The Modern Home

The atmosphere of a Christian home is rarely obviously tranquil; and if it is, it may be at the expense of spontaneity. Any ordinary housewife will feel at times that she has been planted on Noah’s Ark. The preparation of meals; the arrival and exodus of children; music that sounds exactly like noise; quarrels; accidents; some obvious faults and a good many less obvious virtues; page 563 the bumping together of egos; a clutter of clothes and anxieties; moments of desperation; moments of sexual love hedged in by tiredness; a sense that one has, while still alive, become the main item of diet in a cannibal feast; the births and deaths of human beings; the births and deaths of household pets – a home may be a holy bedlam, if the spirit of prayer runs like a deep current underneath this chaos; but it still deserves to be called a bedlam.

I doubt if married people can ever understand their homes. There are layers below layers – good fortune and bad fortune – and both, to the human mind at least, equally unpredictable. The very act that first institutes a home – the coming together of a man and a woman – involves the juxtaposition of personalities and ways of life so unlike each other, so profoundly unrelated as to guarantee the development of lifelong conflicts. Yet I believe these conflicts are intended for the majority of the human race as a means by which we can (if we choose) be both humanised and sanctified, since they cannot ever come near the ghost of a solution without human mercy and a dependence on the actual help of God.

Perhaps I have cheated a little: for the bedlam I have been describing is indeed a possible one – it is, I think, the one that the Church also describes in her blueprints – but it is the Old Bedlam; and we, to our sorrow, have to come to terms with the New Bedlam of the modern home, not in itself ignoble, but containing many variations introduced, perhaps irreversibly, by a somewhat Godless and intensely technological civilisation.

In the New Bedlam the families are much smaller. On the face of it, this should lead to a greater leisure and scope for companionship, both between parents and between parents and their children; but in fact it does not generally turn out that way. The parents of small families are more inclined to worry excessively about the material and moral welfare of their children – as if they had a natural fund of anxiety, like a pound of butter placed in the fridge, and now that there is less bread, the butter is spread on the bread more thickly.

And between the parents themselves there is often a sense of reticence and unanswered questions – the minor resentments inevitable in any marriage are inclined to flare up out of all proportion; or else a couple may sit side by side all evening and watch the TV set, saying very little to each other, in a negative harmony that has about it rather too much of the inertia of old age.

The point is that people are commonly less inventive than they suppose themselves to be. The leisure of the New Bedlam has been achieved by a departure from the vigour and variety – as well as the pains – of nature; and it is only the rare couple who are able to explore their common interests with a sense of renewed discovery.

When there is leisure activity, the man may perhaps go down to the cellar and make furniture; or the woman may turn pots on a wheel or design dresses – and while these are in themselves creative reactions, they are still solitary and not mutual. Perhaps the pressures of the Old Bedlam mercifully page 564 concealed from each their lack of any unusual creativity, and the fact that their deepest common interest was simply that they had come together to beget and rear children.

The demands of the New Bedlam are more austere – ‘Either be creative, or else stagnate.’ It is not a demand which many people are able to answer well. At times the New Bedlamites will secretly welcome family upheavals and calamities because these events give them something to do in common.

Again, as we know well, the smaller families are mostly achieved by a deliberate modification of the nature of the sexual act. Now, I do not wish to seem what I am not – a bigot who over-rides the genuine protest of many people that the rulings of the Church are too hard for them to obey; or a man who considers sexual satisfaction the be-all and end-all of existence. Nevertheless, there are two elements which the New Bedlamites have in their worldly prudence excluded from the sexuality of the home – fertility and spontaneity, the qualities which are perhaps our closest links with natural creation. And these qualities are absent equally from those who practise mechanical or chemical methods of birth control and for those who practise the rhythm method permitted by the Church.

Sexual congress by a planned and rational decision may seem admirable in the eyes of the theologians who assert that reason is the gift that distinguishes humans from animals; but, at the risk of heresy, I would dare to assert that love is higher than reason and can go where reason cannot go, at least among us fallen creatures – and that love has in it both conscious and unconscious elements.

When the Church asserts that mechanical birth control is contra naturam, I do not think first of the abstract ‘nature’ of the theologians, but of an emotional and physical spontaneity which is largely and sometimes totally excluded from the deliberately infertile act.

To say ‘I love you’ and then to embrace is the natural and desirable procedure of marital love in its physical expression; to make anxious inquiries about the presence or absence of mechanical devices or chemical agents, or even about the calendar, is to introduce a permanent emotional obstacle. Only the clinical and abstract mind can fail to recognise that the practice of birth control is indeed contra naturam in a way that is at least obscurely evident to the inner feelings of every modern couple who have adopted that practice. The New Bedlam is in this regard a great deal less natural than the old one.

I am often astonished by the astonishment of the New Bedlamites who cannot understand why their children show little regard for spiritual laws in their attitudes towards sexuality. The children are not fools. Even if they have never analysed the situation, they know perfectly well by way of their feelings that their parents have deliberately excluded fertility and accidentally excluded spontaneity from their relationship. The situation is felt by them as a pressure and a pain. Then, when some unmarried daughter imprudently becomes page 565 pregnant, ignoring her mother’s advice that ‘safety’ and morality are identical – or when some son behaves violently and irresponsibly with his girl-friends, or alternately shows a marked aversion for the married state – it is surely worth considering the possibility that these reactions are a semi-conscious protest against the barren ideals of the New Bedlam, and that the young are anxious about sexual matters because they feel that their sexuality is menaced.

Two wrongs don’t make a right; yet the protest may in the long run be on behalf of wholeness. The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge. It is absurd in this situation to belabour the children vigorously and ignore any inquiry into their parents’ eating habits.

The god of the New Bedlam is Education. His devotees imagine that scientific and social information will set the mind working, and give them wisdom, much as a heavy Chinese meal may conquer indigestion by giving the stomach no alternative but to vomit or digest. Again, to get a high rank among the new technocrats, it is necessary that one should have at least two university degrees.

In the Old Bedlam children frequently became adults and left the home and began to support themselves financially before they were half through their teens. In the New Bedlam they are required to remain for perhaps ten or fifteen years in a curious psychological chrysalis, neither child nor adult, fed with regular educational injections, cajoled and bribed to prevent open discontent, dependent far beyond the natural age of dependence.

One could say that it was the New Bedlamites who invented adolescence. I do not believe that God invented this amorphous and painful state. In the Middle Ages, in profoundly Catholic communities, girls were marrying and beginning to rear children at fourteen; boys were leading armies in the field or working at their fathers’ trades at fifteen. It is not human nature but the society that has changed. And while the Church has to work with whatever social structure is available, I am always sorry to see her awkwardly bowing before the idol of Absolute Education.

We could consider at times whether it might not be better for many young men to work at more poorly paid jobs and for many young women to do without various luxuries and gadgets and raise a largish family rather than to go out to work to help pay off the family mortgage.

The god of Education is stringently opposed to the poverty of the Gospel; he regards it as a superstitious monstrosity. ‘What man,’ he thinks, ‘would not rather have two houses and three yachts – with two consecutive wives thrown in – than one wife and six children? Property is security!’ And the computers whirr like windmills in his ignorant brain.

The Old Bedlam had a strangely hierarchical structure. In some ways it resembled a monarchical state. It had a Head, the man who governed the household; it had a Heart, the woman who provided that containing and sustaining quality of life without which any community becomes arid and page 566 unstable; it had subjects, with human rights as well as duties, the children begotten and reared by the strange couple. The authority in this community came from necessity of function not from sanctity or merit. If it had been otherwise, the Holy Child would have been the indisputable Head of the household at Nazareth; Our Lady would have come next; and St Joseph a somewhat negligible subject. In fact the order was reversed. By authority of function, St Joseph could legitimately ask obedience of both Our Lady and the Holy Child; and Our Lady had a real and intimate authority over Our Lord. This was all based on the dubious notion that men are different from women and children different from either.

The New Bedlam has got rid of these antiquated ideas. It is a rational democratic institution, taking as its slogan the great axiom propounded by Satan in his heroic but unsuccessful attempt to democratise Heaven; ‘No adult has the right to tell another adult what to do.’ In practice, however, most adult New Bedlamites do try to assert a limited and uneasy control, over their children; since, after all, children are young and need protecting. I could perhaps give a brief illustration of the way this control functions.

Tommy, who is fifteen, wants to go to a party at a friend’s place. There will be drink served at the party. He approaches his mother with a mixture of defiance and diffidence. ‘Mum, Jack’s having a party tonight. Can I go to it?’

‘Will there be drink?’

‘There might be a bit. Not much.’

‘You go and ask your father.’ Now, the New Bedlamite mother knows that she and her husband have different views on whether a fifteen-year-old should drink. Her husband began his drinking career with a bottle of whisky shared with a cobber behind the R.S.A. Hall at the age of twelve. It made him horribly sick. But he thinks it would be stupid to stop Tommy from having a few beers at fifteen, especially as he knows Jack’s father pretty well. The mother, on the other hand, was brought up in a teetotal household and doesn’t want her son to drink at all. But she feels that at this juncture her own authority is not quite enough to control the situation; and she is, as it were, calling up the reserve forces.

Tommy goes to his father who is outside mowing the lawn. ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘Mum told me to ask you if I could go to a party at Jack’s tonight.’

His father is on the alert immediately. He has stepped feet first into too many family rows by unwittingly giving approval to actions his wife has already vetoed. ‘What did she say you could do?’ he asks.

Tommy shuffles. ‘She doesn’t like the idea of my having a few drinks. Aw, Dad – you used to have a few when you were fifteen – you told me about it. I won’t get drunk. You say I can go.’

The father is torn two ways. He knows his son knows who the actual head of the household is. His son has witnessed far too many domestic disputes in which the father has been worsted to have any delusions about this. But page 567 he is appealing to his father to put on again the stolen robe and make an actual decision. The father, on his private view of male psychology, knows that Tommy has to make some gesture of manhood – and drinking beer may not be the worst kind to make. On the other hand, he knows that if he gives a decision his wife doesn’t want, he’ll be in the doghouse for a week. So he compromises. ‘I don’t really mind if you go,’ he says. ‘But you’ll have to get your mother’s permission first. You go back and tell her I think it might be O.K. But it’s your battle, not mine; you’ll have to win it yourself.’

Tommy goes back to his mother a little encouraged. He has found a sympathiser, if not an authority. And grudgingly his mother consents; or anxious she forbids the outing. The New Bedlamite structure is not in theory matriarchal. It supposes a perfect equality and agreement between husband and wife. But in practice the authority is divided and enfeebled. The children will never accept the father as Head of the house because they know the mother does not. They have never in their lives seen her obey him.

When they are still pre-adolescent they regard her as the Head; but as they move away from the shadows of the nursery they begin to question this female authority as a household control – which indeed in the Old Bedlam it would be – that does not apply in the world outside the home. And the struggle begins against the female Head. The mother then turns to her husband to find the authority there which would be of help to her now; though she has never accepted it as applying to herself. And tragically she finds something strangulated, partly a ghost of her own authority, partly an unspoken opposition which she will be inclined to codify as ‘siding with the children’ – whatever she finds, it will not be much help to her, and some modern marriages founder on this issue. The point is that, in the last analysis, a dual Headship does not work. Somebody has to have the casting vote; and if the wife does not accept the husband’s final decision, she has to carry the burden of Headship herself.

These are difficult matters. One has to recognise that the New Bedlamites are sincere people, people of good will, doing their best in an inhibiting environment. All of us, even the most conservative Catholics, are bound to be affected by modern trends of thought – and we may have something to learn from the way the New Bedlamites cope with their world, which is our world also – the world of advertising, the world of birth control and juvenile delinquency, the Age of the Computer.

Yet I have often thought that the Church has a dual role at the present time – to reintroduce the concept of God into modern thinking, certainly, and to offer her sympathy and shelter to bewildered people – but also to reintroduce the concept of nature, which the New Bedlamites have whittled down to a ghostly abstraction.

There is a natural order of fertility and a natural authority of function. When these are abandoned, many people have to go through their lives page 568 haunted by the image of a possible richness and harmony which it is not beyond human power to achieve but which the structure of our society forbids us to consider.

In the final analysis, we have to consider what God wants us to do – and I think the answer is that God gave us the Old Bedlam, with all its conflicts, while we have constructed the New Bedlam for ourselves. And in this we are the losers.

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