What is submission?

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Sarah asked, in this thread, what submission really is. There was some conversation and then Martha expressed genuine confusion. I turned to Fr. Lovasik, who time and again, can cut to the chase and bring clarity to weighty topics that tend to be muddied when they are viewed through the lens of today's society. In 1962, Fr. Lovasik quoted Ephesians 5:20-6:4 and then he had this brief elucidation:

This is a perfect solution to a major family problem. Let the wife be subject to her husband as if he were Christ. Let the husband love his wife as Chrsit loves the Church. If such a relationsip existed between husband and wife, they would be in harmony as the Church and Christ are--in perfect love and peace.

"Yes, but..." I hear you thinking. But my husband isn't perfect as Christ was. I can't submit to a man who isn't perfect. I might be smarter than he is. I might be better educated than he is. I might be more thoughtful than he is. I might be more religious than he is. How can I submit to him?

The Blessed Mother was conceived without sin. She lived a sinless life. The only other person on earth who lived such a life was Christ himself. And they both lived under the guardianship of Joseph. God didn't make a mistake there. He could have saved Joseph from sin before he was born, just the way that He saved Mary. But he didn't. He put a flawed man in charge. And then, it took a sinless woman to have the humility to truly submit to him.

So, the two sinless saints lived in perfect obedience to the imperfect man--the father, the husband, the clear head of the household. When we look at the model of true perfection in family life, the indisputably holy Holy Family, we see how to submit. We can clear out the clutter of our present society. We can quell the voices that tell us that the Bible didn't really mean that one is in charge of the other. Of course it did! Women are created differently from men. And we need to trust the Creator with His plan for the family. He knew you would be smarter than your husband. He knew that you would be more devout. And still He made him the man and you the woman and he told you "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." Genesis 2:18.

"But that's Old Testament," comes the protest. "Christ changed all that." No, he didn't. Mary was the new Eve. She perfected that. Christ deliberately came to live in the midst of the Holy Family. There, Mary was the model of humility. She was an inspiration to her husband. She was his helper, first and foremost, because she perfectly loved her Son, and she modeled for everyone--even Joseph--how to do that.

How do we submit? We ask ourselves, "What would Mary do?" I promise you she wouldn't pout, she woudn't connive, she wouldn't demand her own way. She would draw heavily upon the sacraments to live a life of gentleness and grace and perpetual blessing to her family. Always. Not just when Joseph was behaving like the model husband. Not just when he was as holy as she was. She was a blessing when he brought a bad day at work home to the dinner table. She was a blessing when he was demanding. She was a blessing when he was hungry and irritable and when he forgot to take out the trash. We are helpers fit for our husbands when we are inspirations to them. We are imitators of the new Eve, the Blessed Mother, when our homes radiate the peacefulness and the faith of the little cottage in Nazareth.

Put yourself in that little cottage. I cannot imagine Mary grumbling or complaining as she went about her daily round. I can't hear her muttering about the menial labor of yet another workshirt to wash. I can't see her arguing at Joseph's decision-making ability. "But Joe, I'm nine months pregnant! Get real. You want me to travel to Bethlehem on a DONKEY?! And you want me to trust you--a mere mortal of a man--to get me and this baby there safely? You're nuts. That's not prudent. And I know prudence because I know virtue better than you do."

Instead, she trusted God's plan for the family. She inspired her husband to holiness. She modeled for all of us, including him, a perfect love for her son. And she lived a life of humility and grace. That's submission.

Who is at Home?

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Genevieve Kinecke has posted some interesting thoughts on the "Wifely Duty." She's exploring the toll that the two-career marriage has had on intimacy.  And there are certainly some very good points there.

Most of my readers here aren't from two career families. They are moms at home, many of them homeschooling.  So, the tendency is to reason that Genevieve's post has nothing to do with us.  Ah, but it does.  There is a mother-at-home corollary. And it's far more insidious because it creeps up on you when you think you are doing your duty and you scarcely know you are falling into its terrible claws. 

Genevieve quotes the following, writing about the husband of a wife who is at work in the world all day:

So pity the married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual manoeuvre, and still seething over his failure to wipe down the worktops after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his email, catch a few minutes of Match of the Day and call it a night.

I offer another scenario:  The husband, home from a long day at work, checks with his wife via cell phone.  There is no inviting smell meeting him as he walks through the front door. She is not at home, cooking dinner. Instead, she is shouting instructions over a bad cell connection to order pizza.  He is to pick up two of their three children from soccer practice at the school across the street.  She wants him to feed them, bathe them, and get them to bed.  In the meantime, she will gather their daughter from band practice at school and rush her to her evening dance class.  She'll dash through the grocery store during dance lessons and be home around nine.  From there, the scenario will look much like the one quoted above, except for the economic independence.

Ladies, we don't have to be employed outside the home to lose the focus on hearth and home.  We don't have to be employed outside the home to leave our homes devoid of a feminine presence. We can be lured away by the busy-ness of suburbia. We can be persuaded by coaches and teachers that one more class, one more practice, is completely necessary. We can feel insecure as we compare what our children are doing to the many and varied activities of the neighbors. We can find our own meaning of success in the extracurricular successes of our children. This just might be a trickier problem to solve. We want our children to have extracurricular opportunities.  We want to be able to offer them chances to grow and explore. We want them to "succeed."  But how do we do that without completely destroying the fabric of family life, making family dinners all but extinct, and rendering ourselves so exhausted and so unavailable for intimacy or conversation that we can do little more at the end of the day than roll over and go to sleep?

Rest in Peace

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A few years ago, a little boy named Stephen was afraid of all things having to do with animals.  He shrunk from dogs, big and small.  He wouldn't go near frogs or turtles or lizards.  Animals were just not his thing.  And then he discovered Discovery Kids and Animal Planet.  More specifically, he discovered a man who shared his name and who had boundless enthusiasm for all the wonders of God's creation.  And that enthusiasm was infectious. He was mentored by Steve Irwin, otherwise known as the Crocodile Hunter.  Irwin was a "living science" kind of guy.  He so loved what he was doing and so loved where he was doing it and so loved the people he was doing it with that he passed that passion on. And with it, he passed on a lot of knowledge. At first, Stephen was just fascinated with the animals caught safely inside the television.  But, with time, he ventured outside.  He wasn't  wrestling with crocodiles, but he was pursuing frogs and toads.  And he took a big leap and embraced our puppy, who soon became a rather large dog.

Some children ask for Cartoon Network; Stephen will always rather watch Animal Planet.He retains all the little facts and big concepts presented in a larger-than-Australia way by a man who has a contagious passion for science.

It's going to be a sad day here.  Steve Irwin died this morning, out doing what he loved to do--getting very close to dangerous animals.  We've lost a kind of hero for little boys.  And we've lost a great educator for us all.