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Article Excerpt
FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S short story "The Lame Shall Enter First" is not often read by literary critics as a "family values" story, but ordinary readers often hear it as a warning to parents who sacrifice their children for the sake of important work. In their view, this story calls for a reexamination of what it means to be a parent. Sheppard, the father in the story, is a respectable middle-class widower who works as a city recreational director and volunteers as a counselor at a reform school for boys on the weekends. He has a burning desire to help disadvantaged children to improve themselves and he eventually invites a difficult boy named Rufus to come and live with him and his eleven-year-old son. Gradually it becomes clear that Sheppard is entranced with his own good mission to Rufus, so entranced that he allows his son to grieve his dead mother alone. One morning at breakfast, in an attempt to inspire some compassion in his son Norton, Sheppard tells him that he is lucky his mother is not in the state penitentiary like Rufus's mother. Norton dissolves into tears, saying, "If she was in the penitentiary, I could go to seeeeee her." (1) His father tells him to stop being selfish and to grow up. Throughout the story, Sheppard puts a great deal of effort into saving Rufus, while ignoring the silent grieving of his own son. Near the end of the story, when faced with Rufus's ultimate rejection, he claims: "I have nothing to reproach myself with ... I did more for him than I did for my own child," (2) and fails to see the irony. For most readers, the failure of a father to care for his own son is obvious. Norton is left alone to make sense of his mother's death, Rufus is brought into the house to take away what is left of Shepherd's attention, and, at the end of the story, Shepherd finds Norton hanging in his room. This story of an ordinary, fallen, or lame human being is a perfect illustration of Flannery O'Connor's famous pessimism about human nature. (3)
Students in my classes read the story and find it easy to see parallels with their own lives. Many speak of parents who put their children second and their work first. The anguish in their voices is unmistakable. They know well the failures of parents to love their children. Suicide may be an extreme response, but the pain that inspires it is apparently widespread. Perhaps then it is legitimate to take O'Connor's story as a prophetic word about the duties of parenthood.
However, it seems to me that the story is not really about the importance of sacrificing social responsibilities for one's family. Rather, O'Connor is telling a story about a man who fails to connect with two boys--one, his own, and one whom he tries to adopt. Ultimately, he can save neither boy. Like most of O'Connor's tragic characters, Sheppard is not a good Christian. Sheppard's sin is not failing to put his family first, it is failing to be Christ-like. He ignores Rufus's concern with the state of his soul, forfeiting his trust, and fails to comfort his suffering son, forfeiting his life. He does not meet Christ or put on Christ at home or in the world.
If this interpretation is correct, why do my students so often read the story as a cautionary tale for parents who fail their children? Something in American culture makes it easy to see Sheppard's failings as a parent in the home but difficult to see his failings as a parent in the world. In America today, "family first" is nearly a sacred value. Most people agree that prioritizing family is the moral thing to do. One often hears the adage: "Nobody on his deathbed wished he had spent more time at the office." Media accounts of executives leaving corporate life to be with young children receive a great deal of attention. Ordinary families mourn their business and long for the time to put their own families first. Even in the presidential campaign of 2000, both Al Gore and George W. Bush were lauded as good fathers who put their families first. In fact, those who gave their nomination speeches emphasized the fatherly qualities of the nominees over and above their political positions, accomplishments, and goals. More recently, a popular billboard reads: "There's a reason most people don't have pictures of the office at home." That the sign is part of a "values" campaign by a large corporation apparently is an irony lost on most admirers. At any rate, the idea that family first is a claimed American value seems reasonable enough.
More comprehensive evidence for the prevalence of the "family first" ideal is available in the recent book Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think about Working Parents. Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute published there the results of a national survey of over 1000 third to twelfth graders and 600 parents. Galinsky reports that most working parents whom she and her colleagues interviewed claim to put their families first. A small percentage of parents admit that they do not, but Galinsky suggests that children of these parents are more likely to be dissatisfied. (4) According to her study, parents can avoid problems by prioritizing family.
What does this mean? It is not always clear, for the value "family first" is not connected to a specific practice. Certainly, for most Americans, prioritizing family does not mean quitting work. Galinsky argues: "It is not that we work, but how we work." In other words, the problem is not that parents have commitments other than their children, it is that children are not their top priority. Children, according to Galinsky, need to feel that their parents' work is not more important than they are. As one girl interviewed by Galinsky wrote: "I think the thing that goes on with kids is: 'Wouldn't you rather be with me than do this other thing?' I want my mother to like her job, but not more than she loves me." (5) According to Galinsky, children are more likely to give their mothers high grades when they feel that they are managing the work-family balance successfully and putting their families before their jobs most of the time. (6) Sacrificing everything for the sake of one's children is not necessary. One simply has to put them first.
On the other hand, one could argue that Americans do not seem to put family first in any meaningful way, for they spend much of their most precious commodity--their time--away from their children. Even when parents are around, they are often not fully present. The image of a family trying to eat dinner while cell phones and beepers compete for attention has become a cliche. This image is a powerful illustration of how much Americans have allowed work to invade their family lives. Despite the near universal acceptance of family first as a value, clearly, families do not always come first in the lives of most Americans, and most parents are aware of this inconsistency. The Flannery O'Connor story works as a guilt-inducer because it taps into both the "family first" value and the justifiable parental fear that they are selling their kids short.
As a Christian theologian, I am interested both in the vigor and frequency with which Americans claim this value (even those who work long hours rarely say they put family second) and in widespread parental worries that they are not doing enough (even parents who profess confidence in their choices often fear that they have not sacrificed enough for children). Most American parents want to work, yet they also want to have the kind of strong emotional ties to their children that will ensure enduring relationships. They do not want to end up like Sheppard.
Part of the problem may be the lack of a language to express the pull of dual responsibilities that most parents feel. It seems there is a choice. One may take the moral high ground and value "family first," or one may join the undistinguished ranks of inattentive parents glued to their offices and cell phones by valuing work first and family second. I would argue that the Christian tradition, exemplified by O'Connor correctly read, offers a different way of talking and thinking about parenting. The tradition points toward the ideal of a dual vocation for Christian parents that calls parents to be Christians at home and in the world. In this article I will (1) show that the concept of dual vocation is implicit in the work of contemporary theology but in need of explication; (2) explore both sides of the dual vocation (nurture of children and work for the common good); (3) ask whether the idea of a split vocation is more compelling; and (4) conclude with cautious advocacy of dual vocation.
DUAL VOCATION IN THE WORK OF PRESENT-DAY THEOLOGIANS
While the concept of dual vocation is assumed in much of contemporary Christian theology, a full articulation remains necessary because theologians tend to emphasize one aspect of the dual vocation at the expense of the other, thereby impoverishing their family ethics. Methodist theologian Stephen Post is a good example of a theologian who focuses his energy on calling parents back to their nurturing role. In response to what he characterizes as a current crisis of the family, he asserts that parents must own their vocation to parenting. Implying that men and women will play different roles, he writes; "My own parental experience tells me that the relationship that my daughter and son have with their mother is qualitatively different from their relationship with me." (7) While affirming the existence of differences, Post does not give them a central place in his parenting ethic. Rather, his emphasis is on the need for parents to care for their children and in arguing for "models of co-parenting, in which both mother and father are deeply bonded with their children." (8) Post's ideal of co-parenting with different but significant roles for men and women is a key part of his attempt to restore family to its proper place in society. (9)
In choosing this emphasis on the nurturing half of the parenting vocation, Post leaves himself vulnerable on two counts. First, although he obviously wants to argue for a progressive family model, his stress on parenting and his acknowledgment of gender differences can be read as advocacy of a more traditional family model. Without the idea of dual vocation for both parents, a parent's (especially a mother's) choice to take up socially important work seems harder to justify. Second, the stress on nurture of one's own over service to others has the effect of making parenting more of a private vocation. Although Post does write also of the Christian family's responsibilities to those outside the family circle, he is more concerned with the right ordering of loves. Citing his own failure to put second his work with Alzheimer's patients when his young son needed him, and discussing the problems of other overcommitted parents, he seeks to reemphasize the duty to care for kin. (10) The overall effect is to minimize the responsibilities of parents (especially mothers) to non-family members.
Women theologians writing on parenting tend to question the idea of role differences more deeply than Post and to devote more energy to arguing for dual-career marriages in which both spouses have significant commitments outside the family. In her book Family: A Christian Social Perspective, Catholic ethicist Lisa Sowle Cahill does this in a subtle way by focusing less on parenting and...
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