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Watch Out!

In baptism every parent promises to bring up a child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.  The Greek term for nurture is paideia, which was really a dynamite word for the Hellenes, especially those who were kept in the Attic.  One needs only to mention the magisterial three volumes of Werner Jaeger's study of that topic.  Paideia was the unlocking key to the glory that was Greece.  It means the intentional transmission of values and may be translated as civilization, culture, education, nurture and tradition.

 

Unfortunately, deeply embedded in American anti-intellectualism is the conviction that “History is bunk” — a view wonderfully exemplified by the hotshot young technocrat who suggested that the way to make room on the library shelves was to get rid of every book written more than 10 years before.  On the contrary, for Christians history, being the memory of the Church, is a survival necessity.  Traditionalism is often defined as the dead faith of living people, but tradition is the living faith of dead people.

 

Obviously passing traditions from one generation to another makes a culture cohesive.  I am especially amazed at the complex traditions in which women instruct girls.  For example, the demure and devastating eyelid drop is a marvel of timing and musculature.  It cannot be easy to learn.  Likewise, fastening buttons on the back of your shirt must be extremely difficult.  In some cultures women speak a language among themselves which men cannot understand.

 

Some remnants of that situation appear in English.  For example, no man that I know would admit to owning a “hankie.”  As a matter of fact, cultural decline has dropped to the point where many younger men to not even carry a handkerchief and those who do place it somewhere else than in the right hip pocket where it belongs.  In the good old days male persons were also expected to carry a clean handkerchief in the breast pocket of the jacket in case a female person was overcome by “the vapors.”  Of course, we did not know what “the vapors” were — and it was not considered polite to ask — but we understood we had to be handkerchief-ready.

 

I am embarrassed now to admit that for a number of years I have stood prepared to teach my sons to tie a Windsor knot.  To my dismay not only do they evince small desire to master this upper level masculine achievement, they demonstrate small interest in the arts and sciences of neckties at all.

 

I had better success passing on my father’s conviction that “A real man always carries a knife.”  This is partly the result of the pocketless women of our family always needing to borrow a man’s blade and hooting at him and making his life thoroughly miserable if he did not have his knife on his person; being without it, not a real man.  Actually I may have succeeded too well since my 8-year-old grandson sliced his finger with the knife he was supposed to carry only when his dad was around.  My daughter understood her son’s desire to be a real man, and she recognized where he got his definition of that condition, but was not too thrilled by its bloody result even though I showed her the manly scar on my own hand cut by my first knife.

 

I am certainly not a blind advocate for all things traditional.  For example, I would not lament the discontinuation of the unanchored and totally useless drawstring in men’s hats which was only appropriate several centuries ago when a well-dressed man wore a helmet to work slaying dragons and dragoons.

 

However, before this new millennium gets too far along, I want to register a strong complaint about the old one and enlist support for change.  A disaster has occurred to the human race (men’s division) which no end-of-century list of decisive social changes even mentioned.  This is, of course, the disappearance of the watch pocket from men’s trousers — at least in the cheap trousers I buy.

 

I can remember the gracious age when learning to tell time by the location of the big hand and the little hand was a great accomplishment.  In those days the reception of a pocket watch was a male rite of passage.  You could tell when you were grown up because every man, and no boy, had both a pocket watch and a watch pocket.  It was generally understood to be a requirement of primogeniture that the oldest son inherited his dad’s pocket watch.  I am reliably informed there were fathers in the late twentieth century who did not even own a pocket watch to bequeath.

 

This sorry state was voided by my ministerial generation who learned the distinction between kairos-time and chronos-time in our first month of seminary by reading Oscar Cullmann’s Christ and Time.  Since all time belonged to God, true Presbyterians recognized that having a chronometer strapped on your wrist in plain view of the whole world demonstrated an unwarranted panic about chronos-time and an appalling lack of confidence in God’s kairos-time.

 

Not long ago, for men sound theology was indicated by the possession of a pocket watch — a fact which saved pastor-nominating committees a lot of time, so to speak.  The committee simply asked the candidate, if male, for the correct time and unless he hauled out a pocket watch, he was not considered further.  But now, sad to say, there is no place to put a pocket watch.  Of course, one may carry a watch in a vest pocket, but few men wear vests and the purpose of the waistcoat was always to hide the suspenders worn in conjunction with a belt by truly conservative men who wished to avoid all unnecessary risks.

 

In these days of lowered moral standards, it goes unremembered that the admonition, “Don’t get caught with your pants down” was originally designed to keep a man from stepping on his pocket watch.

 

Charles Partee
Presbyterian Outlook
October 2000

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