I should have caught the trend indications before I did. There has recently slipped into the culture a view about the worn out concept of marriage. A writer in one of the leading newspapers of the nation has raised the point in a clever context. He addressed the drive of the homosexual community for same sex marriages. He asked: Why do they try so hard to keep an institution that no longer has meaning? The growth in co-habitation preserving the independence (identified as freedom) of every individual has been a growing phenomenon. The decline in interest in the benefit of children and family life is a major factor, even driving government to provide services formerly left to the family. Recent social movements have sometimes diluted domesticity and focus on children in a corporate unit as an adequate context for those choosing it. With family decline, social problems, and demands for service have become too troublesome and expensive for the general society. Marriage contracts are often broken, or so badly damaged that other institutional arrangements need to be forged to gain healthy social life. The implications of the analysis of the drive of the same sex marriage license, leaves one dangling with logical and moral issues, such as the denial of a millennia old assumption from biology that the exclusive male/female marriage is vital to practical human management. The first institution of mankind, given of God at the creation, is predicted, by several pundits, to fall to the level of intellectual animal life. Only a very few species among animals mate for life. Should thinking human animals adopt the dumb animal model? We ought to reach up, not down for our direction. All this is done without adequate attention to the meaning of biology, of children, of cost, of responsibility, of the loss of a context of life that calls for love, duty, solidarity, nurture, order, unity, identity, and the like. A major warning to society is due – that failure to use a gift of God, like family meaning and nurture, is no indication that the institution is a failure or outmoded. Society may fail.
My thoughts run in several directions when the matters of family and community are used in any measure of spiritual development in persons and groups of persons. Scripture affirms the need of family to develop a meaningful society that teaches responsibility for others. Families tend to be more concerned with life and its quality for the good of its members. Societies deal with compounds of families, so must deal with the issues that divide to the point of conflict. Family conflict is a common factor, but so very much smaller than mass social conflict. It is held together by a sense of blood, of belonging to each other. It takes more to break a family than it does to break a community. In the family there is believed to be more of the meaning of love than in the larger society, and that society is more and more guided by its mechanization. Mechanization does not substitute for family meaning, or replace it in the accepted and major influence among the people. Most analysts relate the control of social mechanization will rely heavily on high performance of families. Families are concerned with the values that assist love in holding the persons together, and a sense of loyalty to one another which is reflected in the care of one another. In this context Christianity relates well, with the application of faith and love to God reflected in faith and love for the members of the family. Most analysts acknowledge that this historic view and practice has been weakened, and for some lost. Some believe a new paradigm is needed. That offered is unsatisfactory.
What is there in the modern industrial and economic world, and dependence on large government, that robs all persons of the main point some cultures have preserved in their major context? The costs of modern life in the industrial countries seem to deny the ultimate conclusion of the better life. The tendency to seek wealth, to hold power, to broaden interests, to follow an arrogance of attitudes toward mechanisms and money, may lead to the loss of the God gift of the primary social unit of earth in the loving family. From the bosom of that family we find self and purpose with others. One finds it in the eyes and stories of those who have lost their families, or loving members of it. We are not surprised that there are God’s family commandments. Those guidelines provide supportive life for those members of the family of which I am now the eldest, and extending to young adults now in our fourth generation. I am currently engaged in the context of a great-grandson and his wife for faith, family and profession. Thrilling! *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020