- Feb 5, 2002
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I’ve chosen to use the short version of today’s Gospel. Nothing against the long version—it gives the full story and the Gospel passage most associated with Candlemas, with Simeon and the Nunc Dimittis, the prophetess Anna, the prophecy about the sword piercing Mary’s heart, and so on. What I like about the short version is not that it is short—in fact, maybe it is a little too short—but that it so well captures the main theme of today’s feast of the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph were obedient to the law of the Lord.
Obedience. That’s it right there—perhaps the least popular concept in the twenty-first-century West. Practical obedience is all over the place, but people don’t go around saying they are “obedient” to the latest social whims. They just suddenly realize that they’re woke and think it was their idea all along to do what the crowd is doing. Obedience is something for the dark ages, for feudal lords, for out-of-date religious traditions, for oppressive dictatorships.
Until, that is, you start having children, and you realize that if they don’t learn obedience, you will. But this sits awkwardly with the postmodern conscience, because the postmodern conscience doesn’t really believe in sin, much less original sin, so that instinct toward order and obedience can’t be rationally discussed, and we end up with the never-ending chain of irrational parent guilt, parent-shaming, and parent anxiety.
Continued below.
www.catholic.com
Obedience. That’s it right there—perhaps the least popular concept in the twenty-first-century West. Practical obedience is all over the place, but people don’t go around saying they are “obedient” to the latest social whims. They just suddenly realize that they’re woke and think it was their idea all along to do what the crowd is doing. Obedience is something for the dark ages, for feudal lords, for out-of-date religious traditions, for oppressive dictatorships.
Until, that is, you start having children, and you realize that if they don’t learn obedience, you will. But this sits awkwardly with the postmodern conscience, because the postmodern conscience doesn’t really believe in sin, much less original sin, so that instinct toward order and obedience can’t be rationally discussed, and we end up with the never-ending chain of irrational parent guilt, parent-shaming, and parent anxiety.
Continued below.
How to Submit, and Enjoy It
Obedience to God, and to one another, is not, as the world would have us believe, an assault on our freedom. On the contrary, it is the most freeing.
