Jeanne DeCelles gave this talk at a women’s leadership training event on the value of making a home and creating a place where Christian life is lived out. She talked about the importance and value of hospitality, being woman of the house, serving and being a helper. This is Part 1 of a two-part talk. “Domesticity Part 2” is available in the File Library.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Tape begins after Jeanne has already begun speaking.]
JEANNE: [“The talk I am going to give this after-”?] . . . -noon is called, for want of anything better to call it, “Domesticity.” But it’s going to cover a lot of different things.
There are a lot of passages in Scripture which are appropriate to this topic, and I’ve selected just a few.Â
The first one is from Sirach 25 (sometimes called Ecclesiasticus):
There are three things my soul delights in, and which are delightful to God and to men: concord between brothers, friendship between neighbors, and a wife and a husband who live happily together.
Again from Sirach 25 (I love this one!):
Low spirits, gloomy face, stricken heart: such are the achievements of a spiteful wife. [Laughter.] Slack hands and sagging knees indicate a wife who makes her husband wretched. [Light laughter.]
“The first thing in life is water, and bread, and clothing, and a house for the sake of privacy.” Sirach 26.
Again, Sirach 26: “A perfect wife”—oh, excuse me.
Happy the husband of a really good wife. The number of his days will be doubled. A perfect wife is the joy of her husband; he will live out the years of his life in peace. A good wife is the best of portions, reserved for those who fear the Lord. Rich or poor, they will be glad of heart, cheerful of face, whatever the season. A bad wife is a badly fitting ox yoke; trying to master her is like grasping a scorpion. [Light laughter.] The grace of a wife will charm her husband; her accomplishments will make him the stronger. Like the sun rising over the mountains of the Lord is the beauty of a good wife in a well-kept house.
Genesis 2: “Yahweh God said it is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helpmate.”
Titus 2:3:
Similarly, the older women are to be teachers of right behavior and show the younger women how they should love their husbands, love their children, how to be sensible and chaste, how to work in their homes and be gentle and do as their husbands tell them . . . (And this is the line I want you to be sure and [sic] hear:) . . . so that the message of God is never disgraced.
That is a very heavy word: to think that because we don’t behave sensible [sic], chaste [sic], love our children, do as our husbands tell us, and work in our homes, we may disgrace the message of God.
The last passage is one you all know well: Proverbs.
A good wife, who can find her? (This is Proverbs 31.) She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not harm all the days of her life. She seeks wool and flax and works with willing hands. She is like the ships of the merchant bringing food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and tasks for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it. With the fruit of her hands, she plants a vineyard. She girds her loins with strength and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. She opens her hands to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of snow for her household, for they are clothed in scarlet. She makes herself coverings. Her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known at the gates, where he sits among the elders. She makes linen garments and sells them and delivers girdles to the merchant. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her. Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all. Charm is deceitful, and beauty vain., but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.
Usually, when people read that passage, they will say something like, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to be all those things all at one time.” But what I want to say is something a little different. [Laughter.]
Having the heart of your husband trust in you, having him praised at the city gates, letting your works praise you in the gates, and giving you the fruit of your hands are the rewards of being a woman like that woman. And while it seems like a very lofty ideal, and though some of the things mentioned are culturally different from the kinds of daily things that most of us do, I think it’s an ideal that we should look to as a possibility, instead of saying, “I don’t have to be that perfect.” It might be better to say, “How wonderful to have my husband trust his heart in me, to have him praised in the city gates, and to do him good all the days of my life.”
I think that we can take that as a real goal—a very challenging one, but also a path to joy for those of us who find ourselves married with children and a house to care for.
I know Paul has a horrible tendency to decide to have everybody in the household stand and face me and read that passage [laughter] on certain occasions, and I always just want to go through the floor, because so little of it applies. But it’s like being honored on your birthday: it makes you really want to be that person that they’re describing. It really stirs up a real desire in your heart for trying to do that. But I find it just horribly humiliating when he does it [Jeanne and all laugh]. [He] never warns me! [Laughter.]
What is the world’s view of domesticity?
Domesticity seems to have fallen into disrepute. In fact, being a helper in any sense of the word has fallen into disrepute. Being a helper to a husband or an employer is seen as something you do until you’re smart enough or successful enough to do something better.
The truth is that in God’s plan, there were not to be two husbands in each marriage. He made a husband and a wife, a man and a helpmate. One is not better than the other.
If you are married, your husband does not need you to be his husband; he needs you to be a wife and a helpmate. If you are working as a support to an employer, that employer, male or female, does not need you to be a co-employer, but rather a helper and a support. If you’re a mother, don’t be a father. The children need you as a mother; they don’t need you as a father.
I began to understand this when my boys were playing football. They weren’t being coached very well, and, the first season they played, they lost every game. They used to say they went . . . defeated. [Laughter.]
During their second season, after the first couple of days (this was at the grade school level), their father, Paul, went out and started to sort of informally coach the team, and they began to do a lot better. But because he was getting involved, I began to get kind of involved. And I got intensely interested in it. And one day, on the way home from the game, when I knew that one of the boys had not played as well as he could, I started to tell him so.
All of a sudden, it was like—I stepped back, and I heard myself talking like I was on the outside of it. And I realized that what that child needed at that moment was a mother, not a father and not a coach. He had a coach, he had a father, but what he needed was for me to be a mother. Which doesn’t mean that I should pamper him or over-mother him. But he certainly didn’t need for me to begin coaching him and telling him how to do it. That isn’t what I was supposed to be doing there.
Webster defines “domesticity” as home and family life, and a fondness for home and family. In other words, it has to do with the place where life is lived.
Now the world will tell you that real life is lived in the marketplace, or in entertainment, or diversions outside the home. Home is where you go when there’s no place else to go. Therefore, what goes into making a home is not all that important. And the person whose sorry lot it is to make a home is not important either. In fact, the world says that homemaking is demeaning; it’s not worthy of anyone intelligent or gifted. It’s not a positive value [sic], and anyone who does this is not to be valued and should probably find more meaningful work as soon as possible.
The scriptural view is that home and family are a high calling. We believe that it will call a woman to all the energy, strength, intelligence, and gifts that she can muster. It is not just a job; it is a mission. And the woman who does it is to be praised in the city gates if she does it well.
But we need to understand that there are a lot of temptations around us. We need to understand where we are in our thinking, where we need to be, and where we may need to repent of any bad attitudes that may have crept in.
Ask yourself: Do you believe that making a home a place where Christian life can be lived is of positive value? Do you think it’s important to create an environment of order and peace and harmony? Do you feel demeaned or resentful by washing another person’s dirty clothes? Does it seem trivial to you to create a nourishing and tasty meal and to serve it in a clean, pleasant, orderly fashion? Or do you value that opportunity to nurture others with both food and a peaceful time, in the middle of their day, when they can enjoy one another and share the news of the day?
Now, it may well be that you do all these things, and you do it well, but it never occurs to you to value your ability to do it well. The world tells you that no one values it. And you may become discontented, and you may begin to feel that your life and your work are of no consequence.
And this can be true if you’re a single woman working in an office. To do that job well is valuable, but the world says you should get on to something better.
But what God said was, “Let us make a helper.” God considers that an important role.
Now later today, we’re going to talk about schedules. But I just want to say that learning to live within the framework of some kind of schedule can do more to create beauty, order, security, harmony, and peace in your life than all the time-saving devices or beautiful furnishings in the world.
The woman of Proverbs has been described like a “Keeper of the Springs.” She created a spiritual entity built out of the imponderable things of the spirit for her husband, for her household helpers, and her children. And, in that home, they obtained a foretaste of heaven. In that kind of home, everyone counts, everyone is loved, and everyone lives a meaningful, peaceful, and responsible life. And that ideal housekeeper in Proverbs lived a meaningful, peaceful and responsible life herself. Her home became a sanctuary. And across its doors, like those of a church, could have been inscribed, “This is none other but the house of God and the gate of heaven.”
I believe that it’s really true that the Holy Spirit cannot dwell in a place that is disturbed by strife, altercations, noisy discourse, or just plain messiness and chaos.
Every so often, I go to the weekday mass in our parish on the same day that the women in the altar society are cleaning the church. I love watching them do it. They’re very thorough. They vacuum, and they dust, and they change the linen on the altar and the candles. And they go about it very quietly and very efficiently, and, it seems to me, very happily. When it’s close to a great feast, there’s a great excitement among them as they move poinsettias and lilies around the sanctuary. It seems to me that they always seem to be trying to make things more and more perfect and more and more beautiful.
I would like to work in my home in the same way. We should always care for our home as the place where dwells the Spirit of God, not with the mentality that we want it to be richer, or more elaborate, or more like the cover of Better Homes and Gardens. That can serve only some need in ourselves, and it may be a neurotic need. It may be pride, or it may be a spirit of comparison with our neighbors’ homes.
One of the psalms says, “Holiness and majesty befit your dwelling.” If God dwells in our homes, then we can find holiness in serving there. And we can invite the Lord there without shame if they are places that are full of peace and order, clean, and full of our love.
We may have to be disciplined about it. Sometimes we say we don’t mind washing dirty socks for someone we love. Sometimes what we mean when we say that is that I’ll do it for my husband, but I don’t want to do it for anybody else who might live in the household. Or it might mean, I don’t mind doing it for you if I feel good about you today, if I feel loving towards you. It has to be spontaneous, right? [Scattered laughter.] But on the days that I’m angry with you, and I don’t feel loving, then I won’t serve you in that way. And this can go all the way from washing socks to getting dinner on the table on time. A lot of women just don’t get dinner on the table on time because they have a lot of hostility towards their husbands. And they don’t even realize that they’re doing it.
What does it mean to rule the household?
Edith Beam, in her book The Bible’s Legacy for Womanhood, says, about some of the women in the Old Testament, “Each seemed to excel in women’s natural sphere, which is to influence, not to command; to entreat, not to threaten; to lead more by example than by precept; and to rejoice in unselfish service.”
Mm-hmmm? [Jeanne seems to be listening to a question from the audience, perhaps a request that she repeat this quotation, which she does here.]
She was talking about women in the Old Testament, and she said, “Each seemed to excel in women’s natural sphere, which is to influence, not to command; to entreat, not to threaten; to lead more by example than by precept; and to rejoice in unselfish service.”
This really goes against everything in the women’s liberation philosophy: to influence rather than command; to entreat, not to threaten; to lead more by example than by precept; and, worst of all, to rejoice in unselfish service.
What does it mean to rule a household?
Sometimes it’s easier to tell you what it does not mean. Ruling the household does not mean ruling over everyone in it. It does not mean that the house should reflect only your personality in its decoration and its arrangement. It does not mean that meals should suit only your tastes without consideration of others. It does not mean the tyranny of a woman who makes everyone uncomfortable while the house is in apple-pie order.
What does it mean?
It means—and now don’t try to copy this all down [Jeanne chuckles]—it means taking responsibility for the overall appearance, order, peace, and harmony in the home. And if you are not the head of that home, it means doing that under the headship of the person who is the head.
For instance, in the sist- —one of the sisterhood houses at home, one of the women is head of the household. But another woman is called the “woman of the household.” And those responsibilities that I just listed are hers. But she does them under the headship of the woman who is the head of the house. And I do it under the headship of my husband, who is the head of the house.
“Ruling” the household means that you, at least, are not overwhelmed by all the demands that are made on the household, and that you can sort out priorities and create an environment in which Christian life and the work of the kingdom can be carried on. It means that you will instruct and explain and show by example how to clean a house; how to cook a meal; how to set a table; how to do laundry efficiently and in an orderly way; how to shop and stay within an ever-shrinking budget; how to keep a house clean and orderly without nagging everybody; and how to do all of that and remain cheerful and able to deal with emergencies which will rearrange your whole day [laughter]; how to brew a wonderful cup of tea or a bracing cup of coffee; how to provide hospitality that is warm, gracious, and comfortable, if not elegant; how to store winter and summer clothes so that they are not lost forever [laughter]; how to store thousands of clothes, toys, groceries, tools, books, more toys, and supplies, so that they can be found and used when needed. That’s all. [Laughter.]
“Ah,” you say [Jeanne chuckles], “if I’m supposed to tell other people how to do that, and instruct them and help them to know how to make a house that looks and feels and smells and tastes that good, I’d better learn to do all those things and be all those things myself.”
But what I really want to say is that what you need to do is appreciate the value of doing those things . . . and to convey that belief that it’s of value to the women who live in the household with you.
Now, for icing on the cake, you can also learn to sew, and garden, and how to make things, and decorate the house, and celebrate the seasons of the year. But there may be times in your life when you have to give up your sewing projects or crafts, which are dear to your heart, because when people come in the back door at six o’clock at night, they need a warm meal, served in a clean, orderly place, more than they need green plants, homemade slipcovers, or beautiful wall hangings.
You will have to make some judgments and some choices. And they will usually have to be dictated by love and by the needs of other people. And when you get right down to it, those are the choices that Jesus made. He chose what serves our needs, and he did what he did because of love.
Now I want to talk a little bit about hospitality.
My mother always dreaded having what she called “company.” It always sounded like it was in large capital letters, and surrounded with large clouds or something. When my mother had company, everything went well. But the whole thought of having guests would throw her into great turmoil.
Now I think it’s safe to say that our home was always in good order, and my mom always seemed to accomplish that without making much noise about it. She didn’t talk much about housework. And you didn’t get the feeling that you were living in a highly waxed and polished environment. We were expected to be neat and orderly, but I really don’t ever remember her teaching me per se to do that. Our clothes were always clean and ready and ironed—she ironed everything. And she did most of the work in the house by herself. I don’t recommend that. I think we really need to train our children. But somehow, she did manage to instruct us, too. I don’t really understand how. . . .
But anyway, getting back to her attitude about hospitality. Since her house was always in good order, it made me wonder why sometimes she’d get so upset about hospitality. I decided rather early in my married life that it was important for me to think about it, because I was exactly the same way. And what I realized was that that attitude toward hospitality was rooted in a false notion of what hospitality is.
I have learned a lot about hospitality by being a guest. I know that when I spend time in someone else’s home, I’m there to spend time with them, and I don’t come to judge what a perfect housekeeper my hostess is. I don’t expect fresh flowers and elegant linen and snowy white tablecloths and expensive china and sterling silver. I love those things, and I delight in them. But the basics—a clean bed, my own towels where I can find them, a warm meal, and jolly company—are the things that I come for. If there’s a small vase of flowers, a good book, some fresh fruit, or even a carafe of wine on our dresser when Paul and I visit someplace, that’s just an extra. And it’s very nice. But you don’t have to do very much, really, to show hospitality.
It’s good to be imaginative, and it’s good to be creative. And we should do everything we can to honor our guests and to please them. But it doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect. It doesn’t have to be a page out of a magazine. It’s the hospitality that counts, and that’s something of the Spirit. It’s not something in your house.
I had to learn hospitality very quickly during the summer of 1967. We received the baptism in the Spirit in March. And I recall that summer as being a time when I had barely changed the linen on a bed before someone was coming in the front door needing that bed.
It was a wild summer. And when we look back on it now, we often laugh about the things that happened to us that summer. And I laugh about how I had to change my mind about how everything had to be just perfect before anybody came to visit.
I learned that being too concerned about extra people for meals or people to sleep over was not the best way to serve them. Being able to smile and say, “Fine; we can do it” was very hard for me at first, and I just had to change my mind. And God needed me to change my mind along with the bed linens to be able to just take care of anybody who needed to be taken care of!
I think that Dorothy and Kevin estimate that they prayed with something like—I don’t . . . want to exaggerate this, but it was in the thousands. Literally thousands of people came through Notre Dame that summer and were prayed with for the baptism in the Spirit. And a lot of them were people who needed hospitality. And I had no time to get mentally prepared and psyched up just to have it the way it ought to be. We all had to just learn fast.
Later on, when we began having prayer meetings in our house, my approach to it was, “Well, we’ll have them here, but I don’t want anything in the house to change. I don’t want us to have to move furniture every week. I don’t want to have to change the way we live in the house in order to have prayer meetings here.”
Well, it didn’t take very long for me to see that you couldn’t have prayer meetings, even in our large family room, without moving everything around. We got into a routine of moving a certain couch to a certain place, and it just became second nature. We disrupted everything in the house, every seven days. And at first, it was something that I just never thought I’d do.
When the prayer meetings moved out of our house, there were very few spots in the carpeting that didn’t have big holes in it [sic]. You could see the floor literally through the carpet. We went through one couch completely. And Paul was going downstairs every Tuesday night after the meeting to check the joists and see if the ceiling in the basement was getting weak.
But I know that the Lord blessed that house, and blessed us richly. And I still look at that room, and I think, “This is where all those neat things happened.” But I really had to change my mind. I mean, we literally had people from the back door of the house all the way through the family room, into the kitchen, into the dining room, and into the living room. There were a hundred people coming there by the time we moved them out.
We had a prayer room in the basement—no, we had Life in the Spirit seminars in the basement before there was such a thing as Life in the Spirit seminars. We had a prayer room upstairs in one of the bedrooms. I can remember praying with somebody in one of the bathrooms in the hall upstairs. And I remember one man having an epileptic seizure on the floor in the kitchen and carrying him up the stairs and putting him in our bedroom while we prayed with him up there.
I mean, you just gotta change your mind about some things! [Laughter.]
However, if your house is basically well kept, then it will be thrown into less turmoil when something unexpected happens, such as a child needing 16 stitches at 4:00 in the afternoon, a stranded traveler, extras for dinner, a wonderful flood in the basement, or a broken oven door. If things run pretty well Monday through Thursday, then Friday’s disasters will not bring everything to a standstill, and life can still go on peacefully.
But that means that you have to be willing to lay down your life. It means that you see order as a real value that’s worth laying down your life for. You may have to give up a lot of your spontaneity. And you will certainly have to utilize every gift you have to make it go well. It means that you may have to start writing up menus and shopping lists, that you have to assign chores and schedule housecleaning and laundry, because order just doesn’t happen automatically. You have to work at it. You have to be diligent, and you have to put your back into it. You have to endure, and you have to not grow weary or discouraged—which is a temptation, because, let’s face it, most of the time, the only housework that is noticed is that which you do not do. [Laughter.] And all housework can really be depressing, because it has to be done again . . . and again . . . and again. And the only way that you’re going to triumph in all of this is to get your mental attitude in the right place: to set your heart on the Lord and on doing His will in all things.
Folding laundry can be a real drag, but it doesn’t require your total concentration. It can be a great time to put your feet up and rest, to organize things mentally, to make lists, to chat with the Lord, or chat with a child. Ironing can be a good time for all those things too; my mother gave me all my sex information while she was ironing [laughter]. She ironed everything: shorts, bras, dish towels . . . everything! [Laughter.] I must have taken a long time [laughter]—I was a slow study [Jeanne chuckles]—but I’d come home from school, and she would almost always have that ironing board set up in the dining room. And I’d sit at the dining room table and eat something, and we’d talk. And that’s where I learned almost everything that I learned about sex.
The work that we do in the home is essential. It’s crucial to the work of the kingdom. I don’t think we always think of it that way. But if chaos reigns in our home, then those who live in the home will go from one battlefield to another, instead of going from a battlefield to a haven of refreshment and peace.
Now I’m going to talk a little bit about household living. By this I mean extended family living.
Ruling a household, or being the woman of the house, is almost as difficult as being the head of the house. It was very hard for me, when we expanded our household, to let go of being the only woman in the house. [Slowly and dramatically:] I . . . cooked . . . every meal. I . . . cleaned . . . every inch. I . . . did . . . all the laundry—I can’t believe it, but I did all the laundry—and I did all the shopping. When we moved into common financial sharing, I . . . did . . . all the spending. And I found that very hard because, for a long time, I kept track of whose money, you know, I was spending on what. And I didn’t want to spend Patricia’s money on groceries, for instance. I mean, I just did all these mental gymnastics for a while.
In the meantime, the two single women who lived with us weren’t learning anything about how to be women in the house. They weren’t learning how to rule a household. They weren’t even learning how to clean a bathroom! I . . . was . . . the queen! The queen of the latrine! [Laughter.] The queen of the kitchen, and the ruler of the menus and the washing machine. And all the time, the house remained my . . . house.
As I told you yesterday, after you’ve spent six hours stripping and waxing the floor, it becomes your . . . floor. Clean bathrooms are the same way. You put in the time on your hands and knees, that bathroom is yours—until it gets dirty again. When it was dirty, it was the girls’ bathroom, or the men’s bathroom, or the upstairs bath, or the downstairs bath . . . but once it was cleaned by me, it became my bathroom. [Laughter.]
Now, that’s the wrong way to speak about anything in household. But the point is, there was a certain amount of truth in it. As long as I was doing all the work in the house, in a certain sense, it was my house. And the people who lived there did not regard it as their house. And they’ll not feel free to hang a picture, move a chair, ask for a special food, or do any of the things that make a house a home for a person.
So if you find that the singles in your household do not spontaneously empty an overflowing wastebasket, or mop up a spill on the floor that you didn’t notice yet, that they don’t notice their room is dusty, or that the laundry is piling up, maybe it’s because those things are not their responsibility. After all, it’s your house, isn’t it?
I justified my doing everything by saying, “After all, they work all day. And I owe it to them to do the work of the house.” And I persisted in this fantasy for two years. I can’t believe it! [Jeanne and all laugh.] Finally, one of the women got brave enough to offer to do a task that I really hated: vacuuming. And furthermore, she offered to do it every week. And I really grooved on that after I got used to it! And then it began to be her house too.
I don’t make that same kind of mistake anymore. But I do feel that even now, I need to learn, more and more every day, ways of making it be our house and less of my house.
Sometimes you hear this come out in conversations with women where they talk about—maybe they don’t have a household, but they talk about the house, you know: “my house . . . I need to go home and clean my house,” or, “we’re going to decorate my house,” or something like that. And I think that that’s dishonoring to the person who shares that house with us, especially if it’s her husband. It’s not her house. It’s their house! But we tend to think if we do all the work in it, that it just automatically becomes ours.
We have a large bulletin board in our kitchen, and I put up lots of pictures because Paul is a camera freak. And I try to mix the pictures up and make sure that everybody’s represented there. But one thing I noticed is that there are a lot of pictures of our children all over the house, and there aren’t any pictures of the singles as children. So I’ve been encouraging them; some of them a little more readily than others are putting up pictures of themselves as children.
We need to really look for ways to make it less like they’re just boarding there. Because if they’re just boarding there, that’s a good and useful thing, but that isn’t what household is all about.
The woman of the house should not just instruct the other women about household duties, but she can also learn from them. How would they like the house to be?
We had a family live with us for about six months. And—I like to tell this story because I think it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.
I grew up with the idea that pickles were a special food. And we only had pickles on holidays. There were always pickles for Thanksgiving, for instance, but just to go out and buy a jar of pickles?! You know, they were just really something special. And it seemed outrageously extravagant to me when this other woman—when this family moved in—was accustomed to giving her children dill pickles for snacks! We were in common financially, so we were buying groceries in common. When I sat down to think about it, though, I realized how much more practical and wise it was to eat pickles for snacks than the things that I had around the house for snacks, and I really couldn’t argue with it. It was right, and I just had to repent in my attitude about dill pickles. [Laughter.] It’s a small thing, but those are the things that make life harder or easier.
Being “woman of the house” does not mean that the only way to do things is the way you do them. Ultimately, you may have to make decisions, and some of them may be unpopular, but you do need to talk about them. For instance, when it comes to decorating a house, I think, you know, if one of the singles in the house wanted to paint the living room red, that I would probably be justified in saying “No—because you may move, and I have to live with it.” But on the other hand, you do need to bring them into those kinds of decisions, not just make them.
You have to relinquish your reluctance to teach your sisters. If you don’t love them enough to tell them how you want things done, then you don’t love them enough. If you’re willing to teach, they’ll be much happier, especially if no one’s ever taught them. We’ve had women come into our household who have never been taught to cook or clean. They don’t know how to set a gracious table.
And you should show hospitality to your household and family. You should set a pleasant table every night, not just on “company nights.” I know—one woman that I was in a handmaid relationship with—they had lots of little kids, and her husband had this idea that they should just put a limited amount on the table. And so they didn’t put a full set of silverware on the table, for instance. And it took a little work to kind of work with them and persuade them that that’s how people learn about how to be gracious, you know, is to learn that at home. And you really should set your table just about as carefully for your family and your household as you do when you have guests.
When things aren’t going well in the household—say, for instance, at dinnertime, there seems to be a lot more confusion than usual, and things aren’t getting done in an orderly way; or if there’s a sense of disorder—try to figure out what’s going wrong. Try to understand what you could do differently there to make it go better.
Sometimes if you have time, it’s good for the women in a household to meet together on a regular basis. That way, you can talk about some of these problems as they come up and try to find some solutions. I’d like to meet with the women in my household every week in that way. But usually, we don’t. I head both of them, and I meet with them for headship, but I don’t—we don’t meet together to talk about things in the household, and I think it would be a good thing to do . . . because that gives everybody a chance to learn about being “woman of the house.”
Being a woman in a household carries this set of blessings and problems. A single woman in a household can feel very isolated, especially if she is the only woman besides the wife of the head. She’s going to feel left out sometimes. And the married couple need to take responsibility to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
But if it does happen, the single woman should make her feelings known. A frank discussion should follow, and everyone should make an effort to alleviate the problem of isolation and loneliness.
For instance, the married couple should clearly be affectionate, and even publicly affectionate. It’s a good and wholesome thing, for instance, for children to see affection between parents. However, there is affection and there is affection. [Laughter.] Passionate embraces and titillating conversations can be very much out of place. And they can intensify a single person’s feelings of being an outsider.
In addition, singles in a household have need of—and can reasonably expect, and should receive—a lot of affection. They need a hug when they come home at night too. They need affectionate help and loving care, and it should be lavished on everyone in the household.
I have been blessed immeasurably by all the women who have shared our household. And I think it’s safe to say that at least three of my very closest friends are women who have lived there. And I know that my children, especially my daughters, have been blessed by the presence of other women in our—in their daily lives.
My daughters were born underprivileged. I cannot sew. I get . . . just absolutely undone by anything more complicated than a cross stitch, and I get emotionally exhausted sewing on buttons. [Laughter.] But we’ve had many fine seamstresses share our house, and both my girls can do these things. I couldn’t give them that, and God, in his mercy, provided it.
We had a birthday celebration a few years ago that I remember in a special way. It was our daughter’s birthday. And one of the single women who had moved out of our household—but who, incidentally, has now moved back in since I wrote this talk—came to share the occasion with us. When we celebrate birthdays in the household, we usually do it on a Saturday. And we use our sharing time, during the regular Lord’s Day celebration, as a time to honor the person whose birthday we’re celebrating. So we used this time to honor both of these women: our daughter and this woman who had lived with us, because her birthday was close.
There wasn’t a dry eye left in the house when we were through. And I was so glad and so touched, first of all, by the way all my children, male and female, shared about how much they love their sister Jeannette, but also how much they love this woman who had lived with us, and by the way that they shared what they meant—what everybody meant to everybody else. I was so blessed by the love that each of my children cherished, not only for their sister, but for this other sister who had lived with us. Even the boys said beautiful and touching things that showed that they really had a strong love and affection for her. They remembered the time that she lived with us as a very special time in their lives. And that really built me up, because I remember how I felt so threatened when we extended our household. And one of the first things I thought was, “What will happen to my children?”
[Recording ends here.]
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