abc family

Rerun

In spite of the good things life has been bringing lately – good food and laughter with friends, a weekend up north with new skis and perfect snow, the chance to regularly spend time babysitting a beautiful three-year-old – I'm dry.  If you could look at my heart right now you'd see rough gray skin, not the soft new pink that means I'm growing.  I open my prayer journal these days and the only words that come are the ones that have been written on me countless times over.  I am frustrated by these words because I feel that I have drawn everything out of them that can be expected of me.  Stubbornly, I don't want to go back to them.

And yet... exfoliation does not cease to become necessary simply because you have done it before.  Perhaps that is life: a continuous refusal to let ourselves fade out, a continuous rejection of the easy path, a continuous affirmation of the reality that the ugly parts of ourselves must be a challenge rather than a cause of despair.

I've hashed it out here many times and at great length, but I could give it to you in a few sentences:

I believe that God is all-powerful and all-loving.  In the face of my suffering, it is sometimes hard to feel that, but I choose to believe it because I know it is true. Therefore, I must also believe that he allows me to suffer for a good purpose, even if I cannot see it.  Therefore, I must trust.  That makes my goals for this time simple: learning to trust God and discerning his will for us.

It's one of the basic rules of writing that it is best to use only as many words as are necessary to say what you want to say.  I've always had a hard time with this rule when I write, so perhaps it makes sense that I want more than the words above, that I feel like I deserve more.  But when I am completely honest with myself, when I can pull my mind and my will away from the rule of my feelings, I know that these words are enough.  The goals may feel simplistic but the truth in them, like holiness itself, is made complex and elusive by my flaws. 

I want to keep traveling; if I cannot have the joy of motherhood in this time I want at least the joy of spiritual discovery.  But perhaps that itself has become a sort of god for me: I seek it for its own sake, rather than for the purpose it serves.  Unfortunately, it does me no good to keep traveling if the travel does not transform me.  I am small and weak, and perhaps that is why the same words must be written on me over and over.  The One who has power to write them uses them to block me in so that I may see that the only way out is up.

Lucky

An email from my friend and fellow infertility journeyer Jennifer reminded me of an idea that’s been with me for quite a while now.

Jennifer said, what if we are actually the lucky ones? What if it is only the smallness of our perspective that makes us unable to see how blessed we are?

A chill ran through me when I read that.

We’re forced to wait for our children. How can that possibly be a blessing?

Still…

For months now there’s been a little voice inside me that chides me when I get too close to despair. If you can accept this cross with love it might be the best thing you ever do.

Sometimes I insist on arguing with the voice. I always thought motherhood would be the best thing I’d ever do. Why haven’t I been given that chance? Why does it have to be this one?

Last spring my father wrote me a letter in which he told me of an image he’d gotten while praying for me: that of Simon of Cyrene. In Gibson’s portrayal in The Passion Simon is drafted into service against his will, but after being with Jesus for a while he does not want to leave Him; he has realized what a blessing it is to help carry that cross.

But, Dad pointed out, if Simon had been forced to carry the cross without knowing it was for his Christ, would he have caught on so easily to the goodness of what he was doing? Almost surely not, and yet the act itself would have been just as valuable.

We see Simon as a chosen one, blessed to have been so close to the Savior at such a time. Yet I’m sure that many of those looking on must have pitied the one who was forced into humiliating labor for the sake of a criminal condemned to death. Perhaps there was a man standing next to Simon in the crowd who drew a breath of relief when the guards passed over him, and went on his way thinking himself lucky. But it was Simon who was given the life-changing chance.

On the fourth Sunday of Advent, which also happened to be Cycle Day 1 for me, the reading at Mass was the story of the Annunciation. The priest talked in his homily about Mary and the amazing fiat of motherhood, and I couldn’t help it. Tears just kept pushing themselves out of my eyes.

That afternoon, my mom pulled me aside. “I was watching you during Mass, and I just wanted to tell you,” she said, “motherhood is a great thing. But wanting to be a mother, and having to wait - yours is the higher calling.”

My first thought was that I can’t really believe that. I’ve been thinking about it since then, though, and about the little voice inside me, and about Simon of Cyrene being pushed to the ground by that bone-crushing cross. I think about the person I might be now if we’d gotten pregnant that first cycle or even that first year, and you know what? I know I am a lucky one.

It sounds ridiculous, especially in light of some of the torturous moments I’ve written about here, but it’s true. It’s true not because I feel it, but in spite of the fact that most of the time I don’t feel it. It’s True with a capital T. It’s a truth of the paradoxical sort the Father of Paradoxes sometimes springs on us to keep us on our toes. And in spite of the fact that mostly I’m too dumb to see it, I want to know it because I want to stay on my toes.

Remind me of this in about a week and a half.

C.S. Lewis Knows

(In honor of the Narnia movie, which I saw this weekend and loved, I went looking for a quotation from C.S. Lewis to use in a post. I found so many that I decided to center the post around them; every quotation here is from him.)

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. 

Sometimes when the inception of a new cycle has informed me of the fruitlessness of the preceding one, grief will stop me for a moment. These moments are the emptiest I’ve experienced; I do nothing in them except shudder in tears. But it occurred to me at the last one – yesterday – that these moments are not sadness, they are fear. In my deepest grief I do not mourn the fruitlessness of my hopes for a child, I fear the fruitlessness of hope itself. This small thing, so longed-for, has not come, and for a moment I am frozen in fear that no things longed-for will ever come. My life is a constant longing for ultimate joy in God, and the tiny atheism that is the fear in those moments is enough violence to split my soul wide open. I know what Lewis means about grief feeling like fear; the grief of my unfulfilled hopes brings the fear that God does not love me. That is the only thing worth fearing, but also the one thing which my existence proves I need never fear.

We're not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

Blessedly, the grace of the One who holds me in being always calls me back from my fear. I trust him; I don’t doubt that he will do the best for me. But that does not mean I refrain from asking him to show me what he is doing, to help me understand. I beg him, also, to find another way if it is possible. (Christ himself did that begging in the garden after the Last Supper, so I figure I may do it as well.)

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, “Blessed are they that mourn.”

As much as I know that begging for relief is absolutely right, I also get another message in my reading and prayer: embrace the suffering. Don’t let it go to waste. And so I’ve adopted a prayer of my own which I repeat in the hardest moments, not because I want to but because I know it is right. Lord, I say, thank you for knowing better than I do what is best for me, and thank you for giving me exactly what I need. Please use this to make me the person you will me to be. And the funny thing is, as hard as this prayer is to say, I can feel the blessing in it even as I say it. I always imagined that those mentioned in the beautitude were blessed by their mourning only in the morning that followed their night of suffering, but I am learning as I walk here that glimmers of light can come before the darkness lifts.

The great thing is, if one can, to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions in one's "own" or "real" life. The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.

In an article I read last spring, George Weigel wrote of Benedict XVI, “We can be sure that he will challenge us all to the noble human adventure that has no better name than sanctity.” The phrase has stuck with me; it’s exactly the reminder I need that life’s adventure is not one particular activity – college, marriage, motherhood (all things to which I have looked or do look forward) – but rather the path to heaven, the path to perfection. Infertility so often feels like an interruption, a pause in the journey I always imagined my life would be, but every one of these waiting moments is forming me. I do not want to waste them by refusing to appreciate that.

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a quiet call to hope, and it wasn’t until I started focusing on that call that I realized how instinctively I cling to my precautions. I am afraid of real hope, afraid to expose myself to the danger of handing myself over. I have often spoken blithely of surrender, but Lewis is right; it is terrible, and almost impossible. And yet, are not all the really worthwhile things terrible in their way? The terrible nature of surrender does not expose it as worthless or too hard, but rather proves it to be exactly what it is: absolutely essential.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

I’ve written many times before about realizing I can never find perfect happiness in earthly things, but that truth is very easy to forget, and I need to be reminded almost constantly. It’s so easy to think that if I just achieve motherhood I will want for nothing else, but I’ve been down that road before with other longings, and I always find that when my desires are satisfied they are quickly replaced by new ones. When I am able to have faith in the permanent, I always find that the transient things fall into place much more easily than I expected. I haven’t gotten “earth thrown in” yet, but I know that Lewis is right about this one, and I know that making this truth a cornerstone of my living will serve me very well. Now, if only I could do it consistently.

The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.

I think it’s in The Great Divorce that Lewis writes of how our final destiny will color our lives as we have lived them, that those who find themselves in hell will see their whole lives on earth as merely a part of hell, and those who find themselves in heaven will understand their lives likewise. It’s a great consolation for me, the possibility that one day I will have an entirely different understanding of this time of wanting. Lewis’s take on joy rings true for me in the way only mysteries can, from that place in me where I have invited my Creator to take up residence. My words trip over each other trying to explain how I know it, but believe me when I say I know it wholeheartedly: suffering is only so that better joy may be.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

Enough said. I pray that every one of us may experience the happiness that is Himself as we celebrate the glory of His birth.

The Spirit and the Flesh

Junior year I took a class called Creation and Grace, required for all theology majors. One of the topics on which we spent a lot of time was the unity of body and soul. The extremes tend toward the belief that we have no souls, or toward the belief that our bodies are mere shells for our souls. We believe it is true to say “I am my body” or “I am my soul” as long as we don't claim to be either exclusively. We’re both: body and soul.

In class we talked about the basic examples of this (how when you're in emotional pain your body can actually hurt, etc.) and I found them convincing, but it's still a hard concept, and one that I couldn't grasp nearly as well as I would have liked. I struggled for understanding.

If someone had come up to me after that class and offered me a better way to understand the unity of body soul, I almost certainly would have accepted. Why not, right? It’s a hard concept, an important one, and I’d have taken the opportunity.

No one offered it to me, but as it turns out I’ve gotten my chance anyway. In retrospect, I'm very glad no one gave me the choice beforehand, because I probably would have said yes, and now I'd be kicking myself for not turning it down.

What am I talking about? You're confused. I'll give you a hint: do I talk about anything else here?

The fear of being betrayed by a loved one is instinctive, I think. Self-defensive. But the fear of being betrayed by oneself is not instinctive, which is perhaps why the betrayal hits so hard.

Oh, having one's body refuse to do exactly what one wants it to do is not a new experience, especially for those of us who are not athletically inclined. I personally am abysmally un-flexible, which was a big pain in ballet class. And when I have to wake up early, I’d like to feel energetic, and why won’t my body do that for me?

Those are little things, though, and hardly meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Infertility, on the other hand, is huge – and very difficult to process. I mentioned to Bryan last week that I’m struggling to be able to forgive myself for having fertility problems, and he looked at me as if I’d suddenly grown an extra head. “Forgive yourself for what? You didn’t do anything!” Which is exactly why I deserve to be forgiven, and exactly why it’s so hard to do it.

When you’re an adolescent girl it’s normal to hate your body. You complain because your friends complain. When I was in high school I joined in the moaning, although secretly I thought my thighs were just fine. The only thing I really would have changed about myself is the quality of my eyesight: corrective lenses are inconvenient. But wishing for 20/20 vision is not really hating your body.

Now, when I buckle my belt across my stomach, I frown at its flatness and the skin pulled tautly over it. And although I can’t see the parts inside, I’m even more annoyed with them. Why can’t they do what they’re supposed to do? I’m not hating my body, exactly, but I’m certainly frustrated with it beyond belief.

But the weird thing is that I love my body too. It’s not merely part of me; it is me. I can’t just get rid of it. It’s a paradoxical place to be: I can’t stand my body for what it’s doing to me, but I can’t live without it. Honestly, I don’t want to live without it.

Infertility has been a supremely confusing experience for me. It has challenged so much of what I thought I knew. In its face I struggle to understand God’s providence, mercy, and love. Many days, I have to work hard to move calmly, to remember that I have nothing to fear. And, especially at certain times, I must deal with contradicting truths: a) my body is an irreplaceable part of who I am, and b) sometimes I’d really like to replace it, with one that works better.

Through grace, I am dealing. The unity of body and soul is not something that we are generally forced to think about one way or the other, yet it is a mystery of God’s creation and deserves to be embraced. Through the rift that infertility has caused within me, I’ve been forced to examine the mystery in a way I never would have otherwise. Even though right now the relationship is tenuous, I’m convinced that eventually this experience will help me to embrace the mystery of body and soul in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before.

But for now, I’m here, still dealing. For those of you who have been through this and made it to the other side – what helped you? I’d be really grateful for anything that will help me come to terms with this.

(Edited to add: I wrote an addendum to this post in the comments section.  It's the fifth comment.)

Own Advent

For me, the category of Things to Blog About is sometimes a narrow one.  There are lots of things that happen to me which are way too mundane: for example, I brush my teeth every day, several times.  That's boring.  To inspire me to write, something has to be bigger than that: for example, if ever I'm brushing my teeth and a snake crawls out of the toilet, you'll definitely hear about it.  (Iccch.  I really hope that never happens to me!)

But at the same time, some things are overwhelming, too big to write about coherently.  Too big doesn't mean "I'm brushing my teeth and an elephant drops out of the ceiling" - that's definitely bloggable unless I'm unconscious afterward.  No, "too big" means intangible.  It means I can't get my words around it; I can't contain it with carefully arranged letters.

I haven't been writing this week because "hey! I learned to make really good pie crust!" - even though it's true - pales in comparison to This.  This which I can't explain, but which I think of wonderingly as my Own Advent, because that is exactly what it has been.

It's easy, in this particular life situation, to see hope as an enemy, as something to be suppressed because it makes the pain harder.  I've never seen it quite that way, but I have to admit that it had slipped away from me this summer/fall, through my depression and our passing the two-year mark. 

Over the past month, I'd been getting reminders that I need to hold onto hope.  At first, it was just a feeling I had.  Then I got a letter from my dad, telling me about a sense he'd gotten that it's very important for us to keep hoping.  It all percolated until last Tuesday in Adoration, where I got a blinding-flash message from God that's hard to describe simply, but goes something like this: Ask me for a miracle. 

Two days later I was kneeling during the consecration at Mass, and another message came, not in blinding-flash-from-God form, but in you've-always-known-this-yet-are-just-now-realizing-it form.  It admonished: If you can believe in such an amazing thing as God's essence fully entering this bread and wine, how can you fail to believe he has the power to accomplish an infinitely smaller miracle in your own womb?

Out of those two moments hope is suddenly within reach again, and my world seems a completely different place.  And wow, it's an amazing place to be.  Freeing and devastating, all at once.  It's too big, as I said, to explain.  My words simply can't contain it.

We discerned this year that God's not calling us to treatment or adoption right now, and although I accepted that and defended it here, I'd be lying if I said I didn't have words with Him about it.  Treatment and adoption are good things; they're good ways to move out of this childless place.  I've been, at times, a little green about the fact that God calls others to move down them, while we get to wait here.  But I understand now that although others' paths may seem better, they're not better for us, because we're called to this.  It's as simple as that.

I know that if this waiting lasts much longer, I may feel frustrated again.  Right now, though, I can't imagine that.  I'm here, and I'm discovering more every day.  I'm understanding God's sovereignity over and love for creation in ways I've never understood it before.  This understanding, and the hope I thought I might never see again, are plenty of an Advent for me.

Wild Patience

A few months ago, a well-meaning but boneheaded person who is thankfully no longer part of my daily life sat me down for a chat.  “Arwen,” he said, “do you trust God?”

“Uh, um,” I stuttered, because of course I do trust God, a lot of the time, and I know how important it is to trust Him, but can I truthfully say “I trust Him” without the reservation that I don't do it perfectly?  I can't.

My reply was cut off; this person wasn't really interested in my answer.  He just wanted to tell me how important it is to trust God, and proceeded to do so with a lecture that lasted upward of twenty minutes.  He trusts God, I learned, and it has served him very well to do so. He recounted several instances, all of them financial, when he thought he was going to be in a scrape and then everything turned out fine at the last minute.

Which, great.  I personally have found that God is always faithful, and always provides, although not always in the way I expect him to do it.  So this person's point – that God is good – was well taken. I agree with him. 

Except, it turned out, that was not his point.  His point was rather convoluted, but I finally figured it was something along these lines: I'm suffering because I don't trust God enough.  If I was trusting him properly, I would not be in this pain.

This is a common idea.  Various people, generally with good intentions, have told me this before, many of them through the Internet.  I have always found it very frustrating. From a theological point of view (and it should be considered from a theological point of view because it's a theological idea) it's one of the most bizarre things I've heard.  Bizarre because it's simply not true, and because I would have thought that would be self-evident.

Of all the people who have ever walked the earth, who trusted God the best?  The man Jesus, followed by his mother Mary.  The one who turned his life over to God after the Last Supper, and the one who turned her womb over to God at the Annunciation.  The one who prayed “not my will but thine be done,” and the one who answered “let it be done unto me according to thy word.”

Yet how did this perfect trust keep them from suffering?  It did not.  On that first Good Friday so many years ago he suffered and she suffered with him, more than any human creature before or since.  His suffering is the archetype for all suffering throughout eternity; her suffering is an example of perfect faith.  How can we look at them, and hear “take up your cross and follow me” and still believe that we are meant to trust so that we may not suffer?

I've found that a lot of people think the pain of infertility is self-inflicted.  “Just relax.” “You're worrying too much.”  “If you just stop caring so much, it will happen.”  These are not words of comfort; they are a kind of conceit for which I can find no appropriate description.

As someone who is there, I can attest that the pain of an empty womb is not self-inflicted; it is an objective wrong and I hurt because I know this.  As a woman I know instinctively what my body should do, and my body is not doing that. The grief and bewilderment I feel as a result of this are unlike anything else I've experienced.

The tragedy of a fruitless womb is as old as the wind, as old as man himself.  It's primal.  Recognizing that and weeping over it is natural.  More than that, it is justice. True tragedy demands true grief.  A refusal to grieve on my part would be nothing but an act of flagrant denial, and I am certain it would save me no pain in the end.

But I am not only grief, for just as it would be denial to refuse to grieve, I would be denying the truth if I did not recognize that the One who allows me to carry this burden has dominion over all things.  A virgin conceived by the power of his Spirit; anything is possible.  Hope, even more than grief, is my constant companion.

Bryan and I have been waiting for more than two years.  We'd be eager to go ahead with adoption or treatment, but we realize that we do not have the power to give ourselves a family.  No matter how they come to us, our children will be a gift from God.  Recognizing that, we are committed to discerning his will before we move ahead with anything.  So we pray, constantly. We pray together every night; we pray separately throughout the day. I pray with tears and songs and silent questions; Bryan is at the office so his prayer is probably always silent.  But we pray all the time, and so far we have gotten the same message: wait.  Adoption and licit treatment are good things in themselves, but they are not for us, not right now.

So we are in this place of waiting. It's a somewhat surreal place, a place where hope and grief come like clockwork every month.  It's a place where we learn, often very slowly, the paradox of life on earth: because of the fallenness of our world and the eternal goodness of our creator, sorrow and joy invariably come together, and we do not have the power to take one without the other.

I cannot complain about being here.  I know that the one who brought me here is trustworthy, and most of the time my heart echoes what my mind knows; I am working hard to trust with my heart all of the time.  I'd be lying if I said that just waiting was an easy place to be, but I'm more peaceful than I've been in a long time.  Grief that in the past has bordered threateningly on despair has become clean grief, free of bitterness.  Joy is fuller here as well.

And I have the consolation of not being forced to walk this path alone.  Foolish people like the man at the beginning of this post are few and far between in my life.  I have a husband whose goodness and love I cannot even begin to recount, and I can always find shelter in his arms.  I have a father who constantly encourages me on what he has called my own via Dolorosa, and who wrote to me once, “You are never out of your Heavenly Father's heart; you are rarely out of mine (I have to sleep sometime).”  I have a mother whose support of me is unswerving; I know that she is thinking with love of her “Punkin” even as she reads these words.  I have sisters and brothers who don't always know what to say, but who love me with earnest sincerity through all of it, and who have found innocent hope when I could not find it; perhaps the constancy of their hope was a tool in helping me regain mine.

At the beginning of this year, I committed to holding on to my softness, and I think the venture has gone well.  I believe I am now the softest person in the entire world.  If I continue in this state until our hopes are fulfilled, I feel sure that the joy of that moment will overwhelm me utterly. What an amazing prospect.  How could I hope for anything less?

This wilderness is the hardest place I have ever been, but through it life has become more meaningful than I imagined it could.  Surely my presence here is no accident, and if it is no accident, I am ordained for it, and I would ask for nothing less than the path for which I am ordained.  Through my grief and through my hope, that truth is always with me.

An Open Letter to My Readers, Especially the Ones Struggling with Infertility

Dear Readers,

This ART post is turning out to be the hardest, hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. I’ve already spent hours thinking about it, and more hours drafting it, and yet it is not very close to done. Here, I’ll let you see what I have so far:

What do you think? Is it good? I’m feeling sort of iffy about it myself. I’ll probably have to start over again.

Seriously, though, I am having a very, very difficult time writing it. And it occurred to me that if I tell you the reasons that I’m finding it such a challenge, perhaps that will help me to get to the point where I can write it. So that’s what this is: the reasons I feel scared about writing a post about Church teaching on ART.

I have a special place in my heart for women struggling with infertility. I know that’s not surprising considering that I’m one of them, but even before I was one of them, I remember instinctively understanding that it must be very hard to want children, to try for children, and to have your hopes be fruitless month after month. Now that I’ve been there, I realize that I had no idea how hard it is, but I knew it must be hard.

Infertility is by nature a very personal struggle. It’s a lonely struggle too, as it can only be shared fully with our spouses, and those spouses very often aren’t in a position to completely understand what we’re going through. (From what I’ve seen, the primal ache for a child seems to be a predominantly female one.)

I hate that there are so many of you going through something that hurts so much, something that makes you feel overwhelmed and helpless and lonely. My heart jumps for joy every time I check a blog and find that someone is pregnant or has given birth or has gotten a referral for an adoption or has brought her child home, because I love to see that pain being erased from your lives. I know that your lives will not suddenly, magically, become pain-free, but I rejoice that you now get to move on to other struggles, struggles that will hopefully make more sense than infertility does. If I were in charge, I probably wouldn’t be able to stop myself from finding every single woman who wants to be a mother and making her a mother right away. And when I come in contact with another infertile woman, all I want to do is tell you things that will make her feel better. My instinct is to protect you because I myself want to be protected, to help you get what you long for because I know how it feels to long for that very thing.

In reality, I know that love is a lot more complicated than that. I know that love sometimes means saying things people don’t want to hear. But on the other hand, you are not loving someone if you hurt that person on purpose. It is not impossible to say the hard things with words that do not hurt – after all, Love and Truth come from the same source, and can never contradict each other – but I worry that I do not have the ability to find those words.

There is no way that I can, in good conscience, fail to write the essay about ART. However, I must not hurt you, you for whom I have prayed so constantly, you whom I love so much. I feel the pressure of that undertaking with every word I draft, with every word I reject as insufficient. Perhaps it is a task for which I am not sufficient.

But I will try anyway, so please pray for me. I will post the essay when it is ready; who knows when that will be. In the meantime, I still pray and hope for you all constantly.

With love,

Arwen

On NFP, Quickly

I’m loving the comments on my last post. You all are being very civil, which I love, and you’re discussing theological topics, which I also love. Hooray!

That being said, I want to clarify a few things about NFP and Church teaching. This will be a really quick post (assuming I’m actually capable of that). A lot of what I’m saying has already been covered in parts by commenters, but I'm not stealing from them - I knew all this stuff a long time ago, I promise.

First of all, the people who corrected me in the comments are right: NFP is in a certain sense a form of birth control. It is not a form of artificial birth control; it is not a form of contraception. I’ll keep that distinction clear from now on.

But with my language corrected, I stand firmly by what I said before: NFP is not contraception. Contraception, by definition, takes place within the sexual act. It takes place when either of the spouses, within the sexual union, places a mental or physical barrier to God’s creative power.

Some of you are probably saying to yourself that NFP places that mental barrier, but I contend that it doesn’t, necessarily.

Many people don’t know it, but Church teaching on NFP actually requires a lot more of the couple than simply avoiding physical contraception.

First, it requires that married couples be open to parenthood. It is absolutely not allowed for a couple to use NFP their entire marriage to avoid having children at all; that is in direct violation of the nature of marriage.

Second, it requires that couples be generous to God. In other words, they give him as much chance to create new life as they can afford – physically, emotionally, financially. The couple themselves is in charge of discerning this, but it’s a must that they do so carefully, constantly, and in good conscience.

Third, NFP can be used to space children, or to avoid conception for a period of time, but only for good reasons. The Catechism says “It is their duty to make certain that their desire [to space their children] is not motivated by selfishness but is in conformity with the generosity appropriate to responsible parenthood.” (CCC 2368)

With the right motivations, it can be acceptable to take advantage of the natural periods of infertility provided by God. It is never right, no matter what the motivations, to render oneself infertile out of accord with nature.

I like to think that NFP users are in a situation that is closely related to mine, actually. It is good for a married couple to simply surrender things to God, to let him send children at his will, whether this means they end up waiting a long time, like us, or whether it means that they have a bunch of kids close together. It would also be okay for us, if we carefully discerned that God was calling us that way, to pursue morally licit fertility treatment or adoption in order to grow our family. But even when we pursued treatment or adoption, the act of giving a child to a family would still be God’s domain, and it would be important for us to remember that during the entire endeavor. In the same way, it can be okay for a couple to avoid the fertile parts of the woman’s cycle in order to space their family, always affirming that the decision not to create another new life at this time is God’s domain, not theirs. March Hare is just one of the many, many people I know or have heard of who can attest to the fact that there is really no way to guarantee that God does not create new life. But I think that’s good – after all, there’s no way to guarantee that he will.

There are so, so many things to talk about here. I also want to move on, and cover ART (which I’m sure will open a whole new can of worms). So I’m not going to post any more about NFP or contraception. It seems to me that you all have that covered, anyway, despite the fact that the Internet is a somewhat inadequate forum for this kind of thing. If you still have energy for it, keep at it!

(Did I mention you all are my favorite blog readers in the whole, wide world?)

Love and Its Result

Fulton Sheen famously said that “there are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church – which is quite a different thing.”

In the years since I became passionate about the defense of my faith, I have found this to be profoundly true. In one area in particular, especially with people my own age, I always find Sheen’s statement popping into my head. After countless discussions on the topic, I have crafted my own corollary of his wise theorem.

It goes something like this: I have never met a single person who can accurately describe the Catholic Church’s teaching on human sexuality and who, in spite of this, believes it to be wrong.

Not a single person. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had where people (sometimes Catholic, sometimes not) tell me they don’t agree with the Church’s teaching on birth control, and then, when I question them, turn out to know nothing about it beyond “birth control is not allowed.”

Well, yeah. If that was all I knew about it, I’d be inclined to reject it too. No wonder so many Catholics openly reject the Church’s ban on birth control, if they’re as uneducated as the people I’ve run across. They can hardly be expected to follow a rule when they have no idea of its purpose.

Now, in a certain sense I think it’s not entirely these people’s fault that they don’t have the information they need. I’ll be the first to admit that catechesis in America is sorely lacking in many ways. I have no statistics on this, but based on my experience I’d say that almost no young American Catholics are taught the truth about Church teaching on sexuality.

I want to talk about birth control here for two reasons: first, because I want do my part, however small, to help people understand; second, because an understanding of Catholic teaching on sexuality in general, birth control in particular, goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of Catholic teaching on ART (for the uninitiated, that’s assisted reproductive technology). Lots of people have asked me about Catholicism and ART, and I’m finally getting around to writing about it. This is the introduction; the actual ART post will come later.

I don’t want this to turn into a free-for-all, so let me make myself clear: I am explaining the Church’s teaching, not starting an argument with you. If you’re Catholic and think I’m stating the Church’s position wrongly, feel free to correct me, but I’ll expect citations from the Catechism at the very least. If you’re Catholic and don’t accept the Church’s teaching, please understand that I’m not damning you – I don’t have the power to do that even if I wanted to, which I don’t – and if you’re feeling benevolent, do me the favor of listening to what I have to say. If you’re not Catholic, sit back and enjoy the ride! I’m glad you’re here.

As Catholics, we believe that all of creation is held in being by God, and everything in creation has a specific nature. Nature in this case has nothing to do with Mother Nature or the environment – it means essence, the whatness of a thing. Christian theologians from the time of Christ (and, heck, philosophers from time immemorial) have spent a LOT of energy discussing the nature of things.  Over time, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church has given definitive descriptions of many things of theological importance. Baptism, for example, is clearly defined: the matter is water; the form is “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit;” the purpose is to cleanse from sin and give new life.

As you can see, the purpose of a thing is an integral part of its nature. A child learning about the nature of things often learns about them first by the purpose they serve. To a very young child a kitchen table is not “flat top, four legs – sometimes three – quite often made of wood, standard height thirty-six inches” but rather “that thing we eat off of.” 

Eventually we get older, and know about all the simple things, (you guys knew what a table was before I told you, right?) so we learn about more complicated things, and purpose is rarely the most obvious aspect of the nature of a complicated thing. We learn the physical characteristics of things way earlier than we learn the metaphysical characteristics of things. Often because those metaphysical characteristics are up for debate. I knew what dating was, for example, way before I knew what dating was for. In fact, were it not a moot point for me now, I’d probably still be trying to figure out the exact purpose of dating. I know people who debate the topic, early and often and sometimes quite eloquently.

None of them with as much enthusiasm, however, as people in our society use when debating the purpose of sex. The more lenient say that sex should be whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s consensual; the more traditional try to draw lines, and rarely agree about where to draw them. 

The good news for Catholics is that we don’t have to throw ourselves into that particular fray. Look! The groundwork is done for us. 

That’s a link to the section from the Catechism on the sixth commandment. (Start with 2366 for the section dealing directly with artificial birth control. If you want more, Humanae Vitae is also an indispensable resource on the topic.) If you read through it, I hope you’ll be struck by the same thing that strikes me more as I learn about it.

Catholic teaching on sexuality is not – despite popular opinion – about what you must not do in order to avoid the wrath of God. The exact opposite, in fact. It’s ordered toward dignity. It’s ordered toward love. It’s ordered toward happiness, that perfect happiness which is nothing less than union with the One who created us.

In case you don’t have time to do all this reading right now, I’ll give you my own outline – with the caveat that I am bound to do a less-than perfect job.

The purpose of sexual union is two-fold: the unitive and the procreative. The love, and the natural result of the love.

Remember, Catholics are creationists. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we reject the Big Bang theory, but it does mean that we believe God created things the way they are for a reason. Some of this, no one argues about. Eyes? Obviously for seeing. Hey, that’s an easy one. 

Sexual union – sperm, egg, all that – is naturally fertile. Sometimes it gets messed up (obviously) but that doesn’t change its basic nature, any more than the fact that there are blind people changes the basic nature of the eyes. 

And procreation is much more important than sight, for the very specific reason that it is in the union of man and woman that God gets the chance to put new people in the world. (Infertility has put this into sharp relief for me by making it very clear that we, hard as we try, actually have no ability to create. That’s why it’s called procreation – we act for the sake of creating; God is the one who creates.)

So if we take the procreative aspect out of the sexual union? We take something that should be giving God the chance to create a new person, and we use the parts of it we enjoy, but refuse to give God his chance. Even though the only reason we have the opportunity to enjoy it at all is because God created it as pure gift to us. See why this might be a little bit of a problem?

Despite the fact that we do have a duty to use the things God created for the purposes for which he created them, Catholic teaching on sexuality is not centered around duty. It’s centered around perfection, by which I mean not flawlessness, but fullness. A perfect thing is a thing which is exactly what it was created to be. Catholic teaching on sexuality is about the perfection of the sexual act itself, and about the perfection of the people performing it.

It can be explained a lot of ways, but this is one of my favorites: Love is gift. Perfect love means abandonment of self. The sexual union is a way that husband and wife give themselves to each other, but if they contracept – if they make what would be the natural result of their love an impossibility – then they’re holding back. They’re not giving themselves fully to each other; they’re not letting their love follow through.

Also, like I said, they’re not giving God his chance to create. Which means they’re not giving themselves to him fully; they’re not letting him have charge of his own domain. Things aren’t meant to be that way.

Find a Catholic who really understands the Church’s teaching on sexuality and lives her life in accordance with it, and you won’t find her complaining about how she’d love to be able to use birth control. She knows that marital love that doesn’t allow procreation is impoverished, less than what it’s meant to be. She knows that when she abandons herself in the sexual union for the sake of her love for God and her husband, she’s doing something that makes every aspect of her life better. Fuller. More perfect. You might feel sorry for her when you see her in the grocery store with her eight children, but I promise you that if she understands and has assented, she’s not feeling sorry for herself.

When Bryan and I were engaged, a college acquaintance who knew of our commitment to our faith told us, “You could use birth control. No one would know.” (We actually did use NFP to avoid conception, but NFP is not the same as birth control because the nature of the sexual act itself is not compromised in any way.) I honestly didn’t know what to say, because he didn’t understand that our compliance with Church teaching on that subject had nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with wanting what is best.

Good parents don’t let their children stuff themselves with candy and watch cartoons all day instead of going to school, because even though the children might want that, the parents know they need to learn instead. God is a good father: he doesn’t want us to have everything we want; he wants us to have everything we need. I’m working very hard to accept that even though a child is what I want, it might not be what I need right now. I wish married Catholics could figure out that the converse might be true for them: even though another child might not be what they want, it could be exactly what they need. 

But regardless of whether that next child comes, it’s profoundly true that acting for love, acting in accordance with love as God created it, is exactly what everyone needs at all times. Holding on to the procreative aspect of sexual union is just one part of doing that.

The Paradox of Questioning

The Feast of All Saints

When I resolved at the beginning of this year to remain soft, I didn’t really have any idea what that meant or would mean. I hoped it would bring peace, but I didn’t know what peace was.

Now, I think for me it means having my questions taken away.

One of the books that means the most to me is Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. In case you haven’t read it, it’s Lewis’s retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, told from the point of view of one of the jealous sisters, Orual. In Lewis’s story, she’s the only jealous sister, and her jealousy is not physical, but a possessiveness which she thinks of as love. The first part of the book is Orual’s “complaint” against the gods, her account of how they stole her beloved sister and ruined her life. The second part… oh, the second part is redemption.

You have to read it yourself. It would take me all night to describe it to you, and I wouldn’t do it half justice. But since we’re here, I’ll give you a short summary.

Orual is taken to the gods, and given the chance to read her complaint to them. She’d railed against them her entire adult life, and she rails now, but as she reads her complaint, as she reads the questions which have consumed her for years, she is transformed. She’s been looking for answers, and the gods don’t give them to her, and yet she suddenly has them.

Oh, I can’t explain it. I’ll give you Lewis’s words.

“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean… When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face until we have faces?”

Since the first time I read this book years ago, this paragraph has embodied for me an ultimate truth: that surrender is fundamental to life as a child of God.

Infertility is my current cross, but there have been others throughout my (admittedly short) years, and in every case my instinct is to demand why this is happening to me. And while I’ve gotten some answers, they never come immediately, and they never come easily. The road to understanding is a long, slow one. And inevitably, before I can understand, I must always admit that it’s all right if I don’t.

I was reading through my archives and found this post, which I wrote more than a year ago. I’m glad I found it, because I needed a reminder of where I was a year ago. Of all the questions I had then.

I get lots of emails from other women struggling with infertility, and it seems that I’m not alone in my questioning. This is common to us, and that knowledge helps me. What helps even more is my recent realization that I will never be completely healed while these questions are still with me. I have a sneaking suspicion that healing of that sort doesn’t come in this lifetime.

Maybe I’m getting closer, though, because the cry of my heart is no longer “Why?” but “How long?” In the darkest hours when my mind used to race until it was numb, I now feel only a quietness that means, in a certain way, peace. Sadness, but not despair. Never despair.

Like Orual I am quick to become outraged at God when things do not go as I wish. Yet I thank him for the grace that makes it possible for me to finish my petitions for my greatest desires with a quiet caveat of “Thy will be done.” (I can only imagine how much grace he must have to pour out to make this possible for me. Needless to say, willfulness is one of my most pronounced qualities.)

A year ago I was screaming with questions, and now I am quite suddenly devoid of them, undisturbed in my joy and resigned to my sorrow. I thought understanding meant figuring it out the truth, but after all I find that understanding is allowing oneself to participate in Truth. When I take Orual’s seat before the gods, I hope that my complaint is much shorter than hers. Actually, I hope to have no complaint, no questions, at all. (Dare I dream? But what better day than today to dream of sainthood?)