1. Katherine sent me the link to this great article by Jessica Snell in Touchstone: The Feast Goes On
“As with the food I prepare, all the traditions of the church year turn the ordinary work of my vocation into a daily reminder of the gospel. The life of a stay-at-home mother is derided by many as repetitive and boring, but what those critics do not realize is that the repetition is not rote, it is rhythmic. It is not like being a cog in a factory but like providing the structure of a hymn.”
2. I cannot say enough about Wendell Berry’s essay: “Feminism, The Body, and the Machine.” It is brilliant. Please, please, please, get your hands on a copy of it and let me know what you think. He covers many themes, one of them being marriage.
“Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of a divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.
The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.
There are, however, still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, ‘mine’ is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as ‘ours.'”
READ IT.
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