Living the Sabbath by Norman Wirzba

Author:Norman Wirzba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

8

Sabbath at Home

Homes are in trouble. Schoolteachers regularly report that many of their students, rich and poor, come to class inappropriately dressed and fed, are poorly behaved, and show signs of neglect and abuse. Their inability to get along with classmates, as well as their frustrations and anger with learning, are often attributable to boredom, conflict, tension, disorder, or unrest at home. Many children fail to find their homes and their families to be places of nurture and support, structure and inspiration. Thus life itself is an ordeal. Not knowing where they are at home, they find it that much more difficult to understand who and where they are in the world. Not surprisingly, their modes of self and world discovery often take a violent or destructive form.

It is common, and far too easy, to blame the waywardness of our youth on violent, promiscuous, or nihilistic TV programming, movies, video games, and the Internet. This approach assumes that the causes of our trouble come from sources that are imported into the home, and thus it leaves the structure of the home itself unquestioned. We need to ask more fundamental questions: Why has screen entertainment become such an attractive, even necessary, option for so many families? (As an experiment, try unplugging the television and home computer for a month and see what happens.) Does this necessity spring from family members’ basic unavailability to each other or from a failure to find in our interpersonal relations a deep fund of joy, inspiration, and contentment?

Households have been under assault since long before the intervention of entertainment media. In many instances this assault was carried out under the banner of economic necessity. Land consolidation, the advent of factory work, and the growth of expanding, even international markets have meant that work has increasingly had to be done away from the home and with a purpose less directly connected with the needs of the household, family members, and the local community. The fragmentation of the day into work life and home life, as well as the growing separation between individual purpose and family goals, professional work and community service, has meant that homes now function under severe pressures from within and from without. How shall we reunite the many strands of community, family, and home life that are currently moving in different directions?

Our culture’s mythology states that in “the good old days” families were much more cohesive units and homes were places of nurture and refuge. Dads went to work while moms stayed home to make sure that everything ran smoothly and efficiently. Meals were cooked, clothes were washed and ironed, the house was spic and span, and the homework was always done. But as moms “went to work” too (as if they didn’t “work” before!), the balance of home life went awry, and children became the most visible casualties. With both parents working, there is hardly enough time or energy left over to get even the basics of home life done. Practical necessity dictates

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