I have always loved the psalms of ascent, and this is one of my favourites. But this does not fit smoothly with the gospel. Now, I tend to read the lectionary, and take the passages (there are generally five: two psalms, OT, NT, and gospel) and then think about them.

Since this is real time, there is a context. I’m not writing as an academic exercise: I am thinking about the day I just had or am having, what is going on around the world, and what is happening locally.

Psalm 122

Now, the people did not bring their relatives to Jesus during the day because it was the sabbath, and they believed that healing was work.
Well, it is work. Anyone who does not thing doctors and nurses work has never seen them… one of the consequences of me being a solo father is that I limit my work hours so I but rarely hit my maximum capacity (because if I work that hard I stop being human, and the kids deserve me being accessible to them, not acting like a robot monk — which is what I do to recover). But Jesus healed Peter’s mother regardless of the hour. The people had led tradition over rule the practice of the kingdom. For the priests and singers did work — physical work (if you have not played a musical instrument for an hour or so or sang, trust me, it is physical) — most Sabbaths as part of the Temple liturgy.

The question now is where are we letting tradition stop us from obeying God? I don’t think it has much to do with our liturgy. The problem there is that we do not acknowledge tradition enough. The ancient divines have spent hours thinking about these issues.

Instead we have ignored teaching — in the Bible, in 1500 to 1800 years of careful pastoral thought and guidance from the church fathers to the great evangelists of the late Victorian and early Modern age — and decided to listen to modern tradition on how to run our families. We now talk about equality and rights rather than obedience. As SSM says

For any woman who has been steeped in feminism her entire life and has never learned the useful art of cooking, these cook-book things are mighty useful. But they are not the Bible! Therefore, to use a cook-book to fulfill the Biblical command to care for my family by feeding them must be a sin, right? Do you see the absurdity of the analogy? So it is with game.

We live in a world where relations between men and women have been severely damaged by fifty years of feminism (but really it started long before that). Telling men that all they need to know about how to manage their wives is in the Bible is disingenous. The Bible gives us an outline. We must live by that outline if we want to be Holy. However, it is up to us to fill in that outline with the choices we make in our lives.

Now, there are people who are talking about this. I have a whole section of nutraditionalism links, I put them there because (as someone who was born before feminism, grew up during peak feminism, and have seen the damage it has done to my society) I cannot see the current economic and political system standing up for much longer.

And that means that the current support for women raising children alone — with the state as the husband — is going to end. At that time women will need to rediscover how to care for men: because the only thing you will be paid for is making something or fixing something. Most administrative jobs — those nice, comfortable jobs that my daughter and most of her peers do — can disappear. The factory job, the men on the chain butchering animals, the farmer getting up in the snow during lambing — they will continue to work. Hard. And they will generally need help with the domestic issues because they will be too tired to do them.

There is much talk about being green, frugal, sustainable. But we do not listen. To those women who grew up during the last depression, and know how to make meals from any part of an animal, domestic or wild, to clean cheaply, cook from scratch, and teach: we still have a generation (at least in my part of the world) who can connect with the problems of living in an isolated area, with being a pioneer. We need to rediscover the sustainable. Because it may not be far from now when your man, ladies, will not need the gym to be fit because he will be wrestling animals or harvesting by hand, while you find exactly how much effort your washing machine and vacuum cleaner saves you. Although I hope this does not happen, poverty has a consequence: waste disappears. Given that the economic output of the major economies has been decreasing markedly, my hope could be folorn.