I’M ON A SUBMARINE MISSION FOR YOU, BABY: A series of stupid thoughts about the Michelle Bachmann “wifely submission” question. These are really just kind of starting points for thought, not actual thoughts, but I haven’t seen them anywhere else yet, so hey.

1. Obviously this whole conversation would be so different if most American Christians genuinely believed that submission is a privileged, honored position. It was rarely the eldest sons who inherited the king’s mantle, you know? Exaltavit humiles.

2. If husband = Jesus and wife = Church, then by transitivity wife = Mary… whom Jesus did actually listen to. Which suggests not that Mary is God but that “submission” in a Christian context is more complicated than simply an army-like command structure in which He gives the orders and she follows them. There is some kind of interweaving in which both are necessary to hear and understand God’s will. I think that’s a possible Catholic understanding of Bachmann’s “lol, really?!” respect-based answer to this question.

The other thing you could say is that nuns are the Brides of Christ in a really obvious way, and yet they are not known for a lack of feistiness.

So again, maybe the hermeneutic here is more complex than just “I am a computer which runs program DOMINION when my husband presses the ENTER key.”

3. I was really intensely struck by this passage from an MSNBC “Meet the Press” interview with Bachmann:

MR. GREGORY: But you said that Gald — God called me to run for Congress. God has said certain things about, you know, going to law school, about pursuing other decisions in your life. There’s a difference between God as a sense of comfort and safe harbor and inspiration, and God telling you to take a particular action.

Because… I don’t remember what Bachmann answered, and I can guarantee it wasn’t what I’m about to say. But this whole question is just so far from what I understand.

God is not a sense of comfort. God is not a “sense of” anything, actually, He is a source of joy or peace or what have you but not the internal sense of it. But okay whatever, I’ve totally said ridiculously dumb things in live interviews. Move on.

When I follow God I find peace.

That does not mean that I find happiness or comfort. I think I was well served by reading Dorothy Day’s autobiography early in my conversion, because Day makes it clear that peace is not comforting or nice or easy. Peace is the hard work of dragging each moment into place like a giant brick. Peace is grueling. Peace is debilitating and you feel stupid and boring and dumb and worthless every time you drag another stupid boring brick up to its place.

Peace is about finding your place.

Your place may not be comfortable. It may not be pretty; maybe part of your vocation is to make this kind of Christian life beautiful! Maybe you have the painful crown of the pioneer.

But Christ will move you past happiness, past comfort, into the hard work of peace.