“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ”

(Ephesians 5:21)

Connie Francis sings a popular ballad about “The Wedding Cake,” insisting that the wedding cake is not just sugar and spice but contains solid, serious ingredients like duty and patience and forgiveness.

But in spite of the philosophy of Connie Francis’s popular song, which sums up in homey fashion the rationale for Christian family life on this Mother’s Day in 1969, there is a sizable rebellion against the institution of marriage and all the family relationships connected with it. This is one of the things the eruptions on the college campuses are all about. A growing number of young people couldn’t care less about cutting the wedding cake, for they don’t intend to commit themselves to the solemn covenant the wedding cake symbolizes.

According to an article in the April 1969 issue of Redbook magazine, a psychiatrist and a journalist ran a brief notice in eight college newspapers a few months ago with these words: “Living together? Not married? Will you participate in a group discussion of alternate ways of family life with psychiatrists from the family institute sponsored by a national magazine?”

Those who gathered in response to the notice were living together without formal marriage, some because they wanted only a temporary relationship without the permanence of marriage, and some because they were rebels, rebelling against modern society and many of its institutions, not only marriage and the family, but university and college administrations, the Church, the government, and business establishments.

One couple drawn into these discussions said, according to the Redbook article, that “what they objected to was society’s pressure on them to seal with a binding contract what they saw as an honest and free relationship like several million other young people in the United States, France, Germany and elsewhere. They have found an issue on which they do not care to be pushed around. At present, they wish not to marry as a part of a general feeling that the institutions of society should be de-sanctified.”

Now it is utterly true that traditional Christian family relationships are based on what Saint Paul called mutual subjection “to one another out of reverence for Christ.” A heavy load of responsibility for each other is bound up in the bundle of a Christian family. And a tremendous amount of liturgy and symbolism and moral and ethical teaching has been piled together to sanctify the institution of the Christian family. And as Connie Francis sings about it, that is what the wedding cake is all about. That’s where it starts in the marriage contract of a man and a woman. Joy and privilege, duties and responsibilities, children and grandchildren, in-laws and out-laws, in sickness and in health, till death does part — it all comes with the wedding cake. That is a lot to load people with — children and grandchildren who did not ask to be the issues of that contract.

Yet mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ is the rule for all. For the wife, mutual subjection means she is subject to her husband as the head of the family as Christ is head of the Church. For the husband, mutual subjection means that he must cherish, protect, and sacrifice for his wife as Christ loved the Church and laid down his life for the sake of the Church. For children, mutual subjection in the family means obedience to their parents in the Lord, remembering the only commandment with a promise is “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”

And parents in their turn subject themselves to the welfare and equip­ment of their children for life, always subjecting their desires for personal pleasure and ambition and wealth to the prior and more dominant claim of their children upon them. It all comes with the wedding cake, and it’s a larger order than some of the youth today with their dreams of greater personal freedom want, so they don’t cut the wedding cake. They aren’t about to.

But not only the young are disillusioned with the institution of the family in Western Christian culture; lots of the older folks are, too. A friend of mine was telling me recently about a friend of his who, with his wife, had lived a respectable, exemplary Christian life. They had been diligent to bring up their children in the Church with the best of Christian teaching they could manage. To their horrified surprise a son went wild, repudiating all his training, even his family relationships. The very opposite of what they had intended and worked toward had occurred. It shook their faith, not only in the value of Christian training, but in the goodness and power of God. Little wonder.

But what we must all remember is that God has given our children, as well as ourselves, complete freedom. They can choose the lifestyle of alley cats and can repudiate any and everything we have valued. This is what it means to be human.

The ideal of the Christian family with its neatly balanced scheme of mutually subjected relationships is just one of the choices open to the free spirit of man. And for me, one of the recognizable glories of this Christian family system is its realistic grappling with the paradox of human freedom and servitude. Built into the pattern of the Christian family, mutual subjection is the recognition that utter freedom is only license whose undisciplined race through this life plunges to destruction.

The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, in talking with college and univer­sity groups recently in Canada, said: “Young people ask me all the time about promiscuity. If I say my experience is that promiscuity destroys life, they won’t listen to me…. They hope I’ll say either, `It’s absolutely vile,’ or, `What does it matter?’ I’m not going to say either. If you turn sex, which is procreative impulse, into pleasure to be sought as an end, you will destroy both the individual integrity of people and their collective life.”

Unbridled license can become the most bitter slavery, while, as an ancient Christian prayer puts it, the service of Christ can be perfect freedom. This is the mutual subjection of each family relationship out of reverence for Christ that glorifies each with an otherworldly splendor.

As wonderful as the husband-wife, the parent-child, the brother-sister relationships are when each lives for the other, a relationship is all the more magnificent, all the more creatively free and filled with blessing, when it is consecrated to the service of Jesus Christ.

Toward the end of his autobiography, Harry Emerson Fosdick has a chapter titled “Ideas That Have Used Me.” This is the top-level option of all the Christian family relationships — not to exist for themselves alone, but to be matters of mutual subjection to one another out of reverence for Christ.

What ideas will inhabit you? A rapidly changing series of psychedelic lights of brilliant hue, or Paul: “This one thing I do,… I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus”?

Dr. W.E. Sangster was a beloved British minister. As William Barclay writes in his book In the Hands of God:

Soon after their marriage, Sangster said to his wife: “I can’t be a good husband and a good minister. I’m going to be a good minister.” He seldom took his wife and family out; he often forgot his wife’s birthday unless he was reminded; he spent much of his time on preaching and lecturing tours at home and abroad.

As his son writes in his father’s biography: “It all depends, of course, what you mean by a `good husband’. If you mean a man who dries up as his wife washes the pots, or a handyman about the house, or even a man who takes his wife out for an occasional treat, then my father was the worst of all husbands.

“But if a `good husband’ is a man who loves his wife absolutely, expresses that love daily, asks her aid in all he does, and dedicates himself to a cause which he believes is greater than both of them, then my father was as good a husband as a minister.”

This is what our family relationships are all about at their best — just our chance of subjecting ourselves to each other out of reverence for Christ, that each may be stripped of the chains and slaveries of sin and ban selfish desires and all the walls be battered down that separate us from the service of Christ that is our perfect freedom.