Household conduct

Ours is a household of four: my husband, my father, my father-in-law, and me. People better at math will know the algorithm for the number of relationships this concatenation generates.

There is the one between me and my husband, the one between me and my father, and between me and my father-in-law. But then you must also draw lines connecting each person with each other, and consider their separate dynamics. And if you really want to be thorough, you must note the various combinations made when any three of us are here and the fourth member is away.

A household is often a collection of people who would not necessarily gravitate toward each other in the world if providence had not thrown them together. Like father and daughter, for instance. I once overheard one of my sons quip to a friend, “You don’t get to choose your parents.” Ouch.

Of the four people in my house presently, only two are brought together by “gravitation,” and that would be my husband and myself. We live under this roof by choice and not perforce. My father was absorbed after my mother died, and David’s father the following year. Still, this should be an easy gig: no one drinks, smokes, gambles, or has gluten allergies, and all are Christians.

But in the 1985 The Mystery of Marriage, Mike Mason observes correctly: “If people understood the true depth of self-abnegation that marriage demands, there would perhaps be far fewer weddings. For marriage … would be seen as a form of suicide. It would be seen not as a way of augmenting one’s comfort and security in life, but rather as a way of losing one’s life for the sake of Christ.”

Let it go on record that my husband does not like to regard marriage as a means of suicide but as an unalloyed joyful blessing. Nevertheless, even he has seen its dross-removal functions over the last four years. We both rejoice in that. But the pitfalls Mason cites should be heeded—and broadened to include every member of the household: “[Familial] love is even construed to be a sort of carte blanche approval for all kinds of selfishness and evil, a dispensation giving two people special license to sin against one another.”

Think about how horrible a state of affairs that is, precisely the opposite of what it should be. If there is anyone we should be courteous to, it is our family members, and if there is anywhere we should show love it is at home. C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, has harsh words for people who shine outdoors and slouch indoors—who behind closed doors are intolerable, suffocating, bad-mannered, and who expect that affection is due them simply by virtue of being family members. “We can say anything to each other,” this person thinks—and he does.

I once heard a woman counsel a grumbling wife to think of her husband as a total stranger so that she would treat him better. It seemed like wisdom, under the circumstances. Later, the counseled woman was relating the incident to another person, and this person recoiled: “Treat your husband like a stranger? Sounds dreadful.” I wondered for years who had the better argument. I suppose if you are behaving despicably at home, the “total stranger” tact is a step up. But only because many of us are so far down.

Meditating on public vis-à-vis household conduct, Lewis writes: “There are ‘rules’ of good manners. The more intimate the occasion, the less formalization; but not therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, Affection at its best practices a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented.”

That is to say, knowing my husband, father, and father-in-law intimately should make me more, not less, tuned in to how to please them and love them for their own good. The demand is higher, not lower.

It all can be done with Christ in us, and even looked forward to as the needed daily laying down of life that makes us like Him.

But who could ever do this in the flesh?