If you’re disabled, you are likely bracing yourself for the season of being treated as though your accommodations are lazy and your holy moderation is slacking. Welcome to pumpkin spice, baking, brightly dyed food, exhausting and time-consuming and inaccessible food producing season! Now with socially manipulative GUILT and EXCLUSION from community! Whether this is your first year with a diagnosis in your family or another round in the long haul, you probably face the stigmas of using accessible foods (cooking nuggets and pizza from the freezer; ordering out; meal prep services; eating very simple foods every day rather than as stop-gaps) and not being able to participate in illness-spreading, loud, chaotic, allergy-rich food-centered events. This post is to give a little perspective to my fellow families with disabilities as well as to those who love you. Your accommodated, accessible, quieter, simpler ways of approaching life are holy and beautiful and good, too. You are not less loved, lovable, or sacred for needing to modify celebrations. You were never called by God to be like the influencers; you were called to be like Christ and His men and women disciples and saints.
Nearly a decade ago, I wrote about the cult of domesticity, the nearly religious practices of keeping home that have the power to hold and heal. But like all good things, domesticity can be twisted into an attempt to gain power over others or to hold oneself in higher esteem than one’s neighbors. There are depths of beauty in the basin when we take up the towel to love others. But when we use our domestic practices as means of control rather than kindness, the twisted towel snaps you, spiraling out to harm the people it was meant to heal.
Perfectionism hisses from the dust-free shadows, “Wouldn’t you be happier if you got rid of everything that allows you to function this well?” It writhes through posts extolling daily elaborate family meals as a sign of spiritual strength and accessible foods as a symptom of spiritual laziness. When the inevitable boasting posts and arrogant presumptions that only certain types of feeding are good (usually applauding elaborate homecooked meals made from scratch by a woman who is described as having a calling to only cook, clean, and rear children in an overfunctioning manner that would have required a retinue of relatives or staff for anyone not trying to live up to this unasked-for, unholy, unneeded ideal), please, please do not take them personally or believe their claims. People who cook AT you or who market lifestyles AT you are not offering gifts FOR you (even and especially if they’re clergy or religious persons pretending like their promotion of “trad” perfectionism is for your own good rather than to ensnare you in a labyrinth of social controls that make you feel bad enough to buy their products). Y’all. Y’ALL. Perfectionism is not what Jesus had in mind when He told us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. He glossed this for us Himself by saying also, be MERCIFUL as your Father is MERCIFUL. Mercy feeds people; it doesn’t require showiness.
Look, the LORD Almighty God fed people bug spit for forty years in the wilderness. Bug. Spit. And heat-stricken birds. Then when the Son became Incarnate, He fed people fish and bread and wine, most of which He multiplied but only some of which He actually cooked. So like ancient lunchables. Sometimes He and His disciples snapped wheat grains out of the field, and we all know He was fond of foraging figs. There’s nothing in the scriptures to suggest that elaborate, inaccessible meals are better than plain, available, simple foods. The discipline was rather to not take more than one needed.
St. Gregory of Nyssa was explicit about how making a show of housekeeping with expensive bowls and implements is as foolish as trying to eat stones instead of bread. You cannot eat your silver platters, he warned us, but since you spent so much on inedible ornaments rather than feeding the poor, you are eating stones instead of bread. Our actions even at table are not for show but for mercy.
Tidy houses do show up in scripture, but not in a straightforward way. We see the woman sweeping only after she lost a coin, Martha chastised for mistaking housework for the highest virtue, and the swept clean house appealing to the demons. God argues with His people for centuries about how He doesn’t even want a house, and then He assigns men (not women) to do the housekeeping.
There’s a lot of pagan nonsense layered over the keeping of houses in the name of being “traditional.” Who does the chores, and more importantly, are they doing chores out of solidarity for a political vision? According to the logic of the trad movement, if I am washing dishes in my kitchen and handing them to my husband to dry, we are only doing it right if we pretend that my husband’s housework is optional and that we are doing chores for the sake of showing off someone’s political vision. This trad vision has nothing to do with what is actually going on: the mutual love and submission to one another that keeps Christ as the head of our household.
A political vision that hides Christ is not a vision at all, but rather like the narcissist who extols the “depths” of a shallow mud puddle because he can see his own shadow on the surface and looks no further. This year as we head into the winter months that have both religious and secular great feasts of domesticity—Thanksgiving, Nicholasfest, St. Lucy’s Day, the Nativity of Christ, St. Basil’s Day, Candlemas—don’t forget that it is not how elaborate your feast, but the love with which you feed that will sanctify your table. Rich or poor, disabled or abled, elaborate or simple, the act of loving another human face and feeding another human person is how we fulfill the greatest commandments.
Summer! Wonderful post.
Thank you!