Are Manners Important?

I sent the following in an email several months ago. I thought I would post it again here. Some of you may feel like you're jumping in the middle of something that you know nothing of with the first paragraph, but keep reading. You won't continue to feel that way. Within the lengthy section of book excerpts the words in brackets are my own. To be quite self consciously honest, my comments at the end make me vulnerable. I almost struck them from the original but decided to leave them in case they may encourage another. I have been an imperfect parent. I recently told a friend that I wished I had been more on top of everything - especially child training - in the middle of the giant and numerous interruptions of the last several years. She asked rhetorically, "And how would you have done that?" I am grateful for God's grace and mercy that has created beautiful things in spite of my blunders and just plain old moments of being pooped out. Life has certainly been taxing and demanding. But at the end there lies a reward for the faithful. I can hardly wait to see God in all His glory=) He is the perfect reward all by Himself!

I may not be posting here again for a while. Jason's palate repair/ear tubes surgery is Friday, and we will be very busy before then. Thanks to so many who have told me they are praying for my Little Bit.

This may seem kind of weird, but I have something on my mind that I wanted to share. Something that Boyd said Sat. morning helped me think some more about something that's been forming in my mind for a long time. There were many good things that he shared, and I hope to remember many of them, but one really helped me. He said to expect children to resist the parents' decisions. (That is not an exact quote.) Something that I've done with teenagers that I regret (although I didn't know why until now) is to let them sway me too much in areas that don't seem all that weighty. Example: Keeping their room clean is stupid. Mom is just too picky. And then, of course, they can support their assertions with spiritual reasoning. That really threw me off.

Three things have happened to make me see my way with this kind of thing more clearly. The first was a very unimportant conversation with a good friend. She told me about having had a child guest in their home. At the supper table the guest took an excessive amount of some condiment. She said that it wasn't the amount that bothered she and her husband. It was that "it was ugly at the table."

The second thing that I came across a few months ago was something I read in the book Sixpence in Her Shoe by Phyllis McGinley. (More on the book later.) I really want to put a lengthy excerpt here, so I'm going to=) By way of introduction, the author has had a conversation with a friend who is worried about how her grandchildren are being raised. Their mother thinks that manners are silly things to teach them and that her own upbringing was too rigid. The author (and her friend) just know that that is not quite right, but cannot come up with a rebuttal - until an incident occurs involving the author. Elaine is the mother of the children and Monica is one of the children.

"'Elaine thinks teaching them manners is nonsense. She told me so when I was trying to persuade Monica to butter her bread like a lady instead of stuffing a whole slice into her mouth. Elaine says her life was nearly ruined by being brought up so rigidly - calls it the 'white glove syndrome.' Her children aren't going to live by all those silly rules, she says. She claims it's self-reliance and character she's after, not frills.'

...'I know she's wrong, but the stupid thing is I can't think of a good argument to contradict her. If manners are nothing but frills, Elaine is perfectly justified. I suppose we don't have time for frills in this age. It's so awful, though,' and here my friend relapsed into real despair. 'I just know those two are going to grow up horrid, oafish people - and I can't bear it!'

...Kind hearts are obviously more than coronets and character of greater importance than the ability to handle a piece of bread and butter gracefully. There was a fallacy somewhere, but I couldn't put a reasonable finger on it; that is, not a finger Elaine would be willing to follow.

The answer was handed to me a day or two later on a trip through the New England countryside. I had stopped off to visit a boarding school for girls where the Headmistress is a friend of mine and where some of my family have been educated...The stairs still sweep grandly down from a mysterious upper floor of offices and dormitories. And it was on this formal stairway that I saw a girl go through and acrobatic performance as absurd as it was charming.

She was in uniform, of course, her arms burdened with books, on her way in a rush to some desperate student goal. Then she encountered the Head and me. And caught so in mid-flight, balanced improbably on one step, clumsy with her great load of papers and texts, she still managed what custom there demanded. She put one foot behind her and dropped a ritual curtsy. It took courage and it took athletic skill. It was also, I felt, quite ridiculous. I murmured something of the sort to the Head.

'You still have them doing it, I see. And do they still get demerits if they forget?'

She looked at me with amusement. 'Yes, my dear, they do - and I know exactly what you're thinking. A Victorian relic, quite useless so far as jobs and College Boards are concerned. We have it out in committee every year.'

'Well,' I confessed, 'you have to admit it's pretty inessential. A curtsy in this day and age - and on the stairs. It's appealing but does it really count?'

'Good manners always count,' said the Head serenely. 'We could omit the curtsy, if you like. It's only a school ceremony. But we can't drop this drill on manners. It's one way of teaching morality.'

'Morality?'

'Certainly.' Her voice was gentle but assured. 'Manners and morals are all of a piece. One is only proof of the other. That child you smiled at just now wasn't doing just a difficult gymnastic stunt. She was showing respect to superior wisdom, sagacity, and' - here the Head glanced at me slyly -'age.'

'But she was in a hurry,' I protested. 'And it's such a - such a salute.'

'Artificial, you mean? Quite true.'...She was doing honor to another sort of standard - our importance. And who knows? If we keep on training her, these manners, the curtsies and respectful answers and artificial niceties, may become something more than automatic reflexes. Her heart may be touched as well. She may learn really to respect authority and wisdom, value courtesy for its own sake, as well as go through the motions.'

I thought it over for a moment. 'You mean a gesture can instruct the mind?'

...I could scarcely wait to pour out to my friend this brand new rebuttal for the theory that manners were unimportant.

Unimportant? They were vital...[W]hat Elaine had damned as frills - soft answers; inoffensive customs at table; courtesy to one's elders, betters, equals, and inferiors - were simple practical evidence of the kind hearts she valued and the solid character she desired to build. They were the first small steps to the house of merit in which she truly wanted them to live.

...Since for me morality had been conveniently packaged a long while ago in something called the Ten Commandments, I ran through the ancient list. Which would Elaine accept as valid?

...[P]arents like me and my generation fought such lonely skirmishes along the behaviorist front. Flinching from automatic 'I won't's' and 'You can't make me's' of the young, we had to evolve our own alibis for wielding unfashionable authority...How much easier is would have been and still would be if good manners - a respectful tongue, an attentive ear, obedience this side of slavishness - were equated with morality. Then there would be no need to invent excuses for curbs and disciplines...

Thou shalt not steal, I considered. Couldn't that be stretched to fit a lot of things? Being tidy in one's room, not using the phone too much, changing from school clothes to blue jeans for play, taking care of other people's property?

And recalling the time when Monica, at my house, had ingeniously detached Meissen cup from its hook in the china cabinet and broken the handle, with no more than an unconcerned cluck from her mother as reprimand, I added breaking and entering is a felony any way you look at it. You could point that out to children.

Quarrels, too - you might stop a lot of them if everybody was reminded that we aren't supposed to covet or be angry of bear false witness.

...But it is moral law which instigated the good breeding in the first place, not the other way round. The soft answer and the reasonable apology, the control of one's own ego - the social animal acquired those after he had acquired a belief in theological virtues.

...Nor of those things would be good enough to convince Elaine, I thought. If I just told her flatly that anger is a major sin, she would say sin is relative. Or else nonexistent.

...There was one enormous virtue she believed in with all her heart.

Charity, I thought, with the clarity of revelation. She believes in charity, And that's what manners prove.

...Charity is not simply a donation to the community chest and a gift to the Hundred Neediest Cases at Christmastime. It is not merely giving one's hours as a volunteer in a hospital or subscribing to the relief of flood victims a hemisphere away. It is both larger and smaller than those things, at once easier and harder, and it does, indeed, begin at home. Charity is graciousness and tact. Charity is a guarded tongue. It is picking up one's toys, giving a hand with the dinner dishes, writing a bread-and-butter letter to one's hostess. It is turning off television at a respectable hour so one's neighbor can sleep in peace, and being patient with bores. It is thanking salesladies in shops, forbearing to pass on the bit of malicious gossip so tempting to tell, wielding the knife and fork so that we do not aesthetically offend.

...He [Paul of the Bible] might well have added [to the description about charity in 1 Cor. 13] that charity (before it progresses to such great bounties and is still a child) first learns not to monopolize the telephone, comes when it is called, asks leave to go to the movies or to use the car, remembers that adults have nerves and frustrations too, and is agreeable to guests in the house.

At the school where Head presides, Consideration for Others is noted on report cards along with Promptness, English Aptitude, and Mathematical Improvement. Once I had been beguiled by the quaintness of the phrasing. Now it seemed to me to embody the total of man's social duty, as well as childhood's great necessary training. It is the essence of charity as it is the essence of good manners. It is even the heart of law. [Remember the second greatest commandment? To love's one's neighbor as oneself? That is precisely "Consideration for Others".]

...[W]hy, I wondered...have we allowed ourselves so long to be beckoned off into different and absurd directions about behavior?...We wanted our young to stand on their own feet. We forgot about the vulnerable toes they might tread on in the process. We wished they might be strong-minded, confident, resolute, capable of carrying burdens. We overlooked the fact that strength of mind is a discipline, resolution must learn sacrifice, and that the burden we most need to bear is our neighbor's good.

...Urbane gestures do not by themselves make philosophers or saints, but they do not unmake them either. In fact, the saints were almost all of them celebrated for their courtesy...A courtly person is not by definition a shallow person, nor is a rude one better for his rudeness. Indeed, rudeness implies egotism, which is the exact opposite of charity. Opening car doors means nothing in itself. Letting an older woman precede one into a room means nothing. But preparing the mind for kindnesses by teaching such flourishes does mean a great deal. Character is a sturdy cloth woven of hundreds of threads, and every thread is important. Elaine was permitting Monica and Tony to weaken the cloth by forcing them to make no effort at sacrifice or control.

...Among all the teachers [at the school], the children have a favorite. She takes the fourth class, trains the choir, and is so beloved that the girls yield to her an automatic duty they sometime give grudgingly to lesser instructors. She is also a Negro...Surely children growing up there in that aura of good breeding, dropping her a curtsy in the classroom or on the stairs, giving her their hearts and their obedience, are learning as much about correct race relations as if they carried banners in parades or sat in at segregated lunch counters. They are doing better than that. They are forgetting that such a thing as racial separation exists. [This book was written in 1960 when racial prejudice was viciously alive and well.]

'Manners are morals.' I repeated aloud...'They are the exercises of the body for the sake of the mind and soul.'"

All of the lessons that might be learned from these chapter excerpts are not really new. They are based on principles that I held in high regard and applied in parenting with great vigor some years ago. But, between the many upheavals over the years and the fierce nature of teenage resistance, I have gotten weak in my applications. I don't know how much can be fixed now. I hope to try and regain some order that comes from having some known and immovable standard for the sake of order, yes, but also for the sake of character building/training.

I am sharing all this because you still have small children. I just wanted to put it in your minds now so that you might someday not be tempted, as I, to slacken the standards. I have a feeling that you all will do well with that - better than I. But, just in case, tuck these things away and be prepared for the future by building resolve now to remain fixed in all that you have decided is important.

I am not going to mention any specific areas (other than what I already shared by way of example earlier) because some of the standards that we might set for our families are not a matter of sin or not. They are just the things that we each have decided will be guiding and steadfast principles in our homes. We can become like the Pharisees if we begin to require of each other things that are not matters of right vs. wrong. But some "hedges," if you will, can be helpful in keeping our individual families on the righteous course we desire.

Just a quick note about the book that I quoted from: It is not written from a Christian perspective, but in some ways that is what makes it so refreshing. The author espouses many things about women and their role that are quite biblical because they work, not because she is necessarily convicted about them. I have found the book to be entertaining as the author is superb. (She is a Pulitzer award winning poet.) She has really written this book about homemaking/childrearing/marriage in loosely story form. The generous amount of anecdotes make the instruction seem hardly intrusive. It's just a gentle look at her own life and lessons she's learned.

It took me three sittings to finish this. If you taken at least as many sittings to read it, I'm not surprised. We are busy, afterall.

Love to all!
Karen