In which category do we, dear reader, include the work that our mothers and wives do at home? Skilled or unskilled? Perhaps, in neither; for the reason that we take it for granted. My experience is quite different.
The first time I got into the kitchen to make a cup of tea for myself, I learned one thing. The distinction between ‘skilled labour’ and ‘unskilled labour’ is a fiction. There is no labour that does not involve ‘skill’. One may be poorly or perfectly skilled; but skill is indispensable. By doing something several times, which includes even menial tasks, one can improve one’s skill towards perfection. Men, cook a meal by yourself. You are sure to agree with me!
This parallels the familiar distinction between being healthy or ill; as if illness excludes health altogether. The truth is that one who is ill is in a lower level of health. Health is the basic state of life; not illness, which leads to and is a shadow of death. When a person is healed, she or he is restored to normal health. The important thing is not merely that illness goes, but that health returns.
But let us return home. Why is it, let’s ask, that the tremendous amount of work that goes on in sustaining a house is rarely valued or acknowledged? Surely, there is reason for it. Here’s my take on this familiar, yet strange, thing.
No one disputes the amount of work that happens in a house. But not many reckon it, or respect its worth. The reason for this is, in part, the layout of the house itself. Where is the kitchen situated? Is it not cut-off from the rest of the house? It is as if there is a discontinuity between the kitchen and the living room. Practical reasons can be marshalled to justify this. The living room needs to be protected from the unpleasant accompaniments –smoke, smell, drabness, etc. – of cooking. However, the fact remains that, were it not for what happens in the lowly kitchen, there will be no life in the living room.
The kitchen is the most private section of the house. The bedroom too is private. But it is private in an intimate sort of way. In contrast, the kitchen is private in a gender-discriminative way. The kitchen is deemed out of bounds for men. In many parts of the world, men consider it below their dignity to be found labouring in the kitchen. In such societies, even women feel awkward if a mere man appears in their domain.
Men too work. But the work they do is out there in the open. It is noticed. What is noticed is valued. The work that women do at home happens in total invisibility. The rest of the household see only the dishes on the table. They never see how they are made. It is if kitchens secrete dishes. Women, on their part, are content to keep it so.
The work that our mothers and wives do has another handicap. The products of their labour do not endure. Or, if they do, it is only for a short duration. Very little survives the given day. In contrast, the work that men do produces durable things. A carpenter, a tailor, a factory worker, produces things that survive. Others like a shop- keeper, a driver, a typist, and so on, work in the visible domain. Their work has social reality. They are ‘seen’ at work. They are rewarded.
In the cultural domain, only what is seen has value. If you, at work, are seen by a hundred people, you are usually considered superior to the one who is noticed only by ten others. If you address a crowd of ten thousand, you are considered superior to the one who addresses only a hundred. It is assumed, by virtue of our inherited assumptions, that the size of the crowd proves the merit of the speaker. The public domain is all about appearances. How a thing ‘appears’ determines its worth. This is writ large over everything ceremonial. People are taken in by show. So, how extra-ordinary a person is, is signaled by how he is buried, not by how he lived. The reason for this is not far to seek. How one lives is, mostly, a private matter. The truth about a person is an inner reality that only God knows. How he or she is buried is a public matter. That is entirely in the hands of human beings.
The ‘pattern’ of the world (Rom.12:2) is that only what is done in public is valued and respected. But if the teachings of Jesus matter to us, it should not be so with us. The sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew is, in this light, a revolutionary text. It turns the world upside down. It rejects publicity-seeking religiosity of the worldly kind, and affirms the spirituality of inner truth. When you pray, get into your closet, ‘shut the door after you’ and pray to your Father in Heaven. The difference between God and us is that God sees the inner truth, we see the outer show. To be obsessed with the show is to become blind to the truth.
Home is, to borrow a metaphor from Jesus, the mustard seed of life. This is the corner-stone that the builders take for granted, if they do not reject it altogether. Home is the sanctuary of life; holier than the church because it is in the home that life is birthed and sustained. We must wake up, at least at this eleventh hour, to the God-ordained creative and generative nature of home. The public domain will not be, if the private domain of home does not exist. And, if the public domain is polluted and inhuman, the roots of that inhumaneness may lie in homes.
For far too long we have preached salvation for individuals. An equally, if not greater, goal is ‘salvation for homes’. Jesus says to Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Lk. 19:9). The lamp of our personality, said Jesus, should be on the lamp-stand, so that ‘it gives light to all in the house.’ (St. Mtt. 5:14-16) If the lamps of our personality give light to all in our own homes, the world will turn to God. There is no other way. This is where most of us fail; priests and laity alike.
Now, ask: who keeps the lamp shining at home? Men or women? The Son of Man, Jesus said, has come to serve, not to be served. He is the light of the world. Selfless, sacrificial service is the light of personality. And doesn’t that shine brighter in our mothers and wives? That may be hard and humbling to concede, but it is true.
Women, on their part, need to come out of the cultural conditioning and degradation they have endured for centuries. They need to believe in the liberation that is already offered to them in Christ Jesus. They are free; and they have a duty to incarnate that freedom by living it. What should the scope and reach of that freedom is for individuals to decide in accountability to God.
This does not necessarily mean that wives have to quit the private space of domesticity, or be resentful of it. It does mean that they must refuse to perpetuate home as an island of exploitation and denigration. They must accept the profound worth of who they are, the significance of the work they do, and the place they have in God’s scheme of things, in which regard Mary, the blessed mother of Jesus, could be a role-model. But, if women’s liberation is to be real, one thing is essential. Women need to be good stewards of themselves, and dare to recognize the talents the Master has given to them, together with the duty to perfect them.
Truth to tell, no human, or human system, can empower women. The only spiritually valid mode of empowerment, for women and for men, is self-empowerment. And the key to that empowerment is the strenuous, arduous, but increasingly joyous, pilgrimage towards personal perfection. So said Jesus. Therefore it must be true.
