Nadia Bolz-Weber Quote
We’ve relegated death, birth, and even making music to the professionals…all things that, until a few generations ago, used to be done by regular people like us in the home. What used to be natural — giving birth, playing instruments and singing, and dying among loved ones who will lovingly lay our bodies out in the parlor to be honored by those who loved us — is now a commercial enterprise. Not that I’m ungrateful for a lower infant mortality rate or the safety that women in high-risk pregnancies now enjoy, and not that I don’t love hearing professionally recorded music. But I do wonder if we lost more than we realized when we started hiring professionals to do for us what we used to do for ourselves.
We’ve relegated death, birth, and even making music to the professionals…all things that, until a few generations ago, used to be done by regular people like us in the home. What used to be natural — giving birth, playing instruments and singing, and dying among loved ones who will lovingly lay our bodies out in the parlor to be honored by those who loved us — is now a commercial enterprise. Not that I’m ungrateful for a lower infant mortality rate or the safety that women in high-risk pregnancies now enjoy, and not that I don’t love hearing professionally recorded music. But I do wonder if we lost more than we realized when we started hiring professionals to do for us what we used to do for ourselves.