day no. 16,126: the family is the original unversity

"I am afraid that when we describe a man as "a member of the Church" we usually mean nothing Pauline: we mean only that he is a unit--that he is one more specimen of the some kind of thing as X and Y and Z. How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense) precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself. The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter, she is a different kind of person. The grown-up brother is not simply one unit in the class children, he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member you have not simply reduced the family in number, you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables." — C.S. Lewis, Membership (The Weight of Glory and Other Essays)

The university was designed with the intention of fostering interdisciplinary attention to a solitary question: "What holds everything together?" The presupposition was that something did. But the question that remained was, "What is that thing? What is the unifying principle behind, underneath, inside, or surrounding every other thing?"

The family is a unity of diversity. Members of a family are not merely like a pocket full of pennies. They aren't made up of units the same in shape, size, or value in one sense. A father may tell his son that he is the man of the house while dad is gone on a trip, but that isn't precisely true. If the dad were to perish while away and never return home, his absence could not simply be substituted. The son would step up and fill the roles of the father to the best of his ability or the widowed mother might someday remarry, but the father, strictly speaking could not be replaced. He is not merely a placeholder. And neither is any other member of a family.

In this, God has given us a preview of His family, the Church. Members of a church are alike in their singular devotion to Jesus just as family members are alike in their single last name and table at which they share meals, but they are not alike in many other ways. A brother is a very different organ of the body than a mother. They exist in the same body and share the same fate of it, but they are unique in role, function, placement, etc...  Their particular commitment and ability to fulfill their respective obligations has an immediate impact on the vitality and vivacity of the other, but the heart cannot replace the kidney if it is damaged and removed. The eye cannot do the fingers work, yet neither is more or less the body. If you lose a finger, you remain you, but the loss of it cannot be simply accounted for by growing more hair or longer nails on the remaining fingers. In other words, you are still you, but you are a little less you than you used to be in some respects.

The family is a beautiful picture of the Church in that it is built upon a unity of diversity. The family is a place of appreciating nativity, fidelity, creativity, and fecundity. The Christian family produces an appreciation of lock and key, bow and string, feather and arrow, target and bull's eye. It prepares its members to belong to a church where cooks and decorators, musicians and millers, preachers and partakers, and the like are all essential party planning personnel.