"Your body is the first thing any child of man ever wanted. Therefore dispose yourself to be loved, to be wanted, to be available. Be there for them with a vengeance. Be a gracious, bending woman. Incline your ear, your heart, your hands to them.... To be a Mother is to be the sacrament - the effective symbol - of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home." from Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon

Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Critical State Thickens


They're In For It Now
      Husband and wife, however, are only the beginning of the hierarchy.  Under normal conditions, involvement in matrimony means entering something like what scientists call a critical state. 
      
The situation, not to mention the wife, becomes pregnant with possibilities. And when those possibilities are actualized they begin to require minding and feeding, they conduct interminable conversations on the telephone, they borrow cars, get into scrapes, and generally cause their parents to wonder, what it was they could possibly have had in mind. 
     
The happy couple have let themselves in for Fatherhood and Motherhood, and it is the unvarnished irreversibility of those vocations that brings us to the next course of stones.

Here again, the building up of the Body, the fruition of the Mystery, operates through the divine comedy of hierarchy among equals.  Here again - this time as parents and children - human beings of equal worth, but with diverse functions, are set in a dance in order that their separateness might become membership in each other.  Here again, persons are invited into the Coinherence through love."

Bed and Board, pg. 57, by Robert Farrar Capon, 1965

(This is the quote Jane referred to in the comment section of the previous post.  
She is, understandably, just a little busy right now, so I'm saving her the trouble.  :)

1 comment:

  1. "divine comedy of hierarchy among equals.... diverse functions....separateness becoming membership...."

    It is true that though we are "equals," baptized into Christ (Gal. 3:27,28), where there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, etc., our functions and roles on this earth are indeed diverse and distinct from another's - as man, woman, husband, wife, child, employer, employee, etc. And that is where the dance happens, as we live in humble and willing submission to those over us, each reverencing the offices God has bestowed upon His unique members.

    Capon has such a way with words. :D

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