Self-Made Orphan

If a man seeks to find meaning while refusing to belong to his family, he will find nothing more than transient distractions to stimulate and occupy him for the present moment, until his thoughts bring him back to the emptiness of his rootless situation.

The above quote from Dr. Peter Kwasniewski’s new book, Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway Society gives one a small inkling of the breadth of this subject as applied to our current cultural malaise.

What is the quest of the orphan? What is a home? In a previous article, I argued that there is a “centrality” about womanhood; that “Woman is the hub of the family and, therefore, the hub of humanity” and that “Destroying that hub grinds civilization to a halt—and along with it, all that is humane.”

Appropriately, Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist gives high priority to the orphan’s search for his mother, a theme often repeated in real life today as the adopted among us search for their birth mothers.

In Dicken’s depiction of early nineteenth-century England, there is an ugly aura around the subject of the orphan. People of “substance” was a common term, one that refers not only to materialistic wealth but to social connection as well. Orphans were immediately seen as more than parentless; they were without social connection.

It followed that, had they been from sound families—from people of substance—their care would have fallen into the hands of their extended families. Thus, there was a sort of implied illegitimacy about being orphaned, or at least, being an institutionalized orphan. They were seen by many as belonging to a despised lower cast. In the words of Dicken’s character, Mr. Bumble, “What have paupers to do with soul or spirit? It’s quite enough that we let ‘em have live bodies.”

In 1977, television viewers were treated to the mini-series “Roots”, wherein the irreplaceable value of family, patrimony, and matrimony stare one in the face, the series’ message seeming to be that our roots, even when painful to recall—perhaps especially when painful to recall—are extremely important. And here we are, less than a half-century later, living in a time when it seems that cursing one’s roots is quite possibly thought to be the most noble thing one can be expected to do.

The ignoble truth of the matter, however, is that it is much less painful to be contrite for the sins of our ancestors than it is to be contrite for our own. Hitting the my-ancestral-culture-self-destruct button is the ultimate narcissistic virtue signal: it is painlessly but pseudo-heroically self-effacing. It just gets no better.

Twenty-first-century labeling and guilt by association insist that, if you’re black, or brown, your roots are honorable—probably sad, but honorable; if you’re white, your roots are shameful. But it will not stop there; it was never intended for it to stop there. The goal of such labeling has nothing whatsoever to do with justice, or race for that matter. The goal of the current zeitgeist is to erase all roots, and that starts by destroying the family, which starts by destroying marriage. All is built upon marriage: the home; the nation (for what is a nation if not a home?); the Church, the home of our faith; the world, home to all.

The destruction of the family has been a long time coming. Its biggest boost came centuries ago when Martin Luther explored those situations in which divorce might be acceptable, doing so in the vacuous expanse of the claimed “perspicuity of Scripture”, a claim completely unmoored from a millennium and a half of Christian heritage. Many, perhaps most, of Luther’s spiritual children have pushed the moral acceptability of divorce to the limitless bounds of the individual interpretation inherent with supposed scriptural perspicuity.

In Charles Dicken’s verbal mural of nineteenth-century England, the orphan was a commodity; a potential criminal recruit, a nearly costless worker, a future prostitute. Those without family, without moorings, are vulnerable on nearly every level. What about those who unmoor themselves? What are their vulnerabilities?

One needs to look no further to discern the root of every modern evil. There was a time when, if the home was broken, there was still the community, the Church, and the nation that provided some sense of foundation, some stability. But they are vanishing.

Marital divorce is, after all, a symptom of a divorce mentality about everything. Kwasniewski quotes the Church Father Origen:

Where there are sins, there are multiplicity, schisms, heresies, dissensions. But where there is virtue, there is singleness and union, on the basis of which all believers are one heart and one soul…multiplicity is the source of all evils, whereas clustering together and brought back from a crowd into singleness is the source of good things.

Luther did not reform the Church, he splintered it; he divorced it. As I write this, the Church needs reform, simply because the Church always needs reform—any human institution, even if divinely led, needs a good kick in the pants now and then; spouses that never argue seldom stay married.

But then, spouses who don’t even agree on what marriage is also do not stay married, and that is where we are at today. All foundations are crumbling, and we see the effect all around us. In the words of Dr. Kwasniewski:

When the heart of the rootless man tries to make a nest in the desperate vacuity of his whirlwind life and predictably fails, he will only redouble the search for temporary distractions, until his life becomes a fleeing from, not a movement toward, reality. The home is the first and lasting context of the fullness we can speak of as “welcome,” “familiarity,” “belonging.” Strip it down or take it away, and eventually the only thing remaining is a frivolous masquerade. Behind the mask is nothing, yet the elaborate process of masking we see going on around us in the world—a masquerade that may be said already to have developed its own protocol, values, and lifestyle, especially in the virtual world created by social media—enables rootless men and women to bear for a time the emptiness of their existence, the inversion of being, and the nausea that would result from staring into it.

 It is just such “vacuity” for which the family is the only antidote. Nothing is more deeply rooted within the human experience. The need for family, home, and community penetrates the depths of our souls and our bodies all the way down to our genes and chromosomes.

Of the necessity for the existence of family, Kwasniewski says that

In order for God to express His perfect love for mankind, He had to ensure first that there would be a relationship that is comprehensive, self-giving, fruitful, and stable. Once this was in place, He could point to it and say: “That is how my love is—only better.”

When I first began reading his book, it struck me as a large bag of “body theology” gold nuggets, but soon enough I realized that it was not a bag at all, but an all-encompassing tapestry, that the gold was threads rather than nuggets, for family is a metaphysical necessity that brings all truth within scope. In Kwasniewski’s words:

If one has nothing worth giving up one’s life for, the only thing left is a ceaseless pursuit of pleasures or frenetic business. In this way, one tries to escape the asking and answering of existential questions such as: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? What does death mean? The reason religion seems to be irrelevant to so many people today is that religion exists to ask and answer these questions. When people no longer ask them, religion has nothing to say to them.

Family is “worth giving up one’s life for.” Yet marriage, in and of itself, is not a suitable, solid foundation unless it rests upon Christ. Kwasniewski sees the sacramental, binding quality of marriage in Eucharistic terms:

If each Christian can say, through Baptism, “I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body” (Gal. 6:17), and if a new identity is given to the soul in the sacrament of Marriage—the identity of one spouse in relation to the other—then how reverently ought husband and wife to embrace one another! He who partakes unworthily partakes of his own damnation, not discerning the body of the Lord (cf. 1 Cor. 11:29), for your spouse is a member of His Body (1 Cor. 12:27), and sins against him or her are sins against Christ (cf. Matt. 25:45). In receiving the spouse unworthily, one receives Christ unworthily: whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me (Matt. 25:40). One eats and drinks, i.e., uses and enjoys, damnation. Corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst.

In order for the destruction of marriage to achieve his desired goals, the devil first needed to give it undue primacy. It needed to be placed on a pedestal above celibacy, virginity, and the religious life so that its crashing collapse would be humanity’s ultimate crushing defeat. Kwasniewski says that the devil.

…persuades people to think that celibacy or virginity is a denigration of marriage, that those who promote this higher state and calling are casting aspersions on the order of creation, the goodness of nature, the beauty of married love. He presents himself, at times, as a defender of these things, but only in a distorted way, as Luther was.

Therefore, we must, above all, be ready to defend marriage, for

…the rejection of plighted love (divorce) is like the rejection of plighted religion (apostacy), which is itself an image of the rejection of reason (nihilism).

Self-made orphans, having rejected patrimony—every patriarchal tradition—and sacramental Matrimony, find themselves in a position not unlike that of Dicken’s Oliver Twist characters, having no foundation other than a darkly overcast, obscured inkling of natural law: the gentle nagging of the Spirit. While the self-orphaned may not be thieves and prostitutes, like Twist’s characters, they are vulnerable, easy pickings for every demonic ideology.

If Sacred Scripture has taught us anything, it is that there are things far, far worse than theft and harlotry. The richest nation on earth has a growing population of homeless people, but this is not entirely an economic phenomenon. A large contingent of the homeless are rootless, self-made orphans. Come Holy Spirit, only you can clean up the home-slaying mess we’ve made.

You can find Dr. Peter Kwasniewski’s book, Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway Society, by clicking on the link.