I'm starting to see a pattern in my life: I don't always "get" things from the start. I'm not dumb or dense, per se; I just don't always go from point a to point b in a direct line. Whenever I sit down to write, it's usually preceded by a good hour or so sometimes of just bopping around on the internet, following my fancy. Sometimes I'm reading other blogs, or academic journals or encyclicals, or following pop culture on Yahoo news. It's "wasted" time, but it does have a purpose in the end. Thoughts or insights or connections start to meld together from unrelated corners and the next thing I know badda boom badda bing, some stuff on a page, my humble offering to you.
I've never been able to relate to the obedient son in Luke 15, but the prodigal son is my archetype: leaving home to find he misses home, coming full circle to where he began. The journey for the prodigal is, on the surface, largely unnecessary. "If he would have just listened from the start," the brother chastises, "he could have avoided all that mess and heartache!" But for the prodigal, the words of the Master "to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little" speaks to his heart (Lk 7:47).
Half my life is examples of coming full circle after a persistent desire to "go my own way." I've always been like this, ever since I was a kid--it's not enough for someone to tell me; I have to find out for myself. It took me twenty years of smoking and addiction to realize nicotine wasn't really benefiting my life in any meaningful way (#rocketscience). I didn't come to the altar on my wedding day a virgin, and it pains me to think of the string of sexual connections following me up there, stuck to the hem of my shirt. " I felt I had to give up a perfectly good job and apartment to go through living on the streets in a converted schoolbus as an urban hermit before I realized hey flush toilets are kind of nice and buses were made for driving, not establishing residency. Even coming to belief and faith was a process of exploration, curiosity, investigation, encounter, and, eventually, assent. If only I knew then what I know now!" Wouldn't we all.
As Deb and I come up on our seven year wedding anniversary next month, the most contemporary example at this point in my life of coming back to start has been on the topic of life--aka, babies. And for this, I need to start at the beginning.
Even before I became Catholic, I was hung up on the practical absurdity of the Church's prohibitory position on artificial contraception. As a fish in the ocean of culture, I didn't even realize how much I was breathing in the locus of mainstream contraceptive thinking that regarded babies as expensive burdens; catastrophic products to be avoided at all costs in hook-ups or non-marital monogomous relations, accessories to be customized; or, within marriage, something to keep limited for sanity's sake. There simply was no other narrative I was exposed to.
So, when Deb and I met on a Catholic dating site, I was what I called a "six out of seven" Catholic. That is, the site we met on asked seven questions about your assent to Church teaching. I had no problem with papal infallibility, Mary, Eucharist, Confession, pre-marital sex, etc. But I simply didn't accept the Church's position that the use of artificial contraception was morally illicit. Mostly because it didn't make sense, and also because I had just started grad school in Theology and thought I was the smartest guy in the world.
So fast forward a bit. Deb and I are in our first year or two of marriage and like most people and many Catholics even in that boat, we wanted a few years together before any kid(s) make their way onto the scene. How to make that happen? Well, you have an array of choices of course. We thought that was prudent and made sense and that's what you did. I was working at Starbucks part time and at a community college part time.
One day I came across an article by a bioethicist named Janet E. Smith titled, "Contraception: Why Not?" late one night on the internet. It was a well-reasoned, thoughtful, and articulate proposition that "Maybe this (modern artificial birth control) isn't the best thing since sliced bread after all." I can't do it justice to summarize, but suffice it to say it cracked the door into an alternative moral worldview in which artificial birth control and it's touted benefits was maybe not all it was cracked up to be.
This wasn't quite an A plus B leads to C forgone conclusion, though. I simply couldn't get past the foreboding prospect of throwing out the condoms and opening the tap full-tilt on life and life abundant. Sure, we wanted kids, but how to keep it at 1 or 2 max? Hm. By this time we had David and like most new parents were overwhelmed, exhausted, and slightly stressed. I kind of half-heartedly looked into what resources were available for methods of natural family planning methods that were available and Church sanctioned. Local support was few and far between but we did manage to find a Creighton instructor about thirty minutes away who would meet with us for $40/session and go over method, basics, charting, etc, to tell when you were fertile and when you weren't.
Our instructor had five children, and we would meet in her home. She was nice and even-keeled, though I think she was slightly self-conscious that people who came to her (like us, seeking to limit their family size) saw her as "um, not very successful" at this method of spacing births. But she also recognized that the Church expects couples to be generous and open to life, and that's what she was doing. We had moved to an au naturale method, but our mindset was still very much about controlling out fertility and being very very careful to avoid "errors" that would cause "failures of method." This resulted in a lot of yellow stickers on our chart, when cycles were not clear, and more periods of abstinence than I think we were expecting. It was not always fun, but we did learn that it could be done and that I wouldn't actually die from lack of sex.
I came to appreciate this kind of self-discipline later after our second (who was also somewhat planned) was born. Going from one to two felt like a big jump and we were just treading water above the surface. We practiced white-knuckle control for a good four years and felt we just couldn't handle anymore than what we already were dealing with.
Now, I'm not a huge rah-rah NFP advocate, but the touted upsides do have some truth to them. We did communicate more when it came to sex and the possibility of life, where we were at both personally and a couple with everything, and how we envisioned out family. Deb learned about her body, and so did I (basic biology, really). Self-control wasn't always easy, but I think in the long run it is really beneficial. After all, if Deb ever fell sick or infirmed, how would I handle my sex drive? Masturbate? Pornography? Another partner outside of marriage? The Church hold the bar high. The only real moral option was chastity, and learning what it looked like in a marriage was a process, but one I might not have come to were it not for learning NFP.
After a few years with two, our hearts began to soften to the idea of considering, well, more than two. The chaos in the 2-3 year old stage was not as bad now, we had moved and had more space, and so the question shifted more from "why?" to "why not?" Did we have serious reasons for postponing or not having more children? Deb's age meant that realistically our door was closing, and we began to consider the very real possibility of regret--that is, that we would regret not being more open to life during those last years of fertility.
Throughout this whole time, God was doing a thing. He was softening our hearts and opening us up as a couple to the light of reason, to the irrefutability of Natural Law, and to truth as revealed by Catholic doctrine on the dignity and great blessing that is human life. The decision of family size is a very personal one and needs to be made by couples themselves, and should not be judged by others, at least that is my contention. But like the prodigal, I realized I (and it really was me more than Deb) was really holding up a sense of control as an idol. I wanted to be the author of life. Yes we need to use reason, discernment, prudence; but was I trusting God? With everything?...even our fertility? This seemed to be one of those 'off the table' parts of our lives that took years to realize. Once we did, I can say, there was more peace and a move closer to trusting that God would provide if we put our faith in Him, even if we didn't know what the future held. We are moving from fear to trust, and while it is a process and we are not sure what the outcome will look like, it is an affirming one that I am confident the Holy Spirit is working through.
There is an expression, that God writes straight with crooked lines. Even when we go off on our own explorations and shortcuts, He manages to gently lead us back to the path as long as we are not ostensibly refusing to follow Him. When we stumble, he stoops down and brushes us off, quick to forgive, to renew, to love. Grace drips drips on our hearts, wearing away the hardness, when we even push the door to his room in just a crack to see what's inside. And in the process, on the journey back, the words come to us:
I've never been able to relate to the obedient son in Luke 15, but the prodigal son is my archetype: leaving home to find he misses home, coming full circle to where he began. The journey for the prodigal is, on the surface, largely unnecessary. "If he would have just listened from the start," the brother chastises, "he could have avoided all that mess and heartache!" But for the prodigal, the words of the Master "to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little" speaks to his heart (Lk 7:47).
Half my life is examples of coming full circle after a persistent desire to "go my own way." I've always been like this, ever since I was a kid--it's not enough for someone to tell me; I have to find out for myself. It took me twenty years of smoking and addiction to realize nicotine wasn't really benefiting my life in any meaningful way (#rocketscience). I didn't come to the altar on my wedding day a virgin, and it pains me to think of the string of sexual connections following me up there, stuck to the hem of my shirt. " I felt I had to give up a perfectly good job and apartment to go through living on the streets in a converted schoolbus as an urban hermit before I realized hey flush toilets are kind of nice and buses were made for driving, not establishing residency. Even coming to belief and faith was a process of exploration, curiosity, investigation, encounter, and, eventually, assent. If only I knew then what I know now!" Wouldn't we all.
As Deb and I come up on our seven year wedding anniversary next month, the most contemporary example at this point in my life of coming back to start has been on the topic of life--aka, babies. And for this, I need to start at the beginning.
Even before I became Catholic, I was hung up on the practical absurdity of the Church's prohibitory position on artificial contraception. As a fish in the ocean of culture, I didn't even realize how much I was breathing in the locus of mainstream contraceptive thinking that regarded babies as expensive burdens; catastrophic products to be avoided at all costs in hook-ups or non-marital monogomous relations, accessories to be customized; or, within marriage, something to keep limited for sanity's sake. There simply was no other narrative I was exposed to.
So, when Deb and I met on a Catholic dating site, I was what I called a "six out of seven" Catholic. That is, the site we met on asked seven questions about your assent to Church teaching. I had no problem with papal infallibility, Mary, Eucharist, Confession, pre-marital sex, etc. But I simply didn't accept the Church's position that the use of artificial contraception was morally illicit. Mostly because it didn't make sense, and also because I had just started grad school in Theology and thought I was the smartest guy in the world.
So fast forward a bit. Deb and I are in our first year or two of marriage and like most people and many Catholics even in that boat, we wanted a few years together before any kid(s) make their way onto the scene. How to make that happen? Well, you have an array of choices of course. We thought that was prudent and made sense and that's what you did. I was working at Starbucks part time and at a community college part time.
One day I came across an article by a bioethicist named Janet E. Smith titled, "Contraception: Why Not?" late one night on the internet. It was a well-reasoned, thoughtful, and articulate proposition that "Maybe this (modern artificial birth control) isn't the best thing since sliced bread after all." I can't do it justice to summarize, but suffice it to say it cracked the door into an alternative moral worldview in which artificial birth control and it's touted benefits was maybe not all it was cracked up to be.
This wasn't quite an A plus B leads to C forgone conclusion, though. I simply couldn't get past the foreboding prospect of throwing out the condoms and opening the tap full-tilt on life and life abundant. Sure, we wanted kids, but how to keep it at 1 or 2 max? Hm. By this time we had David and like most new parents were overwhelmed, exhausted, and slightly stressed. I kind of half-heartedly looked into what resources were available for methods of natural family planning methods that were available and Church sanctioned. Local support was few and far between but we did manage to find a Creighton instructor about thirty minutes away who would meet with us for $40/session and go over method, basics, charting, etc, to tell when you were fertile and when you weren't.
Our instructor had five children, and we would meet in her home. She was nice and even-keeled, though I think she was slightly self-conscious that people who came to her (like us, seeking to limit their family size) saw her as "um, not very successful" at this method of spacing births. But she also recognized that the Church expects couples to be generous and open to life, and that's what she was doing. We had moved to an au naturale method, but our mindset was still very much about controlling out fertility and being very very careful to avoid "errors" that would cause "failures of method." This resulted in a lot of yellow stickers on our chart, when cycles were not clear, and more periods of abstinence than I think we were expecting. It was not always fun, but we did learn that it could be done and that I wouldn't actually die from lack of sex.
I came to appreciate this kind of self-discipline later after our second (who was also somewhat planned) was born. Going from one to two felt like a big jump and we were just treading water above the surface. We practiced white-knuckle control for a good four years and felt we just couldn't handle anymore than what we already were dealing with.
Now, I'm not a huge rah-rah NFP advocate, but the touted upsides do have some truth to them. We did communicate more when it came to sex and the possibility of life, where we were at both personally and a couple with everything, and how we envisioned out family. Deb learned about her body, and so did I (basic biology, really). Self-control wasn't always easy, but I think in the long run it is really beneficial. After all, if Deb ever fell sick or infirmed, how would I handle my sex drive? Masturbate? Pornography? Another partner outside of marriage? The Church hold the bar high. The only real moral option was chastity, and learning what it looked like in a marriage was a process, but one I might not have come to were it not for learning NFP.
After a few years with two, our hearts began to soften to the idea of considering, well, more than two. The chaos in the 2-3 year old stage was not as bad now, we had moved and had more space, and so the question shifted more from "why?" to "why not?" Did we have serious reasons for postponing or not having more children? Deb's age meant that realistically our door was closing, and we began to consider the very real possibility of regret--that is, that we would regret not being more open to life during those last years of fertility.
Throughout this whole time, God was doing a thing. He was softening our hearts and opening us up as a couple to the light of reason, to the irrefutability of Natural Law, and to truth as revealed by Catholic doctrine on the dignity and great blessing that is human life. The decision of family size is a very personal one and needs to be made by couples themselves, and should not be judged by others, at least that is my contention. But like the prodigal, I realized I (and it really was me more than Deb) was really holding up a sense of control as an idol. I wanted to be the author of life. Yes we need to use reason, discernment, prudence; but was I trusting God? With everything?...even our fertility? This seemed to be one of those 'off the table' parts of our lives that took years to realize. Once we did, I can say, there was more peace and a move closer to trusting that God would provide if we put our faith in Him, even if we didn't know what the future held. We are moving from fear to trust, and while it is a process and we are not sure what the outcome will look like, it is an affirming one that I am confident the Holy Spirit is working through.
There is an expression, that God writes straight with crooked lines. Even when we go off on our own explorations and shortcuts, He manages to gently lead us back to the path as long as we are not ostensibly refusing to follow Him. When we stumble, he stoops down and brushes us off, quick to forgive, to renew, to love. Grace drips drips on our hearts, wearing away the hardness, when we even push the door to his room in just a crack to see what's inside. And in the process, on the journey back, the words come to us:
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me, bless His holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And forget none of His benefits!
Ps 103:1-2
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