Dorothy Day on Christopher Closeup, Part I
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Dorothy Day on Christopher Closeup, Part I
a friend posted this on facebook…
Tobias Jones: why I’m setting up a woodland commune
But we’ve never wanted our children to be brought up surrounded by the most privileged in society. If anything, we hope for exactly the opposite. We don’t want to pretend life is a breeze and insulate them against suffering. We want them to see it early and learn what might be done to mitigate it. Over the years we’ve met many children brought up on comparable shelters and their maturity and humanity, their gentility and empathy, are astonishing. The hope is that our children, too, will learn about vulnerability when they’re still living in a warm, loving home; that they will, over the years, begin to learn about addiction, displacement, bereavement, poverty, prison and so on. That, to us, seems much more important than A-level results or a good degree.
And I suppose I say that because I’m very skeptical about the modern, gated, defensive definition of family. While I believe passionately in the importance of family, I think the two-generational nuclear family – “two up, two down” – is an abnormal sociological departure of the 20th century. It is one of the primary causes of rampant consumption because every little unit of human beings has to buy all the appliances and expensive gadgets and toys, many of which are only used once in a blue moon. The nuclear family has created an epidemic of depression and stress because there’s simply not enough time for two adults to do all the work to earn the money to pay for the nanny to do shopping to feed the children and so on. The modern, narrow definition of the word has turned the family – once a castle of inclusivity – into an excuse for exclusivity. Nowadays the phrase “I’ve got to think about my family” invariably means “screw you”. I’ve come to believe in another F word, which seems closer to the older, almost Mediterranean, sense of family: fellowship. As William Morris wrote in A Dream of John Ball, ‘fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death”.
