Cooking for your family as “tyranny” or as “vocation”

Last updated on: September 12, 2014 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Cooking for your family as “tyranny” or as “vocation” 2014-09-11T14:06:44-04:00 Gene Veith

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Slate has published a column by Amanda Marcotte on “the tyranny of the home-cooked family dinner.” She cites surveys that show how hard and stressful it is for women to live up to the ideal of the whole family sitting down together for a home-cooked meal and concludes that cooking –a task that falls disproportionally on women–is “expensive and time-consuming and often done for a bunch of ingrates who would rather just be eating fast food anyway.”

Mollie Hemingway—who just joined the First Things stable of web columnists–answers this column, slicing and dicing its feminist assumptions. But she does acknowledge that cooking and other domestic tasks can be frustrating, tedious, and challenging. Whereupon she then gives her readers a crash course in the doctrine of vocation, including one of Luther’s best quotations on the subject, how the trials of family life are connected to the blessings of God.

Normally I will quote the beginning of an article and then give a link to “Keep reading.” This time I will do the opposite. First I will urge you to read Mollie Hemingway’s piece in the Federalist: 7 Important Things Slate Misses In Its Attack On Home-Cooked Meals.

Now I quote her conclusion, including the quotation from Luther’s “Estate of Marriage” (1522):

Who knew that having a family was so difficult? Oh, all those women who were told they were oppressed by being homemakers and were promised liberation by feminists only to find out that they now have to work all the time, frequently with no spouse, and come home and take care of the kids? Yeah, those women and their daughters know that cooking is difficult. As do all the fathers who help share the burden of providing meals for a family to eat.

But instead of looking at it as just a burden, we should look at is a holy blessing. It’s funny to read Martin Luther on this topic because he sounds so modern. He notes that married men might complain, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves?” How to view this, he asks? He says to view it as a holy blessing. “I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.”

We should view the drudgeries of all life — drudgeries we all experience in one way or another — as holy blessings. We get to serve God by serving each other. So when we have to make the eleventy billionth meal in a row, we can either lament our sad condition or view it as an opportunity to do good for others.

I know, not a typical feminist viewpoint and not a typical American viewpoint. But it’s amazing how much more enjoyable the home-cooked meal (and home-changed diaper, and home-delivered kiss, and home-laundered clothing and home-swept floor and home-based cuddle) is when we consider how blessed we are to be doing what’s right for our children and other family members.

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