Care is an Act of Devotion

Photo Credit: Xerones

This week I’ve been thinking about the idea of devotion.  Because of the way our culture is structured, in the Western world we don’t value care.  Individuals might.  But look at policies for families in America and you’ll see a different story.  Reading Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new book Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family has me fired-up about this issue again.  Slaughter revisits her now infamous Atlantic monthly article Why Women Still Can't Have It All with a new twist.  She puts care - whether by men or women, for children or the elderly - at the center of the book’s thesis.  I love how this works.  It takes what’s seen as a woman’s issues and updates it to reflect modern family life.

But that’s not the only thing I want to write.  What I want to do is connect it with is the idea of devotion.  On a recent podcast of Sounds True, in an episode called Beyond Healing, I heard Caroline Myss talking about her perception that American society is populated by people who live in a kind of white noise.  What Myss longs for is a society where people are devotional.  So I got to thinking about the idea of devotion.  She expressed her conviction with so much passion it actually made me a bit wobbly while I chopped up the onions for dinner. 

Basically I wonder this: If American society was fueled by devotion would we have the abysmal support for families that we do?  And on a personal level, what would my creative work look like if it was more devotional and less aspirational?