Reformation day linkage and statistics.

During Kirk today Barry reminded us that today is All Saint’s Day or Reformation Sunday. Regardless of which side of the Tiber you are on, it is a day to recall the generations of faithful witness that have gone before us. This was emphasized when we had a dedication service for a family, with the grandparents, parents, older siblings and parents standing in front of the congregation.

We were reminded that there are no second generation Christians. We prayed that in time the child blessed would walk through the waters of baptism having chosen to accept faith [1].

Last month we have had #gamergate, a move in the lectionary into revelations, and locally one son through his examinations, and this blogger doing his duty to his guild and university

Some blog stats. Google has 9K views in the last 30 days, and last month this was the 25th most seen blog in the NZ rankings. I expect neither to remain as high.

Screenshot - 021114 - 12:10:13

OK. Around the traps, some good reading:

Dalrock: reminds us that being a single mother is again stigmatized, and why. Let’s say that the haters got all hatey over there, particularly after Cail C. produced advice straight out of the Pauline playbook.

Yes, there are some mothers without husbands through no fault of their own: women who were abandoned by bad men (though in that case they bear some responsibility for choosing that man), women who were raped, and of course widows. It’d be nice to treat them differently from the much more common frivorcee, but it’s hard enough to do that on a personal level, when you know the circumstances. It’s impossible to do it on a societal level, or on the level of government policies.

So in practice, you either shame single motherhood, or you….don’t. That’s why churches now praise all single mothers, and even ridiculously hold the Mother of God up as their representative. The exception soon becomes the rule.

On a personal level, if you know a single mother who was genuinely dealt a bad hand, by all means treat her kindly and help her out — while encouraging her to provide a father for her kids (their own father or a new one if he’s dead).

Now, the fact is that most of the women who are single in the church of my age are divorced. I’m divorced. TL;DR we either encourage women to reconcile with their husbands (the Catholic model) or we make a judgement as to if the divorce is licit (by criteria) and call the erring spouse dead to the church and encourage the innocent party to remarry (the protestant model). If you are going to have the Catholic model, you better have a lot of nunneries — for many women will choose not to reconcile: some of these should never had married in the first place. (You will need a few less monasteries, unless the feminists gut the church, at which point only the gnarly and obnoxious crunchy end of the reformed church will remain in the secular environment. The monastery will again, as it was at the end of the Roman empire, be far more attractive than Babylon, and many will flee the sisterhood to mountains, in the hope they can rebuild the church, as before, from scholarly mancaves).

Cail blogged further on this, and the entire thing is worth reading. An extract.

Those specific exceptions aside, I think there are some things he might be able to do to nudge the operation in a better direction. First, I’d be after the priest/pastor, asking him whether he’s talking to these women about finding new husbands or reconciling with the ones they really still have. Are they temporarily alone and only needing this help for a while until there’s a man in the house again, or is the situation open-ended until she feels lonely? What’s he doing to rectify their feral status? Does he have a policy on single mothers beyond making sure they’re comfortable? If a marriage gets rocky in that church in the future, will the focus be on keeping it together, or will it be on helping the woman escape and survive alone?

Also, are there any elderly or frivorced men in the church who could use some of this help? Not every man has the skills and ability to clean his own gutters and change his own oil, after all. Extending the charity to some men would help shake the idea that it’s all about “vagina = deserving.” For that matter, there might be some young families who could use the help too. Make it about helping people in need, not about helping “single moms.”

There are a lot of single moms out there. Most of them brought it on themselves and their children. They shouldn’t be rewarded for it, and married women shouldn’t be given the impression that they can blow up their marriages and be protected from the consequences. But we do want to encourage repentance and reform, and we don’t want to punish her children for her sins.

What can we do?

Well, we should help those who need it. Some of us don’t: we can pay for help (and I do). Some are victims, and need to be helped up. But we should encourage all to return to normal life as fast as possible. For children, that means two parents: in previous generations the church encouraged widowers to marry widows so that both families would have the economic and emotional stability they needed.

And those who want to be “strong and independent” can move to the bush. Outside society, where the Hobbsean rules of brevity and brutality apply. The rest of us have to live for one another.

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1. I have to be careful here. When my children were small, we had them dedicated, not baptized: we were worshipping with the Bretheren then and the Baptist influence was huge. I now consider this an error: the covenant of baptism is for all ages, including infants. And we do practice infant baptism, for those parents who will take that covenantal relationship.

2 Comments

  1. Wiless said:

    I went to a Lutheran Church today; they observed All Saints Day, in their usual ‘evangelical catholic’ fashion…

    November 3, 2014
    • Wiless said:

      They did, however, discuss the distinction between the Protestant and Roman views of sainthood.

      November 3, 2014

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