Keeping Advent: Watching, Working, and Waiting: the duties and vocations of women

My Advent thoughts this week have been prompted by my Bible reading, which is probably a good thing. The St. James Devotional that I use has been taking us through some of the more dire parables in Matthew, and so I've been pondering things like the Parable of the Talents.

Is it a coincidence that in English "talents" means gifts or abilities, and that when I read the Parable of the Talents I can't help but think of "gifts or abilities" rather than "denomination of coin"?

When I think about this parable, what comes to mind first is Milton's sonnet on his blindness, where he complains, "When I consider how my light is spent/Ere half my days in this dark world and wide/And that one talent which is death to hide/Lodged in me useless . . ." He was a writer who couldn't see; what had he to offer God then?

The poem famously leads him to a consideration of the majesty of God, who has thousands upon thousands of other servants to perform whatever acts of service He desires. Milton concludes that God doesn't need him, and yet it is God's good pleasure to have him ready and willing for whatever order may come. Milton concludes, "They also serve who only stand and wait."

And Advent is a season of waiting. So Milton's sonnet seems a fit conclusion for me to reach. I stand and wait.

And yet . . . and yet I know what the blind Milton went on to do: he wrote Paradise Lost in his blindness, dictating each stanza to his daughters. He was willing to only stand and wait, but that wasn't what ended up being required of him.

So.

I said above that my Advent thoughts this week have been prompted by my Bible reading, but that's only part of the truth. They've also been prompted by my Sayers reading; I just reread her powerful collection of essays entitled Are Women Human?

(The answer, in case you're wondering, is "yes.")

These essays, perhaps surprisingly, are largely about work. One of Sayers' primary concerns, in promoting the humanity of women (women, she points out, are human ("homo") first and female ("femina") second) is that they be allowed to do their proper work.

She doesn't insist that every woman everywhere has a special vocation, instead she says:

I have admitted that there are very few women who would put their job before every earthly consideration. I will go further and assert that there are very few men who would do it either. In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

I can't help but be reminded of Sayers' character Harriet Vane, who, when challenged about the "unwomanliness" of her job of writing murder mysteries retorts that her challenger would no doubt rather she did something more feminine, like washing floors. The only problem, says Harriet, is that:

". . . I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job."

The idea of a "proper job" captivates me, probably because I know what mine is. It's to write fiction. (Is there any wonder I go back to Harriet Vane's story again and again?)

And yet I also have my duty - the duty that does come on me not as a human, but as a woman, and as a married woman: the care of house and children. "Duty" sounds cold to our modern ears, but I don't mean it that way. My children are the delight of my heart and my home is the happy center of my earthly universe.  But "duty" in the sense of "the normal tasks appointed in the normal course of things, without which I could not be healthy, well, or sane".

I'm not quite sure what the solution to the problem of vocation and duty is, mostly because I'm not quite convinced that it is a problem. (Clarification: I'm not sure it's a philosophical problem. I do see (oh so clearly!) that it's a practical problem.) I just can't see an earthly reason why it should be "duty versus vocation" rather than the simple "duty and vocation". It feels like the former, sometimes, but I firmly believe that God always gives what He demands, and that it's all a question of how and when and not what.

But there is one section, in the final pages of Are Women Human? that seems to at least frame well the  at-least-apparent-if-not-actual conflict between duty and vocation:

God, of course, may have His own opinion, but the Church is reluctant to endorse it. I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, somewhere, to explain away its text. Mary's, of course, was the better part - the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him. But we will be careful not to despise Martha. No doubt, He approved of her too. We could not get on without her, and indeed (having paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her. For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow . . . Women are not human; nobody shall persuade that they are human, let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead.

Mary was a contemplative. She is, I think, a fitting model for this Advent season, wherein we watch, we work, and we wait.

More Advent thoughts found here, at A Ten O'Clock Scholar.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

ETA: An update on this entry can be found here.