This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

The Fatherhood Chronicles XXVII

A note of warning before I begin: If you are a feminist who happens to be of the persuasion that not only are men and women equal but interchangeable, then this post will most definitely piss you off. If, however, you are of the more rational feminist stripe and merely assume the equality of men and women, I don't see how this entry will raise your blood pressure at all. And if you are a male (feminist or not), deep down you know that what I'm about to say is one hundred percent true. Admit it.

That being said, I'll pick up at the point this past week (Wednesday evening) when Anna and Sofie turned right around and left by big ol' jet airliner to go be with Anna's sister, Teresa, who is (still) on the verge of giving birth. (She didn't so Anna and Sofie had no choice but to return last night. Keep Teresa and the baby in your prayers.)

So here we were: We'd just gotten in from San Diego the night before. I got up and went to work and taught my two classes. I come home and Anna and Sofie are packed for Texas (via Oklahoma). I had about an hour or so with them, then it was drop them off at the airport and return home. The next four days were spent in somthing like a dysfunctional fog. I went to work. I taught my classes. I arranged the next week's child care. The rest was empty space filled by a bit of reading, some checkbook tabulation, and a lot of movie watching (X2, the three LOTR movies). Though I had picked up a severe cold by the weekend, and was so wiped out on Sunday that I missed the Divine Liturgy, nonetheless, the prospect of picking up my wife and daughter from the airport lent the day some purpose. I rolled out of bed at 8:30 (about three hours late for me), and thought "Twelve hours and the Healy women return to me."

Here's my thesis and main point: We men need women. We need them not so much for propagating the race (though this is a true and enjoyable fact). We need them because they give to our masculine lives the domesticity that is our salvation.

Don't misunderstand. I don't mean to imply that celibate monastics or laymen who just happen never to get married are somehow lesser men or incomplete. Our fulfillment is found ultimately in the Trinity in whose image we have been made.

Nor do I mean that without women, the living quarters of men would be chaotic large-scale petri dishes in which new life forms would be devised. My dad, for one, is an almost obsessive neat freak. (Me? Not so much.)

Nor do I mean that women provide the order to men's lives that they otherwise would lack. No, all-male militia have an established order and discipline that is a wonder to behold. And many type-A men are so regimented that it takes a catastrophe to upend the schedule in their Daytimer.

Rather, I am speaking about domesticity. Domesticity is about fulfillment; the two become one flesh. Domesticity is about neatness and cleanliness (though these are, you understand relative terms). And domesticity is most certainly about order. But it is also so much more than these things.

Domesticity is found, quintessentially, in Ephesians 5:21ff:

[Be filled with the Holy Spirit] submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband." (Ephesians 5:21-33 ESV)

What is important to note here, is that for us men, that is to say, for us Christian men, domesticity is a kenotic paradigm. But it is not mere sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. Rather it is an emptying whose purpose is the sanctification of the women with whom we have been made one flesh, and in and through them, the children that God grants us. Indeed, our paradigm is little less than to be an icon of the relationship of Christ to his Church. When the watching world looks at our marriages, our parenting, do they see christological ecclesiology? Do they think, "Oh, so that's what salvation and the Church is all about?"

I am hardly a model of this paradigm. But through the absence of my little girl and my wife this weekend, it became clear to me that the fulfillment of my manhood is in giving of myself for their holiness. When they were gone, I had, in a sense, lost my vocation. Oh, don't get me wrong. There was that within that thought, "Freedom!" I had lists of books, items for writing, movies to see--and the unfettered time to indulge myself. Instead, there was space and silence. And a reminder. I need my women. Without them, salvation is so much harder to work out.

I rather suppose, mine is not an unusual experience. But the implications are quite clear: the male and female of the species are not interchangeable (you'd flunk biology 101 if you really thought so), and there's a deep design here in these differences. A design cosmic in scope and utterly particular in realization.

Posted by Clifton at January 19, 2004 10:47 AM | TrackBack