Family Man Family Leader

The word 'family' does not appear in either Hebrew or Greek, instead the word 'family' appears in the bible as 'household '. The biblical household comprised family members including grandparents , indeed the grandparents comprised the head of the pyramid ,aunts , uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters alongside parents. The immediate family lived in the family house and made it a home, the extended family lived in close proximity thereby constituting a familial homeland .
Adoption was a means of absorbing non blood kin into the sanctuary of the tribe. It was the eldest male member who decided, as he was the 'Father', and his headship extended to inheriting and disinheriting . Opening and closing the door to nationhood .
The Man as head is a really difficult concept for us today . Even within traditional Catholic circles there is a tension on this issue. Could God really have meant that to be the case today?
First, if you are a non christian , forget it , you are never going to understand this one.
If you are a christian than you are going to have to listen to the evidence.
1Corinthians 11;3
'I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ , and the head of every woman is man , and the head of Christ is God'.
1 Corinthians 7;11
'for a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and the glory of God; but woman is the glory of man . for man is not from woman , but woman from man'.
1 Tim 11-13
Let a woman learn in silence with all submission . and I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over man, but to be in silence.
Tough words for those who only love selectively quoting easy on the ears passages of scripture . Did St Paul mean it , or were those quotes only relevant because the tradition of the day demanded it.? No contest he meant it all right .
He was not adverse to rocking the foundations of traditional institutions and challanging cultural norms of the day, circumcision for one, the traditions of the pharasees for another. Now you can say i dont agree with St Paul and walk away but you cannot say that is not what he meant, and still accept the word of God.
Recent generations of men have retreated from their calling to be leaders of their families . Men have abandoned the truly formative institutions of civilisation . The home stands empty and abandoned for most of the day while the physical, moral and spiritual education of their children is given into the hands of those who actually despise Christ and all he stands for. The exodus of Fathers from the centre of the home to the margins of the workplace has had a severe impact on his influence within the family. So often a work weary father rather than beginning his second shift of 'family man' when he returns through his front door, seeks time out in rest, reward and reccuperation . His only period of interaction or influence with the other family members seems to be reduced to the short time between the tv going off, food being served and the tv going on again . Basically Dad has become stranger, his focus on material prosperity has been bought at the cost of family disintegration.
The only real time he is challanged to act is when pushed to the limit this, action is usually an hysterical expletive filled rant after which he is prone to go into a deep sulk . Family man has become re-actionary rather than pro-actionary. His bottom line is keeping everyone happy even if that is at the cost of right and wrong. 'As long as they are happy then I'm happy', is his catchword . In fact those words become the families constitution . Man has lost not only conviction in himself but the courage needed to ennact those connvictions . popularity becomes his prime concern and to keep that popularity he buys his audience with unlimited freedoms. His leadership will follow in any direction it is lead .
St Paul has this advice for women , hard words for soft ears but again making no dilution, the same yesterday , today and tommorrow.
Titus2;3-5
The aged women , in like manner , in holy attire , not false accusers, not given to much wine, teaching well;
That they may teach the young women to be wise , to love their husbands , to love their children,
To be discreet , chaste, sober, having a care of the house , gentle obedient to their husbands; that the word of god be not blasphemed.
Mothers today so often neglect their home centered role for the empty fullfillment of the workplace while warehousing their children in daycare. Parents send their children to schools where God is outlawed and they allow them the near total freedom to absorb the twisted messages of trashy movies and mindless music. The computer and the tv have become the incubator for so many mums and Dads whose only wish is the passivity of their sons and daughters. anything will suffice to do that job as long as it enables them to spend their lives with the minimum of interruption or agrivation . After years of training in the ways of rebellion through Godless schooling , negative peer association and debauched entertainment , christian parents are somehow suprised when their children rebel and forsake the God of their fathers.
Since the advent of women in the workplace during the first and the second world wars society has become increasingly feminised . This feminising process has reached a point where masculine traits are either hidden away in an attempt to win female popularity, exagerrated in a violent and abusive parody of true masculinity or treated as a psychological condition. The true male role model of an accessable and loving self-sacrificing real family man has given way to a grotesque imitation . The arrogant self obsessed muscleman with the gelled hair and tan who a is also in touch with his gentler femine side and aware of gay/bisexual gender choices is the role model for todays generation of lost boys. It is so sad to see that the best husband material ignored as 'boring', while the dangermen who offer both mystery and excitement are always found to be the most sought after. No wonder boys are desperate to adopt this false image of manliness, because it brings with it the seeming rewards of female adulation.
[As an aside I had to smile at Cathals recent admission to being a night time night club crawler, albeit with no doubt honourable intentions. My experience of near fifteen years of plummeting the very real depths of this nightmare form of social madness serves only to convince me that a young lady of any worth should not be there in the first place and second, if she were she would never make herself known to anyone there, especially strangers with a roving eye propping up the bar. Unbelievably the night club has become the only way that most contemporary young human beings feel able to conduct the form of social intercourse that might eventually go on to lead to a potential marriage or as it is groaningly known today civil partnership . It goes something like this. Take two young self obsessed people , feed them constant moral subjectivity and impurity, get them both drunk, high on drugs, or both , dress her in the most sexually revealing apparell that would once have shamed any self respecting prostitute, lower them both into a scene straight out of Dante's Inferno complete with mind blowing volume levels of hypno- rythmic sensual music filled with foul lyrics and sexual overtones, squeeze them together , dim the lights , stand back and see what happens. Now thats fine and dandy in todays twisted world view , indeed it is increasingly becoming the norm, but if one were to suggest that perhaps the re-examination of the traditional matchmaking cultural practices such as chaperoning , courtship, family involvement and suitor introduction might be in order you can imagine the immoral outrage that would elicit . Enough on that one I think, back to the real subject of this article.]
Primary education is in near complete feminine control with men making up only 12% of the teaching staff. Incredibly very many boys go through their primary formative years both at home and within the school system without encountering or experiencing the vital inluence any male role models . Today we live in a period of the most profound gender identity crisis . It is a crisis that has never been experienced before. All we can do is gawk helplessly at the carnage of violence, despair, unhappiness, uncertainty and unfullfillment that are the true rewards of revolutionary emancipation .
The church like the family is certainly not immune to these symptoms, after all since Vatican II it has readilly embraced so many of the errors and modernist feminist philosophies that so bedevil the mission of the traditional and eternal family instituted by God. The crisis of Fatherhood extends to priest, bishop and as high as the chair of Peter, new man, new religion, new God . The new priesthood is that of the facilitator not the teacher, of those led rather than those who lead . Suggestions take the place of commandments and the main objective of most homiles these days is to say as much as possible while offending as few as possible. Try be mr nice [whatever that means to you ] and try not to be too hard on yourself . This is not exhortation to the war against the world the flesh and the devil but mere feelgood therapy, it is limpwristed self help designed to limit the effects of freudian angst .
The reason that the family is being attacked with such vitriolic hatred from all sides is simple, the family has not been completely liberated from the authority of man as head. It is the last of the Kingdoms. His headship like that of John the baptist is being asked for on a platter but infuriatingly although nearly empty of contents that head remains on his shoulders.
When a woman marries she is given by one man, her Father into the[ we hope loving] custody of her husband. She passes from his authority to anothers willingly.
She veils herself and reveals herself feely to her spouse, she promises to love, honour and believe it or not usually obey the one who promises to cherish.
This sacramental union and sacred oath taking is not a purely emotional response but is one that is also a choice of the will, they say 'I WILL', not 'While I feel like it'.
If the man has not Christ as his head they are doomed. He will be influenced by his pridefull inclinations , his dominion over her will be destructive, not just for her but for him also. The modern idea that is near all pervasive is that somebody somewhere that you are destined for will be able to supply all your physical, emotional and spiritual needs all of the time, and if they fail to do that then they cannot be the right one for you . This disapointment so often leads to divorce and seperation and to the tragic constant series of doomed searching for 'the right one'. Relationship follows broken relationship until old age wakes you up to the falseness of that proposition, by then it is normally too late and so begins a life of regret and lonliness where even the children that were trampled and ignored by this vain pursuit no longer care to call.
For this reason the care that both future husband and future wife should take in descerning their future spouses cannot be underestimated . This voyage that they are embarking on is for Life, only love of God more than of themselves or each other will sustain them on this incredible journey. God as direction, man as captain, woman as first mate and heaven as destination.
Temptation is always to be avoided and unfortunatly the mixed working environent today has become the cause of so many affairs as well as a hotbed of indiscretion and flirtation . No big surprise here as this time spent in shared activity away from the spouse is usually vastly greater than the time they have with each other .This can lead to an improper informality and closeness that fuelled by a constant diet of junk books, soaps and tv can so often lead to infidelity . The joke used to be about the milkman or the barmaid , today most women work with him and most men work with her!!
Important question; Should a woman obey a husband who is both abusuive, ignorant, dictatorial, tyranical or just plain stupid ?
She should from a fundamentalist position, because she has promised to and scripture and tradition require her to. The fact that the husband is an oaf does not disqualify him from being a husband.
Personally I think that perhaps the requirement to obey is operative only when the man is albeit very often imperfectly, trying to allow God to be his head . If he is sincerely and genuinely listening to her , if he is attempting to understand her point of view and include it in his decision making process then even if in his wifes eyes that decision is wrong than he should have the final say. Any other course and the dual voting rights of each leads to a permanent hung parliament and much mutual resentment . However each has their legitimate social spheres and competencies. The wife as homemaker should be allowed the chance to manage that sphere without constant or needless interference, also if she is a better economist or teacher than she should not only be allowed but encouraged to take this lead. [ I must add that abuses on a physical or moral level are never part of a husbands juristiction and these should always be resisted ]
The crisis of manhood that is having such a profound disorientating effect on our culture must be addressed . The formation of future men has to begin today and must begin in your own household . Like it or not the buck stops with you . What you allow or dont allow, what you say and what you do speaks of who you are . And that witness is going to have a profound affect for both good and ill on your children . The things that speak volumes are sometimes the things that go almost undetected because they have become habitual , the lack of charity , the back-biting tongue, the acceptence of soft porn or free internet accesss or casual swearing .the lack of leadership and initiative or the abject surrender of authority to your wife. All of these are filtering into the minds of your young ones. Computations are constantly taking place. Is dad a hypocrite?, does he say one thing and do another? is he a joke? Do I love him or even like him?
We have all seen how some Fathers disordered over emphasis on authority and dicipline without the the corresponding balances of charity and mercy within the home can so easily lead to a counter syllabus of wholesale rebelliion and rejection, and how equally charity and mercy without the balance of authority and dicipline inevitably leads to the same conclusions only this time they are called Liberty and freedom.
It seems as if both the church and the family are indissolubly connected in this way, both are suffering from the same malady . However the illness is caused by the medicine and the solution for both can be found only in a return to objective order. And that order is a return to Patriarchy ..'Rule of father'.
This war is for the hearts of our children, they live for only a short time under our immediate authority and at some time they will have to live by the spirit and that spirit must move their hearts in conformence with the will of God. The world seeks for their hearts and the fight for the parents is to capture those hearts for Jesus. If we have genuinely won the hearts of our children then both theirs and ours become one, and what child would wish to break our hearts if in doing so they risk breaking their own as well .
Last word to the last words of the old Testament
Malachai 4;5-6
Behold i will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the lord. and he will turn the hearts of the Fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their Fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.

Make thee an Ark

Heb11:33 'It was through his faith that Noah, when he had been warned by God of something that had never been seen before, felt a holy fear and built an Ark to save his family.'
An Ark was a vessel or perhaps a more accurate definition would be a vehicle by which God protected his people . Noah acted out of faith and built the first Ark according to God's instructions and his household were preserved during the deluge that destroyed wicked mankind . The second Ark saved Moses from pharo's instruction to drown all the hebrew male infants, it was the basket that floated amid the bullrushes.
The third Ark, was that of the covenant. It was a wooden chest surmounted by two winged angels . Inside it were the the law in the Torah , the rod of Aaron the high priest and a vessel containing the heavenly manna that sustained the tribe of Israel in the wilderness.
The fourth Ark and the last Ark mentioned in the bible appeared alongside our Lady in the book of the Apocalypse .Our Lady herself contained next to her heart for nine months the trinitarian essences found in the ark of the covenant, Jesus the word made flesh, the fullfillment of the Law, High Priest and Bread of Heaven.
THE RAIN
This time the flood is invisible to the naked eye, it is invisible because it is spiritual . The casualties are not corpses foating on the surface of the water but souls sinking into the depths of hell.
Fleeing from occassion of sin has never been as difficult, and the opportunities to excercise our sinfull capacity have never been as great as they are today . A generation ago if you wanted to be seriously corrupted you had to put in effort and take risks . You would physically have to go to the seedy part of town to access any form of extracurricular material to fuel the fires of your fallen nature . Also you might be seen, your cover blown and your reputation left in tatters . To be corrupted today, to experience a diabolical banquet that Nero himself could only have dreamed of is as today as easy as turning on a switch .Twenty four hours a day Sodom and Gommorah are available via satellite, the world wide web and mobile phone technology .10 minutes of unrestricted internet use can permanently imprint onto your memory banks a series of images so dark and so powerful that they will haunt you to the grave . We live in an age were the contents of the minds of the child asleep upstairs and the stranger we meet on the street are unguessable.
Many of us when faced with a growing awareness of issues that are so disturbing as to seriously awaken the conscience, place those issues into a box and shove them far to the rear of our phyche maked 'do not open', and there they remain, unopened and unquestioned . How few Mums or Dads bother to enquire what their own child might have seen, heard or done in their waking day. Parents are too scared and embarassed to pry into the hearts of the very ones that God had chosen them to shepherd . There is a sign hanging on Johnny's bedroom door and seen in Johnny's defiant eyes , it reads 'Parent's Keep Out ' . This is the new relationship that fits the modern individualist family model . Home has become a fast food youth hostel , the parents mere vending machines.
Chances are if you are reading this magazine that you are growing in your awareness of just bad things have become and at the same time increasing in frustration as to what to do about it. The answer is to do as Noah did and build for your family an Ark .
The most efficacious step you can make immediately, before you can even consider building your family an Ark is to stop watching terrestial or cable TV. Use videos or dvd's if you have to but only ones that you have watched yourself . Dont ever trust or assume the contents are acceptable even if the classification says so!
TV addiction could be one of the hardest chains for you to break, but it is at the same time the one that promises the most freedom. This step will force you to fill the time vacuum with family interaction . The difficulty in maintaining any kind of positive interaction will show you just how much of a virtual life you had been living .You will feel like a shipwrecked captain sitting on the beach with his crew lamenting 'what do we do now?' Answer, get building!
First Plank
HOMESCHOOL
Institutional schooling is just that , it institutionalises , no major issues with that especially if that school fullfills the third pillar of formation behind Home and Church . The problem today is that most children spend all their formational time either in the classroom , the playground or on the streets .True home time is not time merely spent in the house, upstairs alone with the PC and playstation, but time spent with the real family of mum, dad, sisters and brothers . Quality time is slowtime and plenty of it . Not neglect followed by bucket loads of material indulgence, that can only double the disorientation . Leading the child to seek 'things' to fill the gap that serial desertion leaves in their hearts . Some well meaning and also some not so well meaning commentators when faced with the issue of homeschooling cry 'What about socialisation.' Socialiastion for most homeschoolers is precisely the reason they homeschool, they dont want their child to be socialy processed by the prevailing mores of today . Socialisation can be both positive and negative, it is negative when it contradicts both traditional family values and christian morality . The truth today is that the formational climate within the school enviroment and indeed outside it in popular culture, is so toxic to the christian faith that parents have to attempt to construct a counter culture and alternative enviroment themselves . Indeed socialising is so important that a good deal of homeschool time must include visiting families that reflect , accept or at the very least not reject the parents values. A childs need to feel normal and experience peer interaction is vital and indeed a natural requisite of any childhood .Give your child what you know is good , give them their childhood.
Education means preparation for life, for a christian, life is a preparation for the life here after. Put Christ first . Homeschooling allows you to do just that.
Second plank
HOMESTEAD
A mortgage is a usurous ball and chain, you are it's slave. Free yourself !
The modern mentality of the immedite rather than the long term, the ME and NOW philosophy, has blinded so many to scramble after a mirage of 'quality life'. So much so that most people would rather live a life of debt , just to give others the impression that they have made it in the game of life. A mortgage is a bit like wearing make up , it gives the false impression on the outside of what the truth is on the inside .The truth is that such is the state of borrowing in the West that even a modest down turn in the fortunes of the economy will result in mass home repossession , displaced people and homelessness . A couple of wheelbarrow loads of Argos trinkets being the reflection of your true value in life.
A pearl of great price in todays temporal world could be a caravan on a quater of an acre in the countryide that you own, rather than a five bedroom detatched on a housing estate that you squat in. The mind conversion that you must go through to understand is this .Give the long term future, both for yourself and your family, your immediate attention . You stand today as one link in your family chain . What you do or not do today you pass on to your children for good or bad . Not so very long ago people understood this, they knew that judgement would follow the works of their life, and a greater part of that judgement would fall on their stewardship of the children that God had entrusted to their keeping.
Today's Godlessness has produced a mindset that cannot fathom that anything that happens after death can be of any consideration in the here and now, and that includes what happens to the next generation, the present is all.
Time for them is their feast, they keep it for themselves . Their children like so many little Lazarus's, living on the scraps of the few minutes they can get from the table of the day.
Abandoned homesteads are still plentiful in Ireland . A run down cottage and an acre or two can still be bought for below 100.000 euro and some can still be found below 50.000 euro. A mobile home costing below 3.000 could be found to live in while the cottage is made habitable again . Most of these old cottages have one or two outbuildings and some even have the old crane still in the fire place!
Owning and living in one of these humble cottages used to be counted a blessing, for the generation where every new luxury becomes overnight a necessity this blessing would feel like a scourge.
If you have had a mortgage even for just a few short years then chances are you have some precious equity stored up .This equity could buy you your freedom, not just yours but your children's as well . A bonded servant works for a master, a serf gives half his crop to the lord of the land . By becoming poor in the eyes of the world , by being a fool for Christ, you can become a free man . Free from debt , free from the worry of loosing your 'home', free from the yoke that says you must continue to do work that you hate just to pay the bills, free to spend more time with your family. If you live in the town or city, free from the fear of crime, the threat of drugs, gangs, and a climate of immodesty, free to spend time walking in the garden and listening to God. . Make life your work , rather than work your life.
Third plank
HOMEWORKING
So you have your children under your wing again, as it was meant to be, you have your half acre, ruined cottage and 2 berth second hand caravan. First give thanks to God, you have squeezed through the eye of the needle!
Now how to I feed and clothe my family?
Attempt to be as self sufficient as you can , start a vegetable garden and compost heap! Try to live frugaly and economically, try stretching and saving a pound rather than earning a pound .Get some hens and buy your clothes from charity shops. You could half the cost of your shopping trolley simply by buying the stores own in house brands instead of the usual ones . Assuming the property that you are now standing on is in a fairly remote part of Ireland you will not be able to replicate the job situation you had previously . However the job you held previously is a redundant position, you no longer need that size paycheck and with it that sized working week. You need a supplementary income . Part time salaried work carries with it very generous low paid worker benefits, if you work a mere 19 hrs a week these benefits, especially if you have a large family add up to more than you imagine, check them out!
For those who want to break the ties of working for another person altogether, think small business. The devil is in the internet big time, however the technology that assists him in taking so many captive could be at the same time the conduit for keeping your new found freedom.
With ebay and paypal you could start a little craft business, or antiquarian book shop, religious sacramental purveyors etc .Or maybe invest some of your dwindling cash resevoirs into a website or for your ideas to reach a larger public . Another suggestion could be to use your land, specialising in certain organic produce after doing a bit of market research into the gaps in the market place. Alternatvely start a small herd of cattle, many still do it! or rent some acreage if you have it to the forestry . The options are as limited as your imagination . Remember that even if for a while the period of work you do may not be completely to your taste, it is only a supplement and small medicine for the benefits it brings, to both you, your wife and your children, because that medicine buys you each other!
Maybe as the future unravells all the gains of the past , the patterns of the past itself will become ever more relevant .The future for faithfull Catholicism here in Ireland could very easily find itself following the same route as remnant faith groups have done over the centuries particularly in the USA.
The establishment of clusters of homeschooling homesteading families in distinct geographical areas up and down the country, usually within the close proximity of a good orthodox priest who still values the faith in it's entirety or near a parish whose ministry still includes the shepherding of souls. These groups of homesteaders could then attempt to replicate in this communitarian micro climate the set of values that greater society has chosen to abandon.
The Catholic family is itself the original community , it seeks alliance in place of union . These alliances would produce neighbourhoods, not legalistic communities . Indeed these neighbourhoods could very well be the fertile ground whose seed goes on to produce vocations both to holy orders and to holy matrimony.
Let each family build it's own Ark . Let these Arks float together in the tempestuous seas of this spiritual deluge.
Within each of these Arks may we preserve the faith, live the faith and pass on the faith.
'When the son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?', whether alive or dead please God we will have played our part in answering yes.