Non Serviam

I was reading through the comments on Leila’s post, and I came across one that really caught me off guard. Well, two comments really.

The first was this:

“But one of the most wonderful ways to serve is in your God-given vocation as wife and mother.”

and then the response, from a regular commenter over there, College Student:

Its funny because I believe in God and one day hope to be both a wife and mother yet I still find this statement greatly offensive. Maybe it’s the word serve, I dunno, it’s just pretty nauseating.

I had to chuckle to myself as I read that, because I remember those days. I so vividly remember those days in college when the notion of “giving up my whole life” so I could take care of a husband and children made me recoil in horror. Oh, the horror!

I’ve seen that reaction before. It’s often implict; “I don’t want to just be a wife and mother.”

First of all, who does? I mean, what woman alive wants to say, I am a wife and a mother, and nothing more. That’s not even true. First and foremost, before anything else, I am a daughter of God. Then I am my parents daughter, then I am a wife and mother, a writer, a lover of….the list goes on and on. No one is “just a wife and mother”.  For anyone to imply that women who value this vocation as having primary importance are somehow two dimensional cardboard is offensive to me!

The ironic thing about this whole serving thing, is that, the very same people who would (and maybe do?) disdain me for embracing my vocation as wife and mother, would laud my Christ-like service if I decided to spend a year in Africa working with the poor. Why is that laudable, but devoting your life to the people in your house is degrading?

I was one of those people. I looked down my nose at those “wife and mother vocation people” that I encountered at the Mount, mostly the spouses of some of my professors. Meanwhile, I spent my spring and fall breaks in college going on service trips to work with the poor and suffering.

My reasoning went something like this: It’s one thing to spend your spring break serving others. It’s something else entirely to spend your life.

I had embraced the feminist notion that in order to “be something” you cannot, must not serve. You have to “get established in your career”, “look out for number 1”, and “not let anyone get in your way”. Of course there is nothing wrong with having a career, if that’s what one wants. But there is something wrong with telling women they “must” have a career, they “must” have it all, or they are just brainless cardboard. There is something very wrong with that.

However, I bought into it, whole-heartedly. The idea that a woman would purposefully give up the years she is supposed to be “getting established in her career” to get married, have babies, and take care of them, seemed repulsive and “nauseating”.

That’s because I was living Non Serviam. I would not serve. Sure, I would serve for a week or so here or there, but always on my terms. I would serve when I felt like it.

The kind of intimate, challenging, service associated with embracing any vocation, was not to be borne. If I ever did get married and have children, I remember thinking, I would of course have a nanny, or at the very least, a housekeeper. That type of work would be far too far beneath me to do myself.

There are still days when I feel that changing poop diapers and wiping drool off my shoulder, and figuring out what to make for dinner for the 50th time, are “beneath me”. But if they are, if that is true, then who is fit to do them? If I say that someone else is fit to do the work that is “beneath me” then what I am saying about me?

This is my vocation, and to think I am above doing any of the work that God has put in front of me, this day, is to say loud and clear, Non Serviam.

The truth is, we are all living Non Serviam. Non serviam is at the root of every sin. We will not serve. We will not serve God or others. Or, we will only serve them on our terms, which is just as bad as not serving at all.

Thankfully, we have the antidote. We know how to break free from Non Serivam and the sin that is always its fruit. We struggle, we fall, but we know the Truth.

“Whoever wishes to be first among you shall be servant of all, just as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life for the many.”       -Matthew 20:28