Berry Talk

Over Thanksgiving, I spotted a Wendell Berry book on the shelf at my brother's house. The book was The Art of the Commonplace. I was first introduced to Berry during my time at L'abri in 2003. I started with Jayber Crow and then went on to read some of his non-fiction. He's not the C.S. Lewis in my life, but he sure has given my brain and heart a wonderful literary feast. I plucked the book from the shelf and found an essay called "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine."

I wanted to print out this particular essay when I got home from our Thxgvg vacation. So I googled it and wah-lah, I found it! Here's the link to the essay:

http://www.crosscurrents.org/berryspring2003.htm

This essay is for anyone who tells themselves that staying home with kids is tantamount to "not contributing" or that helping your husband is somehow a euphemism for "doted upon" or "weak." Your household is indeed an economy and a very important one. Your children are indeed part of society and will one day be part of that society in a more economic sense. Your job in the home is not categorically lesser simply because it doesn't include a salary and a boss who may or may not have any genuine interest in you. Your job at home may indeed be lesser (just as a paid job could be lesser than a job at home), but being at home doesn't, by category, make it lesser. Your help to your husband may indeed mean that he's a pushy, macho man who doesn't appreciate you. But helping one's husband isn't categorically demeaning. Especially if you care at all about Genesis 2:18. It should be noted that Genesis 2 comes before the Fall in Genesis 3. (To be clear, if you do happen to fit the stereotype of SAHMs who "eat bon and bons and watch soap operas whilst the children wander about the house" then that is another story.)

I personally enjoy working for my husband, my partner, and the father of my children. I also appreciate a husband who practices his belief that bread winning is not the summation of his fatherhood---the children need him as their father, not just as the provider of resources. I categorize myself as a stay at home mom. I believe that includes a contribution to society (in particular, my very small members of society) and to my home as an economy.

In the essay, Berry talks about an article he wrote in which he mentions his wife helping him. She helps type out his essays, and she gives her input. He got a reaction from the article which assumed a few things. In the essay, he responds to these assumptions and a false syllogism.  He goes on to tend to other matters in the essay such as the use of a computer and technological progress. But he starts with the household as an economy.  I don't mean to open a can of worms and I especially don't mean to say anything more than what I've just said. If I didn't say it, it shouldn't be assumed to be implicated. These matters are material for discussion, but I thought this essay made a great dent in a conversation that I think will go on for years and years to come. Furthermore, I think there will always be, on some level, a dissatisfaction in one's work and life. This is true for a man or woman. This is true for a mom or a dad, married or unmarried, wealthy or poor. I know it to be true for the unbeliever because I believe, like Augustine, that there's that God-shaped hole in all of us. But what about for the believer? Why don't we expect angst, and even embrace it, in a way?

Romans 8:23 from NLT, And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.

I'm no hermeneutics expert, but to me that means that I shouldn't expect fulfillment of the ultimate sort until that Ultimate day comes. And I think that "Godliness with contentment is great gain" can be true at the same time as Romans 8:23 is true. I don't feel pressured to delight in each Cheerio I pick up from the floor or each bad attitude I have to address. I do pray against being a murmurer though.

So here are a few excerpts from the essay (emphasis mine):

Excerpt One:

"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 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.”

Excerpt Two:

"If I had written in my essay that my wife worked as a typist and editor for a publisher, doing the same work that she does for me, no feminists, I daresay, would have written to Harper’s to attack me for exploiting her—even though, for all they knew, I might have forced her to do such work in order to keep me in gambling money. It would have been assumed as a matter of course that if she had a job away from home she was a “liberated woman,” possessed of a dignity that no home could confer upon her."

Excerpt Three:

"But what appears to infuriate them the most is their supposition that she works for nothing. They assume—and this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy—that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold. Love, friendship, neighborliness, compassion, duty—what are they? We are realists. We will be most happy to receive your check."