A Civil Campaign

I just finished rereading (for maybe the seventh time) the excellent A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold (not Christian, but oh-such-good-fiction - it includes in its merits the one scene in literature that makes me laugh out loud, no matter where I happen to be when I read it, and the most poignant fictional letter I've ever read), and I've been thinking for awhile about something one of the characters says.

Lord Miles Vorkosigan, the main character, is ordered by his emperor to ask his father to give him "that lecture on honor versus reputation he gave me that time." Miles obeys, and what his father ends up telling him is this:

" 'I wouldn't have called it a lecture. Just a useful distinction, to clarify thought.' He spread his hand, palm up, in a gesture of balance. 'Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.' "

I've been thinking about this quotation - this definition, if you will - more than I had before, because I feel like it speaks to something I've been noticing in my life. There is a weird way in which the very physical life of a mother of toddlers (cleaning, playing, changing diapers, carrying, cleaning some more, etc.) forces all of the most important parts of my life to be inward things. When I've had conversations with people recently, I've found myself struggling for things to say. How do you say, "My life is largely made up of menial tasks, but I know more about myself and about God now than I ever have before" without sounding bizarre? And how do you explain that pouring yourself out into a schedule of potty-training, legos, diapers and meal preparation is a path to holiness like none you'd ever before conceived of? What do you do when the changes inside you are so momentous and yet so slow - like the irreparable moving of tectonic plates, the landscape's different but you wouldn't notice unless you could watch it in stop-motion film - that there isn't something new to tell your friends each time you see them?

On the one hand there are the weekly changes in my children ("Look, Gamgee can say "where's Dad?" now!") to point to, or the new, clever housekeeping thing I figured out ("I now know Clorox wipes are great for cleaning out little potties."), but those are only the surface things of my life, and I haven't yet figured out how to talk properly about the bigger things. About how a year ago I was less patient than I am now, but how now I can see how much more patient I'm going to have to become. About how I can better tell when I'm wasting time now, but how the time-wasters that still tempt me are harder to resist? About how Morning Prayer has been a blessing I embrace but somehow when I'm out of my home and at mass, I have trouble praying? About how much I've grown to care about the spiritual development of my children, and how inept I feel in aiding that development along? And that just scratches the surface of the work that I feel my life is about right now.

So I come back to Bujold's definition of honor versus reputation. My reputation right now is small. I'm a stay-at-home mom, and that's most of what most people know about my life. It wouldn't look that impressive in an alumni magazine. (And am I the only one who gets antsy when reading her alumni magazine?) But what I know about myself is that I'm following the vocation the Lord has laid upon me, and I am learning the riches of the love of Christ in my daily work. And, even though it's a harder choice than I ever would have guessed, like Miles and his father, I would choose honor over reputation every time.

But I still want to learn how to talk about big things properly. Writing about them is much, much easier.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. to whet your appetite, here's what Miles' father says a little bit later in that conversation:

" The Count studied his fingernails. 'It could be worse. There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating."