don't know, the books take place in medieval Norway and are rife with Catholic imagery and themes. I was so excited to find this reference to the Ember Days. Isn't it amazing that what was once a commonplace custom is now virtually unknown?

Anyway, although there may not be special recipes to mark these fast days, we can observe them with prayerfulness and our own attempts at mortification (although the medievals certainly have us beat when it comes to that as well...but that's another post). After all, what fun is feasting without fasting?

The Family as a Work of Art

I was the first one up this morning (the girls always sleep in when it is cold).  Left to myself, I picked up Wendell Berry's book What are People For? that I had recently received from my parents as a birthday gift and had not yet had time to peruse.  This work is a collection of some of Mr. Berry's essays.  Wendell Berry is a Kentuckian farmer, who speaks here in reference to troubles on his farm:

It used to be that I could think of art as a refuge from such troubles.  From the imperfections of life, one could take refuge in the perfections of art.  One could read a good poem--or better, write one.  Art was what was truly permanent, therefore what truly mattered.  The rest was 'but a spume that plays/Upon a ghostly paradigm of things.'  I am no longer able to think that way.  That is because I now live in my subject.  My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place.  


We are accustomed to thinking of art as something that hangs in a museum, or sits reprinted on our bookshelves.  We indulge in art on occasion, but art has very little to do with our day to day lives.  Visiting a museum further contributes to the sense that these great artistic works exist proudly, without organic context, in a void, persisting timelessly.  And then there is life.  There are the stops and gos the ins and outs, real daily hectic modern life.  It may not be pretty but its real.

What if we changed our focus?  What if we made our families, our own natural circles, the location of art?  After all this is where all those significant pieces from the museum came from originally: homes, churches.  It is as though the existence of the museum stands to serve as a reminder that such beauty can no longer exist at home, at prayer.  These works must be protected from the ugliness of "real life."

I am not suggesting that we invest in a lot of artwork and proudly hang it in our homes, or even that we compose our own artwork and put it on the wall.  What I am suggesting is that we see our homes, our families as our lives' own work of art.  Like Berry we might then find that we live in our artistic subject and that our subject is our place in the world, a place of living.  Now this would be embracing vocation.