Weddings, Children, and Consumption

"The way that young Protestant couples plan their weddings bodes very ill for the kind of family they are hoping to become. You watch what a wedding is often about these days — it is about displaying one’s wealth to those one is eager to impress. If you think instead about the scriptural wedding itself, about being the open banquet that one hopes one’s marriage will be, I think weddings would look a lot different than they do. I think they would be on a Sunday morning service where everyone is invited. I think they would look more like a potluck than the kind of catered extravagances toward which even the middle class is climbing. I think the image of the banquet where the blind and the lame are invited, and those who cannot repay us, that image would be one in which to start a marriage."

~Amy Laura Hall

Definitely some good thoughts.  I hope to someday have this kind of wedding.
And I kinda wish all weddings were so open like this!  I love attending them, and I think the above paints such an incredible picture.  So counter-cultural.  That's what Christians are supposed to be, right (at least especially in this very good sense of this example)?


My other favorite part from this interview:

"TOJ: Is it wrong then to even have the approach that I shouldn’t have as many kids because then I could then be more hospitable toward those children who need good parents, who need resources…?

ALH: So are you asking should you use contraception and adopt children? Or use contraception so you could give more money to your church and tithe?

TOJ: Well I guess I am asking both of those things, but those both seem somewhat a-moral now that they have been articulated…

ALH: (laughs) Well its not that those questions are obscene, but even as you ask such questions to be troubled by them, I think is to be asking the right sorts of questions. When you ask as you also simultaneously think, “ah is that the right question to ask”… that’s the right question to ask. To ask whether or not that is the right question to ask is already doing so much more than most young couples are doing when they are thinking about having children. What they’re thinking about when they are having children is crafted not by their faith but by the book, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. They’re going to stick with all the rules in What To Expect To When You’re Expecting, because What To Expect When You’re Expecting tells you that if you adhere to these rules you will have a child of the promise. That’s why their little tiny section at the back of the book about the unexpected, or unanticipated child with disabilities comes as such a jarring little section. Up until that point you have been reading that if you do all of these things right, you will not have the “dreaded” child, the child that is unexpected.

So what you usually have couples doing is buying these books and trying to anticipate all that they can do so that they can have a beautiful and flourishing child by all the definitions that we perceive in our society to describe a beautiful and flourishing child. That will continue your beautiful image of your flourishing beautiful family. And so even to ask questions about what images one has in view for having children goes a long way towards being more faithful. Just asking questions, why, why do you want to have kids? What do we have children for? A Mennonite colleague asked that right to my face at a conference — that we need to ask what are children for. He explained to the group that, in the Mennonite tradition, children are born for martyrdom. (And at that point I was thinking, that’s why you’re a Mennonite and I’m not.) But, to even say that, to witness that in the Mennonite tradition you have children so that they can bring witness in a cruciform way to Christ’s love, that’s a whole different set of questions than the questions mainline Evangelicals usually ask.

TOJ: The question of, “what are children for”, is this idea to have a perfect child, and to have the child in a very controlled way, to give this child everything that he or she needs and to give the child every advantage possible… is there kind of an approach to children in this country that seems Savior-esque, with this objectification does there also come a kind of idolatry of children?

ALH: Yeah, it’s a pretty surreal, Gnostic idolatry though. You get this image of a kind of disembodied child that you want. Look at the Ann Geddes pictures, an image of a child as pumpkin, or a child as flower: the baby as the commodity you get to consume or pluck and put in your vase, VERSUS, the kind of images you have with Norman Rockwell. Almost all of his images of children are children with skinned knees, are of the chaos of kids — I think about the one with the boys running and trying to pull up their pants, they’ve been swimming in the water hole with their dog. The images of children that he depicts are children with other children, who are showing signs of mess, which children inevitably are. Versus, with Ann Geddes, her images are so popular, I mean all sorts of well meaning lovely church ladies on a regular basis put up Ann Geddes posters and calendars and use those images. And what they are is a kind of really dangerous idolatry, because you’re idolizing a kind of purely platonic form of “baby”, the “baby” one can fashion according to one’s own desires, the “baby” as consumable. And notice that those babies never have a sign of food on themselves; if you know anything about toddlers they are constantly covered in food. These pictures are children that do not consume; these are babies that we consume. And those icons of childhood are indicative of a dominant culture in America that sees children as a way to accessorize and fulfill one’s own life, rather than as interruptions into our own hopes, dreams and goals.

Children should ideally re-calibrate our lives and instead we are seeking children that we can calibrate in order to fit into our hopes and dreams. That is part of why you have pre-natal testing and selective abortions, even among Evangelical Christians, you have a real interest in sex selection and gender selection even among Evangelical Christians because they have an image of what their family will look like, of what their child will look like. And there is a whole arsenal of tools now in medicine to use to craft a child that will most fit. Very blessedly, the child who comes will never be a child that will adjust accordingly and be perfect in a way that you were hoping. Blessedly, even if we end up cloning someday, that child will resist merely being an image of what we want. And in that resistance I think there will be hope."  

(bolding mine)

It actually reminds me a bit of my Latin American Cinema class, in how we have talked about the body (along with cinema itself) is often portrayed as being something that is consumed by our eyes and not really given much second thought to.

That felt more elegant in my head.  lol.

Convicting article in regards to how I view children and babies.  Are they just cute objects that are there for me to look at and play with?  Generally, yes.  Talia comes to mind as the prime example, especially with all of her ridiculously adorable photos on Facebook.  Not to bash on those photos... but it's just a thought about how I am viewing what children are for.  Entertainment?

This branches out to how I view people in general.  Do I consume a bit too much of Darren Criss?  haha.  probably.  I don't want to say yes, because I still enjoy it and I still want to keep up with it.  sigh.  but I think one look at my tumblr dashboard would tell you that one entity dominates it (and it's definitely not God...).

Once again, what I'm learning recently.  Romans 1:24-25.  Being given over to all my desires, in any area of my life.

Thank God He doesn't give me everything that I want.