Men Are from Mary, Women Are from Martha

A fun and interesting blogger named Ellen Painter Dollar takes up the seasonal reminiscence we reposted here on the First Things website, ” Dakota Christmas .”

She likes my writing—”so gorgeously, lucidly written that I wanted to lay my hands on my laptop screen, hoping I could soak up just a teensy bit of his graceful way with words.” Ahem. See, Mom, that’s me she’s talking about, though if have to dwell in the land of over-the-top praise, I think I like even better the guy who left a comment on the memoir that read, “This is better than Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past .” Yep, if only old Marcel had kept at it . . .

But it’s Dollar’s follow-on that seems worth taking seriously, for, she writes, the story as a whole “struck me as so male .” Late in the essay, I wrote about a kind of reaction that set in against the overabundance of Christmas when my sisters and I were young:

I remember bundling up and going out for air after Christmas dinner the year I was sixteen. Trudging along the lip of the white-dusted gully on the edge of Pierre, I looked out to see the land, like a cold sea stretching off to the horizon . . . .

[S]ometimes in winter, I could sense something else in that cold, blank range—or, rather, nothing else, emptiness itself like a positive force, an overwhelmingly present absence: purer than we were, cleaner, truer to God’s purposes, more real . . . . The prairie in December is brutal and indifferent, but that sated Christmas I was sixteen—with presents back home spilling off the sofa, the annual racecar-track looped in a figure-8 beneath the tree, too many new books and boxes of candy, the mothball odor of the Christmas linen and the cloying scent of the juniper branches—I perceived, in some confused adolescent’s way, the spirit’s harrowing side. I came to cast fire upon the earth , as Christ declares in the Gospel of Luke, and would that it were already kindled! There was a burned-over purity to that frozen landscape, an icy clarity to its ash-white slate. There was an escape from the mess and clutter of our overpopulated Christmas desires, ruined by their secular attainment.

Well, yes, she later adds—but “Joseph Bottum could wander out onto the prairie to think deep thoughts because other people, most likely his mother, aunts, sisters, stayed behind clearing away the Christmas mess and clutter.”

I should say that the lonely prairie end of the Christmas memoir was supposed to be a looping-back to the prairie beginning of the essay—a claim that there exists in us an impulse to seek God in solitude and bleakness, but there is another demand that also calls us back to seek God among people. For that matter, if you think prairie-town kids of my generation didn’t have household chores, you must be living in suburban California.

Still, Dollar is a smart cookie, and her point is interesting:

I’ve come across similar advice—set yourself apart, beware the busyness of life “out there,” hunker down in your cottage, deny, simplify, focus—in plenty of other books and essays and sermons that advocate separation and simplicity as keys to the spiritual life: Spend more time in solitary prayer, set aside Sunday as a true Sabbath by forgoing all but the most necessary chores (because, you know, I spend the rest of the week doing unnecessary chores), and, of course, stop spending your Advent getting ready for Christmas. For the most part, this sort of advice seems to come from men.

Is that right? Is the impulse to solitude and simplicity primarily a male impulse, which men are allowed to indulge only because there are legions of women behind them cleaning up the mess? Men are from Mary, Women are from Martha?