Mother's Day Is Coming
Also some stuff about the SBC and how hard it is to go to church on any day of the year.
Finished listening to Feminism Against Progress last night while slewing dirt and seeds around in my garden. It is a suitable book to read on the eve of Mother’s Day, which, if you live in the US, is just around the corner. Everyone I know loves Mother's Day, of course. It's the best day. Nothing is better than being a mother at this peculiar time in human history. Not only does one gain social status and almost universal approbation by the decision to have a child, but also, one’s life is instantly made much much much more practically easier by the addition of one or more helpless people.
It's very easy, for example, to run the gauntlet of a medical industrial complex that thinks that pregnancy is an illness. It’s lovely to raise children without very much social support. It’s brilliant to muscle babies and small children in and out of space-x car seats and to be always looking over your shoulder to see if someone is going to anonymously report you for being bad. And then, my favorite is to begin to worry about educating children at just the moment when the educational industrial complex decided to be, how shall I put it…dysfunctional. And to perseverate about the emotional and spiritual health of older children. To manage schedules. To discover, one morning, that you are the “executive” functioning brain of the entire household and that you also have to teach the children to drive. And then to stagger into the divine liturgy on some random Sunday in May and discover that it’s your “special day.” That the calendar has vouchsafed to you a couple of hours to sit there and contemplate all your failures and disappointments, all the things you thought you were going to do and didn’t. If you survive, I’ll be standing at the back to hand you a flower and congratulate you for being awesome.
It is any wonder, in this new, bright, practically dystopian age, that so many people--women in particular--are opting for the Meat Lego Gnostic option—Harrington's clever term for people who think that the body is infinitely malleable, and that a disembodied sort of life is much more worth living than the embodied kind. Why wouldn't you retreat away from the body? Why wouldn't you try your best to make your child not have to deal with any of the inconvenient and embarrassing parts of being a person?
So anyway, you should read the book, and we should all chat about it on Substack. Especially because I think we might dig out of it some extremely useful ways to critique the Church, which, on the whole, is doing its best, but is coping with all the same kinds of troubles as everyone else. What are we to do when we sit on our devices all week, scrolling and fretting? How can we possibly get along with each other on a Sunday morning? Each of us, isolated in her own house, struggling with her children, swimming against the tide? How can a day of embodied "rest" with a lot of people who are just as beset and troubled as she is even be a thing?
This week I saw one long thread (can't find it now) of a person who had been struggling along in a small church, and then the church decided, according to him, to make some foolish decisions, and he, as a result, is going to chuck it. It's too hard. And then there are these very discouraging numbers about the Southern Baptists., though this person seems to think all is not lost. It would be easy to crow, to complain that all Southern Baptists are literally Hitler, that they should be doing everything differently than they are, but that explanation ignores the more pressing reality that it is just very inconvenient to go to church. Inconvenient, and in many cases, emotionally and spiritually painful.
I love Harrington’s solution—to both stay where we are now and also to go back to 1450. We can use the technology we have, but also, we can decide not to participate in the destruction of the human person. I’m going to call this the Boersma-Harrington Option. It’s not just reenchanting the world. It’s taking all the stupid theological ideas that produced a fractured, immiserated world and dumping them in the Mariana trench where we don’t have to see them anymore.
The Harrington-Boersma Option, as I see it, would mean totally reorienting the idea of the body within the 3 Fold understanding of Christ’s Body—his actual human Body, the Eucharist, and the Church. It would mean jettisoning American “individuality” to such a degree that people in churches would make practical decisions that irrevocably bound them to each other. And, (not finally because I’m definitely going to think of more), it would mean actually sorting out the relationship between men and women.
And now, if you will excuse me, I have to go write down on a piece of paper everything that’s wrong with Beautiful Union—or at least a thousand words worth. Have a nice day!
There is a scene at the conclusion of the film “Fury” that has stayed with me. It’s about a US tank crew at the end WW2 in Germany. At one point the tank breaks down at a cross roads. A large battalion of SS fanatics is spotted a few miles away approaching the tank. The crossroads must be held. The commander of the tank makes the fateful decision to stay and fight. The crew want to run. The commander reminds them of their duty and calling. Against all odds they fight and die save the youngest member who lives to tell the story. This is us in the church today. Hold the cross roads where you are locally. Do the things Christians do. Live “as if” you are in the Kingdom because by Faith you are. Hold the crossroads. Stand firm. Stay connected to other faithful Christians.
Razor sharp. This is the content I'm here for. 👏🏻 Also, I'm feeling the need to read some Mary Harrington.