Single blessedness?
Weaver, Mary Jo
surroundings that will only allow the sort of religion that fits in, the religion which reinforces the picture the world wants to have of itself. C.S. Lewis once remarked that there is always...
...It is the rending of our civility, of the fabric of our lives together in this city...
...Many people persist in seeing single people as loose and unanchored...
...I grew up in a tradition where there was an institution of dedicated singleness...
...That is not true, but it is true that in a highly t? . mobile society the friendships single people make are often scattered over a wide geographical territory and the needs for a community of intimacy have to get worked out differently...
...but I do want to argue that the kinds of things necessary to growth and maturity are the same for all people and are provided in marriage and community life but often are not available to singles...
...Mentally healthy people are flexible and open to possibility...
...during the warm weather...
...The assumptions of religion and the family have often been negative when it comes to singleness...
...Not that there were not old maids ("poor things") who had never beenasked either by a man or by God to dedicate herself to him--the problem did not lie in the sad failures of a few old maids...
...When people must worship together, eat together, live in some kind of peace and charity together, they are drawn away from egocentricity...
...To assume that singles do not need or want openness and to deny them its possibility is to misperceive the situation...
...You can hear it coming, fat away down some leafy path: murmuring canned voices, a jangling, a thumping...
...In the flight lounge, the passengers--many of them returning from 9 at Disney World in Orlando, Florida--chatted quietly, yawned, read, and scratched their peeling sunburns...
...who would like to be able to move easily in a variety of social circles, be tapped as a resource by the churches...
...The problem (or puzzlement) !ay in the idea that one would choose to be single, want to lead a lonely, undedlcated, peculiar life...
...The assumption was that something was wrong with such a person...
...Some people choose to be single and others find themselves that way by accident or tragedy...
...There is one final, pastoral aspect of celibacy which I would like to mention...
...MARY JO WEAVER O NE HEARS a good deal about singleness today because many people are either living alone or in "arrangements" that are not marriage...
...Single people are often defined negatively, i.e., as unmarried...
...There are people who remain unmarried and unloved because they have not been able, for whatever real sons, to attract anyone...
...Single people often have to look around for opporamities for openness...
...Because of the mobility of many single people they often develop a kind of psychological gregariousness that extends itself in new kinds of friendships...
...They are not considered to have a family in any conventional sense and therefore can have no family place, i.e., no home...
...The developn~nt of character is surely not guaranteed in marriage or in a religious community, but the opportunities for flexibility, intimacy, meeting the demands of others and experiencing death are there, built into the structure...
...Today, in any public area of New York City (and in other major cities, I suspect)--on buses and subway U~ins, in movie theater ticket line.~, or jus t walking along--you must expect the sudden, rising howl and static thudding of an approaching twenty-pound, $99.95,3i89 stereo radio (or tape deck, or special combination...
...Today the pious may still storm heaven but most people turn to psychologists to find MARY JO WEAVER is an "assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University...
...In pre-industrial society marriage and family were necessary to keep the society going and at that time there was not much room for single people to be' 'alone...
...The someone has to be critical enough to say, "don't be a fool" and loving enough to say, "darling...
...In London, you don't have to, but here-yes...
...I wonder if having more single people around (not necessarily living with) the family might have good results for everyone...
...This is especially true for women, whose ability to reproduce is bound up with their age...
...ear drums and our ClVlhty I I I I I l WALTER DONWAY T HE YOUNG Englishman tending the Radio Shack store on York Avenue at 85th Street tapped the glass of the counter front...
...There was a utilitarian and religious reason for singleness...
...At the other end of the spectrum, what can one do when a single person dies...
...The fact that the other person is loved stands as a barrier between them...
...Some of the children slept on the floor, wrapped in blankets...
...and who deny the assumptions of the marketplace--those people are stuck...
...With fewer children, less pressing physical labor and more leisure, couples find that they have more time for each other...
...People who swing are not overjoyed with the company of someone who does not, and single people who do not thrive on the sexual playground are generally not attracted to certain kinds of parties, apartment complexes and lifestyles...
...5.Marketplace...
...Then, like the screech and crush of an intersection 9 tomobile smashup, music--a raucous wheezing and thumping--blared in a far corner of the lounge...
...It has been established in a number of ways that people need a stable community of intimacy in which to work out and enjoy life...
...Isn't there something brazen about the radio toters, a deliberate testing of their power to impose openly on the rest of us...
...There was a need for dedicated singleness--the great centers of learning were monastic...
...it would be interesting if they could envision it as doing themselves a favor...
...With families and communities there is an opportunity (in experience and intimacy) to come to terms with death...
...In these days when religion and the family both appear to be in some difficulty themselves, it might be a good time to take another look at the singles--at their power as well 9 as their needs, at their value as well as their demands...
...If single people, motivated by some religious or utilitarian ideal (as Gandhi was or Jesus was) are living a celibate life, they get little support from any quarter of the culture...
...I do not think that people who are married need think that they are doing single people a favor by inviting them more intimately into the family...
...T HE REASON singleness is a question is because we insist upon seeing people in relation to their life's arrangements rather than in terms of who they are...
...How do people find people to be serious about their death...
...The notion that people need to sense something larger, more perfect, enticing, powerful, etc., is as old as the Greeks and as varied as the poets, yet the culture often assumes that single people only need or want themselves...
...It is often ]~ard for conservative people to be anything but suspicious of singles...
...1. Nuclear family...
...In the common mind single people have no homes...
...The stable community of intimacy, whether that is provided by a family, a religious group or some kind of intentional community of politics, provides people with a way to live with others...
...hospitals, orphanages and other agencies of social concern were often managed and staffed by sisters...
...So far as the churches are concerned, single people do not have a morally valid position...
...we do not call in single friends at the time of death but tend to exclude almost everyone...
...That is what I began to suspect, one evening a few months ago, when American Airlines delayed its 8:55 flight from Kennedy International Airport to Rochester, New York, for nearly three hours, while mechanics repaired the pilot's microphone...
...The Bible and religious tradition insist that the fundamental mistake anyone can make is to assume, wrongheadedly, a position of centrality, to place the self in the center of the universe...
...I do not want to deny that theway we choose to live our lives and with whom has a significant effect on who we are...
...A friend of mind says that everyone needs someone to say, "Don't be a fool, darling...
...If the family is in some trouble in the larger society, it is not in trouble in the church, the last great stronghold of family idolatry...
...I hadn't really come to buy one...
...It must exhibit the love it is based in, the paradoxical strength in weakness of which Paul boasts, or it will be worthless...
...My point is that family and community recognize these needs as needs of the married and religious person rather than as needs for all persons...
...One of the advantages of that arrangement was that families had a place for singles...
...Single people challenge the view that marriage and family are normative...
...At such times, I confess, I hear another sound...
...People with strong assumptions about what define a home and family are not presently ready to understand singleness sympathetically...
...Single people, when they are written up in magazines, are synonymous with the leisure class--they all have lounging robes, expensive dogs and suntans...
...When someone asks a single person where "home" is and that person answers with the town she or he is living in, the questioners often respond with, "Oh no, not that, I mean your home," by which of course they mean one's parents' home...
...Jesus and Paul both relativize the need to marry--it is not, for Christians, the most important life option...
...Single people can get off center (eccentric) easily and it is important for them to have ways to focus on people and needs beyond their own...
...As the media have it, the problems of single people lie predominately in securing a proper credit rating, designing their own homes and finding a vintage sportscar...
...For a variety of reasons, some married people are uncomfortable around single people--they often do not know what to say to someone who doesn't share the range of familial problems (children's dental work, teenage rebellion) that cement intimacy among couples...
...The context for understanding the present perceptions of singleness includes at least five areas: the nuclear family, sexual openness, social convention, the churches and the marketplace...
...many people are and will continue to be single and it will take on an increasingly positive character...
...In the old days, the wrongness was assaulted by novenas or by an arrangement made by the girl's father...
...3. Others...
...Singles are a problem to the churches and to conventional social situations and an opportunity for manufacturers...
...further, they get little help from the institutions already available...
...Today, the nuclear family has no room for single people...
...Their faces stiffen...
...2. Sexual openness...
...One of the curious problems singles have concerns their homes...
...They do not want to get married or join up, but to remain single...
...In marriage and in religious communities there appear to be built-in opportunities for having to take signifi2 cant others seriously...
...Whether one is married, single, widowed, religious, gay, strai.'ght, whatever, the need for flexibility and openness (whether to God, others, one's own growth) is a need...
...From Heidegger to Woody Allen we are told that death is important and that facing it gives dimension to our lives...
...I left without buying a radio...
...4. Churches...
...Singles have the same needs, but often do not have much support from people in these areas...
...People who did not marry either stayed at home or went into some kind of religious community...
...rigidity is not thought to be a good attribute...
...There is little place for singles in a married culture or in a religious community one...
...Lewis once remarked that there is always a tendency to warn an age against the danger into which it is least likely to fall...
...I am interested in how people perceive and react to singleness in the Christian church, i.e., in terms of religion and family...
...Single people have time and as such are a great natural resource...
...Isn't it a kind of power play...
...Children woke, people muttered and craned their necks to look...
...Perhaps marriage is enjoined in the Bible precisely because placing one's ego at the center of the universe is an overwhelming temptation when people are alone...
...It doesn't look powerful...
...Two young men about college age--big, blond, in T-shirts that showed off imposing biceps--crouched over a huge radio, 26 October 1979:591...
...Watch people at such times, especially the older people who spend much of their day in the park ! I I WALTER DONW^Y is Executive Associate of The Commonwealth Fund and a regular contributor to Private Practice, a journal of the Congress of County Medical Societies...
...See this one...
...I 9 THE PAIH OF NEGATIVE DEFINITIONS Single blessedness...
...And dangerous...
...Singles are no exception...
...3. Social convention...
...The single person who is not a high-level consumer has little chance to be perceived as wanting to lead a simple life...
...Married people and community people can reject the opportunity and choose to become rigid, but they are challenged to do otherwise, their life arrangements axe usually much easier to endure as they develop flexibility...
...It isn't the dangers of asceticism that the Western world needs to fear fight now...
...The question needs to be posed in terms of maturity or authenticity or wholeness, not in terms of singleness per se--my interest is not with whom we are (or are not) living but who we are...
...When they are severed in some way from their families and not utilized in church structure, they gravitate more toward their work or their play and find all the media hype about swinging singles to be so much selffulfilling prophecy...
...Testing our...
...The single person often has some trouble in establishing a community and in fitting into family or religious community contexts--when they get close to a family the assumption is that what they really want is to get married...
...At this point the positive value is coming predominately from the marketplace--the one place where singles are valued and welcome...
...Single people have time for service that married and community people simply do not...
...Single people who wish to remain single can only hope that people will catch on and tire of: finding dinner partners for them, wondering/asking/assuming things about their sexual orientation, picturing their lives as the media do (as "swinging"), dropping broad hints about how they might make their lives more "meaningful," and feeling sorry for them because they do not have the proper nesting instincts...
...In looking at a married person someone in this situation is able to say, "He couldn't possibly understand my loneliness--he lives in such security, the security of being loved...
...Commonweal: 590S INGLENESS is here to stay...
...Professional single women often find that they have more in common with the men at a party than with their wives and are caught between having a good time and a safe one...
...Single people are treated as people with a "problem" by the churches that are, for the most part, highly oriented to families...
...When a really big radio passes on a bicycle rack, playing at top volume, it seems to tear a long slash in the tranquil atmosphere...
...In a world of sexual openness single people who are not "swingers" are often caught between rejection and suspicion...
...They need, however, as everyone does, a context of intimacy...
...In the marketplace singleness has now been married to the new consumerism, what one weekly newsmagazine called the "tea for one market...
...If churches do recognize single people at all, they tend to organize events for them in order that they can meet and marry and therefore fit into the life of the church...
...Single people are not welcome at some parties because it is assumed that they are on the make and, by definition, disruptive...
...some padded about the lounge, carrying quivering rubber alligators...
...Singleness should be given a positive reading and sOme theoretical support in and by the churches...
...Celibacy seen only as a "state in life" is as cold as ice, just as dead as a marriage which exists only as a pledge on paper...
...We all know what they are not --they are not' 'two in one flesh" but single/alone...
...The underlying assumption is the same: being single is not normal...
...t~asks of service appeared to require celibacy...
...They also have higher expectations of one another and some students of social change speculate that the pressures of companionate marriage significantly affect the divorce rate...
...The celibate can reveal to someone this lonely a love which can be healing, and can restore a meaning and dignity which the world denies...
...so in a puritanical age we are warned against licentiousness, and in a licentious age we are warned against puritanism...
...People who do not fit into the current context, who consider that they have a home of their own, a private sex life (or none...
...That radio's got three-and-a-half-inch speakers--big, for a portable...
...In that situation, the burden of proof falls on the married rather than on the single...
...It's designed all wrong for the American market...
...It was called monastic (or religious) life, was open to both men and women and thought to be assuredly superior to the other state in life, marriage...
...In marriage and in intentional communities there is an opportunity, at least, to develop flexibility...
...Churches can help in this area--perhaps by enlisting single people to help visiting the sick and helping them to find some discussions and experience about death and dying in more than a clinical situation--but they often do not...
...All people have issues or problems to confront in themselves butnone can do it by themselves...
...Singleness cannot be perceived as a pity, but must be seen as a valuable way for people to choose to live...
...One way is for the churches (in their various structural arrangements, community and family) to see the positive value of singles and to understand their needs...
...In marriage one was dedicated, too, but it was different...
...Singles are marketplace targets, they have mobility, few responsibilities and more money to spend...
...It is a question of power, I'm afraid...
...Before thirty one can be considered in a state of creative indecision between one of the two states in life...
...1. Flexibility...
...after thirty one finds oneself much less safe from pressing inquiry and rude assumption...
...a lot of the time that could have been dedicated to God was dedicated to the spouse and one's many children...
...Later, an airline employee pushed in a big cart piled with trays of Danish pastry, coffee and tea, soda and ice...
...Marriage and community provide the opportunities ~for people to grow in all areas and the assumption is that people ought togrow in these areas...
...they provide ways for their members to get these needs met...
...26 October 1979:589There are at least four canons against which one can measure maturity or wholeness: flexibility, ability to relate to a stable community of intimacy, concern for others as opposed to ego-centficity, and security, especially in its relation to death...
...It is not good to be alone...
...Religious people are supposed to be open to God, willing to allow some room for mystery and the workings of pi'ovidence...
...out what's wrong...
...Single people often have trouble finding someone with whom to talk about death, and they surely find it difficult to have someone with whom they can have some experience of it...
...Passengers queued up, served themselves, munched quietly...
...Single people have the same needs and no built-in institutions to help them...
...and, by implication, it's a question for all of us--a question of civility...
...Social conventions do not make room for singles...
...Any martied or community person can choose to ignore the opportunities, choose to be rigid, closed to intimacy, totally egocentric and alone, evenat the moment of death...
...But I do buy the analysis...
...This is odd since I think it could be argued from the New Testament that singleness is the ftrst normal state for every Christian and that there is no Christian imperative to get married or to prefer marriage...
...There was little room in theory or in practice for an undedicated life--people were either to bind themselves to God or to a family--singleness without the curbs of public vows and community was considered unseemly and footloose...
...2. lnt/macy...
...Single people need to be encouraged to participate in communities of intimacy, not just work or play groups...
...4. Death...
...Whether and what single people do sexually is not at issue here;,the point is that since people do not know, they assume (often wrongly and needlessly) that a single person sleeps around, is gay or hamstrung with sexual hangu.ps...
...The one segment of society in which they are taken with utter seriousness is Madison Avenue--singles represent substantial sales...
...Those single people who cluster around religious centers, even sometimes becoming "third order" members, find themselves ultimately excluded because they are not really part of the group...
...when they find some solace with members of a religious community, they are often asked why they don't just join up...
...Sit in Central Park at lunch time...
...In Christianity one can choose to be celibate "for the kingdom," but what about those who do not want to be described in such highly religious rhetoric...
...How can single people function to mitigate against some of the problems in society, especially problems in the family and in churches and get their own needs I THE RADIO POWER PLAY met at the same time...
...The singleness issue is not a major problem until one gets past the frontier of thirty...
...At the same Commonweal: 588time, marriage has changed somewhat in character...
...If the churches and the family do not offer some good alternatives to single people, then singles will get caught up in the false communities of capitalist investors...
...Death is private...
...Conservative people, under the avalanche of confessional talk shows and cinema assumptions, m~fy buy into the cultural hype about sex and think that everyone is doing something...
...Worse, married and community people often perceive single people as those people who have no needs or desires beyond themselves...
...But thekids won't buy, because the design doesn't reflect the power...
...singleness becomes a duty until the reasons for marriage are made clear...
...The context, therefore, is incredulous and puzzled at best and hostile at worst...
...they look, then glance away, afraid...
...Who is called, especially if their parents are dead already...
...Married people seem to have trouble inviting them to dinner without finding someone of the opposite sex to balance out the couples and so simulate normalcy...
...he said...
...Where singleness used to be shameful it is now shameless in its pursuit of pleasure and the good life...
Vol. 106 • October 1979 • No. 19
