Very Members Incorporate: 7 Ways To Make Life More Congenial

My Talk from this Afternoon

If you follow me online you’ll know that last week my fridge died, which was a huge blessing because all the plastic drawers had broken and been duct taped back together, and because, when we first bought it, I was a fool and a knave and didn’t consider how the door of my kitchen ensuite bathroom—who doesn’t want a tiny loo in the middle of their food prep?—prevented the door of the fridge ever being fully opened.

Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash

You could open the fridge to get food, but you couldn’t open it wide enough to clean anything. None of the plastic drawers could be fully extricated and cleansed of the dirt associated with six children who don’t know how to right a container of yogurt that has fallen over and is gently oozing forth its contents. Every so often I would break my back and arms, working various long implements around to try to get encrusted junk off those once gleaming surfaces.

And this, it occurred to me, is a pretty good, though terrible metaphor of how technology, in particular, creates unreasonable expectations that set us at odds with ourselves, and which reverberates as a sort of spiritual malaise in a backward and disordered world.

Now, some of my faithful readers got into a tiff last week, because one of my favorite pastimes is to complain about technology. And the instigator of the controversy did have a point. The problem we humans have is not our gadgets, but that we hate God. Get rid of the idolatry, insisted Reepicheep, for that is his pseudonym, and everything will be peachy. And, for sure, that would be great. But one of the interesting things about technology is that it enables certain forms of idolatry that, if we could properly observe their subversive properties, we might more easily relinquish them, or at least consider their use. It might be possible for people, even women, to live happier more integrated lives than they are doing now.

The title of this time we have together is Ourselves, Our Souls, Our Bodies, which comes from that wonderful line in the Eucharistic Prayer, the point at which we try to apprehend how God could join our frail mortal bodies together into his glorified and eternal One.

“Because there is one bread,” says Paul, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”

We are atomized, alienated as we come forward, one by one, to receive the gift of his precious Body and Blood, and as we come, he binds us together in a spiritual unity that no one of us could possibly articulate in words, and yet, it is the substrata of our life together.

Like most women, the body part of the equation that is most uncomfortable for me is not that of Jesus, but my own, and not because of its materiality so much, but because of the spiritual world it is forced to inhabit.

The technological nature of life sets certain expectations before me that make the relationship between the world of my mind and the world of my body angular and frustrating.

We women have been around the spiritual block, so to speak, over the last century. Four different waves of feminism have tried to remediate the feminine condition by gradually destroying the family and the work that undergirded the family. We’ve traversed through wondering if women are even human, to the badlands of wondering if men are. We have tried every sort of morality, every sort of social structure, every manner of dress, every kitchen gadget, and a thousand kinds of parenting techniques.

And what are we left with, 150 years on? A broken fridge that promised to make me really productive in the kitchen and failed utterly.

Today I want to very briefly outline where we are and then offer one of my favorite literary and theological devices, the Listicle—seven ways to make the experience of being a man or a woman in these long purgatorial days before the return of our Lord a little bit more congenial.

Where Are We Going, and Why Are We in This Handbasket?

You remember that strange woman in Zechariah:

Then the angel who talked with me came forward and said to me, ‘Lift your eyes and see what this is that is going out.’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘This is the basket that is going out.’ And he said, ‘This is their iniquity in all the land.’ And behold, the leaden cover was lifted, and there was a woman sitting in the basket! And he said, ‘This is Wickedness.’ And he thrust her back into the basket, and thrust down the leaden weight on its opening. Then I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, two women coming forward! And the wind was in their wings. They had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between heaven and earth. Then I said to the angel who talked with me, ‘Where are they taking the basket?’ And he said to me, ‘To the land of Shinar, to build a house for it. And when this is prepared, they will set the basket down there on its base.’

In the era of covid I read a few books that gently reordered my assumptions about how our post post post modern world has been assembled. One of them I talk about all the time. It’s called Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington. Harrington locates the first transhumanist, cyborg adventure to be the widespread adoption of the pill. In a recent article, she summarized her own work:

For the first time, with the Pill, a medical technology was adopted not to restore normal physiological functions—specifically, female fertility—in the name of health, but to interrupt normal functions in the name of individual freedom. This inaugurated a radical transformation in our understanding of what a person is, in which embodied attributes once understood as irreducible givens—beginning with sex difference—have come to be seen as optional, and subject to individual choice and re engineering. Importantly, inasmuch as women have embraced this technologically enabled understanding of ourselves—in which female fertility is viewed as an option whose default setting is “off”—we have embraced our own fusion with technology as a precondition for participation in public life. Much of the mainstream social fabric in Western societies is downstream of such technologies. In other words: the default modern Western culture is already a cyborg one.

Many students of history have noticed, with chagrin, that in the 1930s the Lambeth Meeting convened by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang (I grokked it because I couldn’t remember), voted to allow the use of contraception in certain limited situations, which, of course, eventually came to include everyone all the time, a stratagem the Roman Catholics managed to avoid even in the aftermath of Vatican II. The use of the pill, even with Roman Catholic resistance, swept across the West and reordered the sexual and relational lives of men and women, and, in consequence, their spiritual ones as well.

In many ways, as Harrington and others observe, the pill allowed sex to be governed by market forces. The body, once a spiritually infused subject in relationship to other subjects, is now a malleable object, one whose identity, or essence, can be altered by use of surgery or the greatest source of authenticity, TikTok which is the logical consequence of the smartphone.

Harrington again:

“Smartphones proved to be the digital equivalent of the Pill: every bit as intimate, as seemingly indispensable, and as deeply implicated in everyday freedoms and commerce. And as with the Pill, the global transformation that has followed their normalisation has reshaped politics, culture, sex, family, and even consciousness itself. Most centrally, it has reshaped what we mean when we say “identity”. For possessing an always-on, networked, handheld device enables every user to turn away from the arbitrary, immediate, real-world features of our lives as the principal forces shaping “who we are”. Instead, it has grown increasingly possible to curate social groups based on interests and affinities, infinitely adjustable virtual “avatars”, and even erotic and romantic entanglements conducted partly or wholly in a dematerialised, digital realm.”

What this amounts to, for conservative women especially, is a certain kind of self-justification through social media. The competing poles of feminine identity, the sort of winged stork women dragging the woman in the basket to Shinar as fast as ever they can, admit no neutrality. The economics of sexuality results in dehumanizing porn, babies bought and paid for by men pretending to be women, and a scary demographic collapse.

Untethered from socially cohesive communion, women today preach to each other through stories and reels. One of my favorites is a Russian lady who married some oligarch or other and built a McMansion somewhere in the South. Her gospel is wealth. She films herself putting on makeup and arranging her extensive collection of designer clothes. Along the bottom of the screen scrolls little affirming messages like, “Our life becomes beautiful not because we are perfect. Beauty in life appears when you put Awareness into everything you come in contact with.”

Why do I always click? I want to know what will happen next. Where will she put her large fake tree? What kinds of berries will she feed her pug dog? I don’t want to look at my own chaos so I look at her happy serenity.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more people making TikToks today filled with spiritual messages about the self than there are people going to church. And I bet most of them are women. And many of them—a huge number, I don’t know how to think in math—produce so called ‘trad’ content.

Trad content, for me, illumines the great chasm that is fixed between two kinds of women today—those who want to do the anti-body feminism of the last century even harder, the ones who, on one hand saw on, even in supposed Christian circles, about “ethical” non-monogamy and “ethically” sourced porn and those, on the other hand, who are sick to death of wage labor who have to give their babies over to institutional child care, or who never get to have children at all because no man will commit to marriage, who long for a world they have never inhabited, the ordinary one where the body, mind, and soul are not “fixed” by technologies as though they are broken.

Ironically, much of the technology, in so far as it cleaves the soul and mind from the body and puts it on the screen, or into the app, ends up being a full measure of wickedness that millions of exploited men and women and even children bear, the heavy economic weight upon the lid of the basket admitting no light, no sanity, no order. The makers and apologists of these devices are carrying away the souls of women to Babel, that great and terrible tower that teeters in the sky.

But because we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of the Lord, Jesus, there is no reason not to take proactive steps to pry open the fridge, tear out its broken and ruined constructs, and return to something life-giving.

We can have nice things, I think, if we are willing to prefer the true Body over all the fake ones. Here is my listicle.

The Listicle

One—Ditch Egalitarianism

In fact, go ahead and admit that there is no such thing. Sociologists and social engineers often notice that women prefer an “even” playing field.

When little girls are arranging their games, they will spend hours jostling amongst themselves, trying to prevent any single one of them from gaining primacy. And yet, if any of you know any little girls, or the women they grow up into, you will know they are keenly aware of the social hierarchies that they constantly reinforce through “equality.” Men, in this, are more straightforward. A fight and everyone knows where they are. Women, though, often say one thing and do another.

And this is why you should never believe anyone who says they want equality. What they want, though they will not admit it even to themselves, is to dictate to other people how they ought to live their lives while pretending they’re not doing that.

I don’t want to betray my sex, but every time a woman tells me she is equal to her husband, I mutter to myself, ‘sure thing sugar,’ which is what the young lady says to me at my gym when I ask if I can stand in the red light machine. What the woman vaunting her equality is really saying is that she is the governing member of the household, either her own private one, or the household of faith.

The man, in this case, is not free to do much of consequence that she may disagree with. And, if that’s how you want to do it, fine, but why not tell the truth. Why not admit, like Jory Micah, that poor young person who flamed out so spectacularly, that you are actually the ‘head’ of the household.

The thing is, the man, even when he doesn’t want to be, is the ‘head’ of the house, ontologically, just as Christ is head over the church. He may be really bad at it. He may be dysfunctional and weak. He may be tyrannical. But nothing he, nor the members of his family, can say will ever undo this fact. If you don’t want to believe me or the Bible, just go read Edwin Friedman who brilliantly elucidates this obvious fact by means of Family Systems Theory. Wonderfully, though, for the man who is properly the head of his house, just as Christ is head of the church, the kind of life that is displayed to the outside will be precisely the generous one everyone longs for. It will appear to be a place of easy geniality, of shared work, of liberty of thought, of pleasure and joy.

And that is because role and function, important as they are, are second to the mysterious incorporation of the members together with each other. This is one of those awful tricks where to get the thing you want, you have to give up your rights to have it at all. What was it that Jesus said on that subject? I’m sure I can’t remember.

Two—Live Action Role Play Vernacular Gender

Along with deconstructing the myth of equality, it’s well past time to recover what Ivan Illich calls Vernacular Gender. In many ways, this is the most essential, and also, the most impossible task of our age. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of Vernacular Gender, which, ironically, according to Illich, doesn’t exist anymore, having been replaced with what he calls Economic Sex, essentially the concept is that, before industrialization, and still in some remote parts of the world, there existed a sort of “ambiguous complementarity.”

It wasn’t that we are all human in two sexes, male and female, which is how we like to talk about ourselves now, as *both* so preciously made in the image of God. Rather, Gender, for Illich, “implies a complementarity within the world that is fundamental and closes the world in on “us,” however and ambiguous and fragile this closure might be.”

“Gender,” he writes, ‘is vernacular. It is both tough and adaptable, as precarious and vulnerable, as vernacular speech. As happens with the latter, gender is obliterated by education and its existence is soon forgotten or even denied.”

As you can see, “gender” in this sense, isn’t a social construct the way people use the word now, but a soul incarnated in a particular cultural expression. The book is full of wonderful examples, but I’ll use one from my own life. Where I grew up, to be a woman meant to go and collect wood in the bush for the fire, carry it home on your head, and heat the bath for your husband. If you asked anyone, a long time ago, what is a “woman” they would say that a woman is the person who gathers the wood and heats the bath.

But along came a man who took his donkey and cart out into the bush and collected the wood for his wife and brought it back to the village. Was this right of him? As Westerners, we would all say so. But that is hubris, for we know nothing of the fragile ecosystem that produced that outward and visible sign of inward femininity.

Now, of course, it is all gone. A woman is a person who goes to school and gets a government job.

The sort of world where function, meaning, work, and kinship are so tightly bound together that it would take an anthropologist twenty years to untangle is unimaginable to us now. Our conceptions of sex are so deep they might take three whole blog posts to describe. Nevertheless, though we cannot understand or imagine it, I think we should try.

At the center is work. “What housework is now,” he writes, “women of old did not do. However, the modern woman finds it hard to believe that her ancestor did not have to work in a nether economy.

“Irrefutably, the new histories of housework describe the typical activity of the housewife as something unlike anything women have done outside industrial society, as something that cannot be suitably accounted for as just one more facet of the unreported economy, and as something the dogmatic categories of ‘social reproduction’ simply cannot meaningfully signify.” 48

He describes what it would have been like to cook an egg for breakfast in the world of vernacular gender as opposed to in the one of economic sex. Back in the day, your great grandmother hobbled out to her cow, like Hannah Neelman from Ballerina Farm, only without any cameras to witness her doing it, milked the cow, churned the butter, gathered some wood, took an egg from the coop, and cooked an egg.

Now, of course, you have to put gas in your car that came from Canada (is that where we get it?), drive in your car that was made somewhere else, go to the supermarket where eggs cost eighteen thousand dollars, drive it home, forget that you have no butter, and go back to the store. Illich again: “Unlike the production of goods and services, shadow work is performed by the consumer of commodities, specifically, the consuming household. I call shadow work any labor by which the consumer transforms a purchased commodity into a usable good.”

This kind of hidden economic system has rendered present-day housework—Illich was writing in the early 80s, “more lonely, more dull, more impersonal, and more time-polluting.”50 He describes it as a “new, muffled stress.”50 It is a world apart from the vernacular one where things were “homemade, homespun, home-grown, not destined for the marketplace.”68 “Gender,” he writes, “is something other and much more than sex. It bespeaks a social polarity that is fundamental and in no two places the same.” 68

And this, it seems to me, is precisely the place where the local church comes into view. We can’t escape the grind of economic sex, nor the tyranny of wage labor. But when we cross the threshold of God’s realm, there might be ways for local custom to develop, for the deep spiritually oriented roots of culture to take shape, first, so that no two churches look the same, and second, so that the work of men and women inside the Body materially and practically takes on the homespun feel of a pre-technological age.

It means having separate men’s and women’s spaces. It means letting some of the mysteries of humanity settle out without litigating them all the time. It means letting the altar guild ladies have their head and not messing with their domain. It means men’s retreats where you sing Raise a Glass to the King and complain about the obtuseness of your wives.

Three—Get an Education

Following closely upon that point, I cannot help but lament the condition of the theological education of women in the Body of Christ. One reason we don’t even possess a vestigial memory of Vernacular Gender is because we don’t read the Bible with any particular curiosity. It has been to the detriment of the church that women have largely been siloed into sex-specific Bible study groups that don’t illumine and reveal the mysteries of the scriptures.

No one—at least not anyone that I know—is not going to educate their daughters in this cyborg age. We don’t have the luxury of deciding not to equip our girls to function in the age of AI. Do we want them all to get married and occupy themselves comfortably at home? That would be lovely, but they also have to earn a living of some kind.

And as they do, their education in the scriptures has to be hefty enough to ground them in biological reality. Infantilizing the women didn’t work, and neither did infantilizing the men. If there is any equality, it should be in catechesis, in going deep into the scriptures and finding God is sufficient for the needs of the person.

In fact, I would locate the leftward drift of many churches, and the women in them, to Biblical malnourishment. Women’s needs to be fed by the scriptures and the Eucharist were not taken seriously enough, and so, starving, they went online and to conferences and found other kinds of food. If you find a group of dissatisfied, fomenting women who are suddenly very interested in talking about the role and position of women in the church, and you’re the preacher, you might want to go back and listen to some of your own sermons. Are you phoning it in? Are you growing yourself, spiritually?

This isn’t always the case, of course, but a woman’s spiritual hunger is as great as a man’s, and she needs to be fed.

Four—Have a Long and Thoughtful Conversation about Status

A few weeks ago I came across a pretty great article called “It’s Embarrassing to be a Stay at Home Mom.” It Is a bit long and full of advice that doesn’t pertain to what we are talking about today. But his point, that status is a necessary function of human society, and that the mother, for the most part, unless she is a beautiful social media influencer, has almost none, cannot be dismissed.

And really, it’s not just mothering. Most women, no matter what they’re doing, feel like they need to justify it in some way. Observe how as women have become more and more “liberated,” more “free” they have simultaneously had to spend more and more time explaining themselves.

And this has enormous implications for the church. There is only one kind of high status work in the church, the job of the priest, who is, as we all know, supposed to be the servant of all, and therefore never depends on the authority and deference afforded to the crisp white collar at the neck, the flapping stole, the clerical ring.

While the debate about what kind of people can or should be ordained is important and will hopefully find a happy conclusion, useful work in the kingdom of God must, in some kind, be available to women. The very polarizing political nature of debates over men and women I hope in many places will soon soften, and women will be able to find work that gives them dignity, authority, and yes, even some meaningful and feminine power.

Would to God we could recover the days of an iron-willed matriarch sitting bolt upright in the front pew, Bible open, and the preacher, knees quaking, having to adequately divide the word of truth in her presence.

Five—Make the Church Genteel Again

On that note, some of you here might remember a time in the recent past when men and women did not belittle each other quite so much. This, I think, is another function of the fake egalitarianism that has poisoned so many ecclesiastical spaces.

It should not be that men talk down to women, or women talk down and belittle men. Perhaps you here in the South are not troubled by this habit, but in many places, anger and fear creep into the discourse about sex around gender.

As I said, I am always willing to blame technology whenever possible, and social media, and I think that is a huge part of the problem. Speaking as a woman, whether online or in person, the way women are talked about, even sometimes by themselves, is not very friendly. I think reasonable solutions to many persistent problems might be found if a certain archaic gentility were to rise, like the South, once again.

Six—Use the Unrighteous Mammon of Technology to Make Friends Along the Way

We can’t escape the technology that now governs our lives. Unless you are very we all become much wiser and more clever, I don’t see how most of us will be able to function without a smartphone. But there might be some sense in which we redeem the technologies that intrude and turn them to good.

Offering your devices to God as a sacrifice, entering into the realms that other people are comfortable with, but also immiserated by is something I’m pretty sure St. Paul would approve of. I guess what I mean is, if you’re really good at making reels, or using the socials, that’s not necessarily wicked, especially if you can aid in the divine work of encouraging and strengthening the broken hearted. And finally,

Seven—In a World of Athaliahs, be a Sarah

You remember Athaliah? She would rule, though the fury of hell came against her. She killed all the king’s sons, save one that she did not know about. She brought false gods into the land. Her brutality and entitlement was, well, biblical.

There are a lot of women like her, today, who insist on their rights, who already know everything, who won’t sit under the Word of God. Who are determined to take us all to Shinar in a handbasket.

But before Athaliah, there was Sarah, that tough old nut. She lived almost her whole life without getting the one thing she most particularly desired. When she finally got it, she was old. In fact, the whole situation was ridiculous. And so she laughed.

And, in wonder, she asked, shall I also have pleasure? I heard a preacher, bewildered by the question, think she was probably talking about, as we like to call it in our family, marital unpleasantness. But I think a lot of women know what she meant. She meant the astonishing and sacrificial pleasure of nursing a baby.

For me, the only joy greater is standing along with all the believers of my local church and casting up to God, in that last prayer after communion, that he must not forget to incorporate us together, body and soul, into his Body.