The Pace Of A Hen

“CERTAIN AUTHORS,” says Pascal, “speaking of their works, say ‘My Book.’ They would do better to say ‘Our Book’ because there is in them generally more of other people’s than their own.” Truly, this book is not my book but our book. It is the book of my friends, my family, my favorite writers. It is a book which grew out of the Pendle Hill pamphlet Martha and Mary, which in its turn grew out of the pooled wisdom of a group of women who sat and talked one sunny autumn afternoon about a woman’s relationship to her home and her family, to her work and her spiritual life. We came to see that it was not a matter of choice between the roles of Martha and Mary, but a recognition of the diverse facets of almost every woman’s nature. The reconciliation of a woman’s many selves is a slow process. Richard Cabot taught my generation in his book What Men Live By that the integrated person, the one who faces reality, is never an extremist but one who keeps his equilibrium. The ever-increasing demands on a modern woman’s time and energy, her wide interests, her own high standards of performance, pull her in many directions. Her scattered life does indeed resemble the pace of a hen. For her the golden mean is achieved only as she is able to find her way between work and play, between home and community, between solitude and society, between the wisdom of the serpent and the gentleness of the dove. But in time, with some years given mainly to the nurture of the family, some years to this field of service or that avocation, these seeming fragments can fit together to make a shining pattern of wholeness.

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