The Domestic Kenosis: A Response to Ross Douthat from the Mother of Eight Children – Public Discourse

In the final analysis, Engels fails to intimidate me. John Updike s iteration of the intramarital class struggle is more illuminating, from his novel Couples: Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Am I so sure which of those two I am? My most productive years have been entirely committed to manufacturing and maintaining humans, but the weight of our world is on my husband s shoulders. I set my own schedule, have some latitude in determining which tasks I will perform, and perform those tasks according to my own standards. He is a wage slave in the service of nine lives outside of his own, because together we have turned out to contain multitudes.

Mr. Douthat s description of situations such as ours as kenotic necessarily calls to mind Philippians 2. Is large family life an icon of the Lord s emptying of himself on our behalf? No more, I believe, than any Christian life deliberately modeled upon His example. And yet it could be a hacky way of getting at it for a lot of people.

Would you have goodness forced on you? Get married, and let marriage have its way with you. Those who come of it will become greater, O man, and you will become less.

via www.thepublicdiscourse.com

Goodness.