Friday, October 31, 2003
(8:51 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Meh-widge.
Last night at RCIA, we discussed the sacraments of matrimony and holy orders. The sister who was leading the discussion seemed to be dead-set on making marriage into the sacrament of romance, and I ruined the party by pointing out that "matrimony" has its root in the Latin for "mother," and that the point of marriage is not to close the couple in on themselves, but rather to be open to others, specifically to children. I ventured the guess that the emphasis on romance leads to an overload that might even contribute to the high divorce rate. Perhaps the lack of birth control, and the resultant many children, might also help to keep the family from becoming a closed-in, Freudian nightmare -- the children just kind of arrive, instead of being the next step up from having a dog. The emphasis in a large family would have to be on training up the children in the way they should go, rather than in fulfilling the parents' own emotional needs. This is not to say that the parents' emotional needs would not be fulfilled, but just pointing out that direct responsibility for that kind of thing is not fair to a child.
But I don't really know anything about marriage, except what I've read -- which is almost always about how marriages fail, whether overtly or covertly. I'm exaggerating slightly, and I'm sure the literary record is biased against truly successful marriages, since nothing makes for great literature quite like depression and hopelessness. Oh, I mean "gritty realism."
I wish we could go back to the days when academic jobs were more readily available and more secure and when you were allowed to sleep with your students.
In another note, Doonsbury this week has been all about one of the college-age characters being caught looking at porn. It's really bizarre.
