My Life For Yours

Pastor Joshua Anderson, while teaching a Sunday school class on marriage this past summer, referenced and recommended a little book by Thomas Howard which I finally found time to read on Spring Break.

In Hallowed Be This House, Mr. Howard illustrates the way in which the Christian principles of sacrificial living are lived out in the home. Room by room, he forces us to step back, pay attention to what happens in that room, then recognize that these ordinary, daily activities - even when engaged in out a sense of duty, even when they appear endlessly dull, and even when we fail to recognize them as such - are services rendered to one another which embody the Gospel. My life is laid down in exchange for your life in these ordinary routines...I die that you might live.

The 128 wisdom-packed pages defy summarizing and must simply be read in their entirety by anyone who desires to find joy in the monotony of daily life at home. Here is one excerpt to whet your appetite:

Not, of course, that everyone goes skipping and whistling about his tasks. The father is not obliged to caper along behind his plow, any more than the mother is called upon to be singing canticles of bliss over the suds all day long. The hour after hour, year after year routine is no doubt unexciting; and more often than not, this "love" of duty takes the form of of simply doing it because it is the next thing...Nobody supposes for a moment that it is all ecstatic. Learning to love is like learning anything else: a great deal of it is a matter of fumbling through the steps until they become automatic and habitual. The saints would tell us that their freedom and joy stand at the far end of long years of getting into habits of Charity. It is not all ecstatic. The household duties of love are very much like our human existence itself: glorious and sparkling when you think of the big things - Creation and Resurrection and the Vision of God; but handed to us from hour to hour, year to year, in muted, plain forms.

Which is the whole point about kitchens, and about households, and about families, and about ordinariness itself. The splendid mysteries are there, acknowledged and celebrated in common-place routines...through which we may glimpse huge vistas of joy. The man following the plow along thousands of miles...or sitting in endless committee meetings, or the woman cooking ten thousand meals and washing a hundred thousand dishes, and both of them doing it, really, for the sake of the other and for their children - are these not cases in point of the vast thing that Charity is about; namely, exchanged life? My Life For Yours? And do Christians not believe that, fully revealed, this Charity will turn out to be ecstatic, hilarious, and splendid beyond all imagining? Otherwise, what is all the imagery of heaven about? It is either a lot of whistling in the dark, an opiate concocted by the worst sort of wizard to keep us meekly at our plows and our stoves, (as Marx and the lib people will have it), or it is True.