Getting my life back

[This is a Part II to the post Putting Our Lives on Hold.]

This weekend will mark my fourth Mother's Day as a mom. It's stunning to think of how much things have changed since that first Mother's Day not that long ago. Three years and two more babies later, I see now that it was the crucible of motherhood that shattered the fragile life philosophy that I learned from the secular world, made me fearlessly seek truth and, ultimately, taught me the true meaning of life. Here are my reflections.


Back when my first child was born, I had a certain amount of angst about being the mother of a baby. It was odd. I loved my son dearly and saw the great importance of shaping another person's life...and yet, there was always this voice in the back of my mind that murmured, "What about my life?" Despite my tremendous love for my child, there was a part of me that felt like I'd hit the pause button on my life the day he was born. The full-time care that babies and toddlers require was so wearying, and I frequently commented to my husband that I couldn't wait until our youngest child went off to elementary school so that I could finally "get my life back!" I felt like there was always a carrot stick hanging in front of my nose, distracting me, promising the glory days to come when I would no longer have little ones around and I could finally get back to really living.

In my mind, the phase of life with babies and toddlers underfoot was drastically different than other phases of life. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I assumed that the only way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused. This was the default, the only way to live life to the fullest. Being the mother of little ones was a rare situation in which you were thrust into being temporarily other-focused, and was therefore something to just grit your teeth and endure until it was over and you could get back to the default.

After my second child was born in the midst of painful medical complications, life with little ones got even harder. You'd think that I would have found myself more desperate than ever to move on from this grueling time in my life, and yet, that didn't happen. This was around the time I had started to take a serious look at Christianity, and in the process of reading up on God and what he's revealed to us through his Word and his Church, I started to notice something interesting:

My life as a mother started to make a lot more sense when seen through the teachings of Christianity.

I've said many times before that reading the Christian explanation of why we are here, what we are to do and how we are to live was like reading an articulation of words that had been written on my heart all long -- and this was especially true when it came to motherhood. I increasingly found that my secular, godless worldview offered me no lexicon for describing what was so beautiful about motherhood, and why it was worth it; yet Christianity described it perfectly. I started to find some very interesting answers to that nagging question, "What about my life?"

Christianity was telling me that all those things I yearned for that fueled my self-focused pursuits -- happiness, excitement, security, youthfulness, joy, importance -- were actually yearnings for God, and that I'd never find peace until I sought him. At first that claim sounded crazy, even after I thought it was possible that God might exist. But when I took a hard look at my worldly pre-motherhood life and recalled the travel, the parties, the socializing, the trendy size 8 clothes -- all those things that were supposedly my "real life" that I was so anxious to get back to -- I started to realize something: none of those pursuits ever brought me lasting happiness. In my self-focused life without God there was certainly happiness and joy, yet it was fragile. There was always a feeling of restlessness, a never-ending search for the next big thing. I felt like I couldn't stay still too long, or the happiness might go away.

"OK, I'll bite," I thought after contemplating this for a while. "If I've somehow been groping around for God this whole time and won't be able to truly rest until I find him, how do I go about doing that?"

It was when I got the answer to that question that my entire life -- in particular my life as a mother -- finally made sense.

I discovered that the path to God is the path of agape, of self-giving love. When John wrote in Chapter 4 of his first Epistle, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love," he wasn't talking about just any kind of love. I "loved" traveling and sleeping in on weekends and pretty much anything that involved me doing things for me without having to make sacrifices. But that's not the kind of love John was talking about. The kind of love that leads to God, that God is, is agape: self-emptying, other-focused, inconvenient, sometimes-painful love.

When I started to seek God by seeking agape, everything changed. For one thing, the carrot stick disappeared; that siren song of the self-focused glory days to come when I no longer had children in diapers was silenced, the tension gone. My life as a mom of little ones was no longer in such sharp contrast to my future life without young children: either way, I'd be serving others. I found that this was the meaning of life, the secret to lasting happiness, the hidden key that unlocked the mysteries of the spiritual realm that I'd spent my whole life trying to find.

And, ironically, after I came to embrace the idea of a life dedicated to agape, I actually ended up with more time for myself. Because in my secular mindset the other-focusedness of the childbearing years was a temporary situation that you would extricate yourself from as soon as possible, my mentality was to just hold my nose and plow through it. I would have thought that to further embrace selflessness would lead to mental and physical collapse! But what I realized, through Christianity, was that a life of agape is not a life of running yourself ragged. To truly serve God and others to the best of your ability is to humbly accept that you are only human, and that there are limits to what you can do. Using the Rules of Life of religious orders as examples (I once posted the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity here), I began to see that it was simply not optional that I regularly find time for rest and prayer. I saw that the other-focused life doesn't mean that you can never take a time for recreation and relaxation -- quite the opposite, in fact. It means that you must regularly take time for recreation and relaxation, but that you put these activities in their proper place, realizing that they're not the meaning of life.

After doing it backwards for so many years, it fit like a glove to live a life that was other-focused for the long term and self-focused in the short term.


As this fourth Mother's Day rolls around and I look at my life with three children in diapers, I find that it's a perfect encapsulation of the mystery of human existence, a testament to that most counterintuitive, most important of all truths: that it is only by going through the discomfort of becoming other-focused that we will find what we're really looking for. To paraphrase the Evangelist John, it is only by knowing agape that we will know God.

I've mentioned before that I'm particularly ill-suited for this job: I'm easily irritated, disorganized, sensitive to noise, introverted, and come from a background of being a spoiled only child where I never had to lift a finger around the house. My daily life is not usually what you would call "pleasurable," at least not in the same way as my pre-kid days. I would almost certainly have reported more days as being overall "fun" or "easy" back when I had a cool career than now. From a secular, self-focused worldview, my life should be worse now than it was before. But it's not. I wouldn't say that "my life is better now," as much as I would say that "my life has started now."

Through Christianity, I understand that that the tension I used to feel about my life as a mother was the tension of resisting God, of fearing that if I emptied myself of ego and selfishness that there'd be nothing there to fill me back up. I finally understand that the life of a mom of little ones is in such sharp contrast to the typical life in our godless, secular culture because it is inherently a life of self-giving love, of being close to God.

The lessons I've learned are objective truths about the human experience, applicable to everyone in every state of life, whether or not they have children. Yet, for me, it took motherhood to teach me these lessons. I am so hard-headed and was so entrenched in my old ways that it took the tidal wave of agape that could only come with a house full of babies to break down layer upon layer of selfishness encrusted with fear, and free me to seek the truth.

Through the beauty of motherhood, I think I now understand what it's all about. And I finally got my life back.

One beautiful dream

Ever since I discovered the story of St. Frances of Rome (via Adoro te Devote) I have felt more drawn to her than to almost any other saint. Probably the best adjective that most people would use to describe her life is unfair. From early childhood she desired nothing more than to be a nun, yet when she was 13 her parents had her married to a wealthy nobleman. She was quiet and introverted, yet her in-laws expected her to be vigorously involved in the proper social circles. She lived in a rough time where upheavals within the Church and plague ravaged her city. She often found herself surrounded by friends or relatives who didn't understand her or even ridiculed her. Her home was looted and members of her household staff were tortured and killed. Not one but two of her beloved children died.

And yet, even in those dark days of suffering and strife and death, she showed Christ to the world. The more difficult things got, the more she turned to God. Through her passionate faith and selfless dedication to others, God was able to work in her life, and eventually in the lives of many people who knew her.

I highly recommend that you read the whole summary of her life, but I wanted to share one little gem that brings a tear to my eye every time I think of it. Though her marriage was arranged and originally unwanted on her part, Frances was a devoted wife. After more than 35 years of marriage her husband became ill, and she nursed him as his time on earth drew near an end. He spoke to her on his deathbed, and his last words before dying were:

I feel as if my whole life has been one beautiful dream of purest happiness. God has given me so much in your love.

Whenever I hear people talk about concepts like "success" and "achievement," I often think of that quote. For those of us who are married, what better goal, what more worthy achievement could there be than to have our spouses feel that way at the end of their lives?

I originally thought of finding God as a dry intellectual pursuit, a mere question to be answered. One of the many profound surprises I've encountered on this journey, however, is that Christianity is about so much more than having the right answers or attaining accurate knowledge about the concept of God; the Christian life well-lived is a life of love. And, as we see from the life of St. Frances, even during the darkest times, even when the world outside seems to be falling apart at the seams, God can still work through each of us to make our lives and the lives of those around us "one beautiful dream."

St. Frances of Rome, pray for us.

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How I became pro-life

I've been wanting to put this together ever since I read Abigail's touching post with the same title. I've been dabbling at this post for a few months, and finally feel ready to share it. I apologize that it is so long, I just couldn't figure out how to condense it without leaving out important details. I hope that you will find that it's worth your time to read the whole thing.


Who is human?

Back in college I remember reading about how in certain societies throughout history, I believe in this case it was the Greeks, it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them somewhere to die. It was so deeply troubling to me, and I could never figure out what was going on there: how on earth could this have happened?! I mean, I knew lots of people, and nobody I knew would do that! In fact, in our society you only hear about it in rare cases of people who are obviously mentally disturbed. How could something so obviously evil, so unthinkably horrific be common among entire societies?

Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing babies." Obviously, nobody around here is in favor of killing babies -- and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate for that was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor of killing anything. We simply felt like women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an unwanted pregnancy. It was unfortunate, yes, because fetuses had potential to be babies one day. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not making women slaves to the trauma of unwanted pregnancies.

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I were in the process of exploring Christianity, we couldn't help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often than we used to be, and we were put on the defensive about our views. I remember one day when my husband was in the middle of reconsidering his own pro-choice ideas, he made a passing remark that stuck with me ever since:

"It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other people's-life," he quipped. "Everyone is pro-their own-life."

It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose lives were worth living. I (along with doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this very important line. When I would come across Catholic blogs or books where they said something like "life begins at conception," I would scoff at the silliness of that notion as was my habit...yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense:

"A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human life!" I would say to myself. "Fetuses eventually become full-fledged humans, but not until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?...Eight weeks? No, they're not human then, those must be involuntary spasms..."

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed "fetuses" touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at Lifesite. Babies -- I mean, fetuses -- seen yawning at 12 weeks gestation? Involuntary spasm. As modern technology helped fetuses offer me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar of what I considered human.

I realized that my definition of how and when a fetus became a "baby" or a "person," when he or she began to have rights, also depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn't sit well.

The whole thing started to really get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was not human. I started to see it in others in the pro-choice community as well. On more than one occasion I was stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon reading of what otherwise nice, reasonable people in the pro-abortion camp would advocate for.

In reading through the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart, I read that Dr. Leroy Carhart, an abortion advocate who actually performs the procedures, described some second-trimester abortions by saying, "[W]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus...the fetus [is] alive." He said that he has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus removed." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which presumably consists of well-educated, reasonable, intelligent men and women, opposed this procedure. Not for the reasons I thought -- because it was plainly obvious that this was infanticide in its most grisly form -- but because dismembered babies inconvenienced their mothers, and it was better to kill them outside the womb in a procedure they refer to as "D&X". In the College's words in its amici brief:

D&X presents a variety of potential safety advantages over other abortion procedures used during the same gestational period. Compared to D&E's involving dismemberment, D&X involves less risk of uterine perforation or cervical laceration because it requires the physician to make fewer passes into the uterus with sharp instruments and reduces the presence of sharp fetal bone fragments that can injure the uterus and cervix.

There is also considerable evidence that D&X reduces the risk of retained fetal tissue, a serious abortion complication that can cause maternal death, and that D&X reduces the incidence of a 'free floating' fetal head that can be difficult for a physician to grasp and remove and can thus cause maternal injury.

I read the Court documents from Stenberg v. Carhart in a state of shock. A few years ago a friend of mine had her baby very prematurely, and I had visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was so beautiful, just like the full-term newborns I'd seen, only a little smaller. Seeing him and the other babies lying there so peacefully in their incubators (some of them with cute little notes written on their incubator tags like "Aiden -- mommy's big boy!"), I was overwhelmed with feelings of wanting to protect these precious, innocent little babies. I was thrilled to hear the my friend's son and all the other preemies who were in the NICU at that time did survive and go home with their parents. So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was reading of people -- not just fringe crazies, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices -- casually speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered babies ("fetuses") the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors continued when I read Gonzales v. Carhart [some excerpts here...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely disturbing].

It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not pro-choice.

Yet I still couldn't quite bring myself to label myself pro-life.

I started to recognize that I was no better than Dr. Carhart or the concurring Justices or the author of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' brief, that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was something deep down inside, some tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the most dire sense of the word. Even as I became more religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect, because it got too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being "at conception" as opposed to at some arbitrary point during gestation.

It wasn't until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group, took a new look at the modern assumptions about the act that creates those fetuses in the first place, that I was able to let go of that internal pressure I felt, and to take an unflinching look at my views on abortion.


The contraceptive mentality

Here are four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was formed:

• When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.
  
  
• In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. After we were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general. Not once.
  
  
• On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me -- that is how much we desired not to have babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.
  
  
• Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called "Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.
  

Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.

The message I'd heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street -- something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives.

Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church's view of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.

I'd always thought that those archaic teachings about not using contraception were because the Church wanted to oppress people by telling them to have as many kids as possible, or something like that. What I found, however, was that their views expressed a fundamentally different understanding of what sex is, and once I heard it I never saw the world the same way again. The way I'd always seen it, the standard position was that babies were a horrible burden, except for a couple times in life when everything is perfect enough that a couple might temporarily see new life as a good thing; the Catholic view is that the standard position is that babies are a blessing and a good thing, and while it's fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a "contraceptive mentality," feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties, we not only disrespect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

To use a rough analogy, the Catholic Church was saying that loaded guns are not toys, that while they can perhaps be used for certain recreational activities, they are always to be handled with grave respect; my viewpoint, coming from contraceptive culture, was that it's fine to use loaded guns as toys as long as you put blanks in the chamber. Thinking of that analogy, expecting to be able to use something with incredible power nonchalantly, as a toy, I could see how that worldview had set us up for disaster.

I came to see that our culture's widespread use and acceptance of contraception had led to the "contraceptive mentality" toward sex being the default position. As a society, we'd come to take it for granted that we're entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we're in a state of being vehemently opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we're in a state of seeing babies as a huge burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon: even if it would be a huge crisis to get pregnant, we have a right to go ahead and have sex anyway. If this were true, if it was indeed a fact that it was morally OK for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives, in my mind, then, abortion had to be OK.

I realize that ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone...but the lie was just too tempting. I didn't want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity...terminating pregnancies just had to be OK, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal...and society had made it very clear that sex is not a huge deal. As long as I accepted that for people to engage in sex in a contraceptive mentality was morally OK, I could not bring myself to even consider that abortion might not be OK. It just seemed too inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

So this idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we're vehemently opposed to its life-giving potential, was a totally new and different message. For me, being able to honestly consider when life begins, opening my heart and my mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.


The great temptation

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a thought occurred to me, and from that moment on I was officially, unapologetically PRO-LIFE. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I thought:

I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people -- people like me -- can support very evil things through the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could leave a newborn child to die: the very real pressures of life -- "we can't afford another baby," "we can't have any more girls," "he wouldn't have had a good life" -- left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, it was the same process that had happened with me, that happened with the concurring Supreme Court Justices in Stenberg v. Carhart, with the abortion doctors, the entire pro-choice movement, and anyone else who's ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I bet that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they can't talk, the can't sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles are just involuntary reactions. I bet you anything they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them "fetuses."

Schedules and hard stops

[This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]


Contrary to what some charitable readers might think after reading my New Year's post, I have always been scattered and disorganized. Even before I had three kids in diapers -- heck, even before I had any kids, even before I was married -- I lived like this.

In fact, I remember a time a few years ago when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed, I asked my 90-year-old grandfather if people were this busy when he was younger. I was sitting on the edge of his couch, glancing at my watch because I was in a rush to get to "important" thing on my to-do list, but I wanted to take a minute to hear about his life on the farm back in the 1920's. Surely there was a ton of work to do to keep a farm up and running -- was daily life back then the chaotic mad dash that it is today? Did his mom always seem overwhelmed and frazzled, bemoaning how behind she was on everything?

He replied with an emphatic no. Life was not rushed and chaotic. They didn't live under the constant feeling of being stressed and overwhelmed that people seem to today, he said. They had their share of worries, and lots of hard work to do, to be sure, but daily life had a peaceful rhythm to it that is utterly lacking today. I wondered if maybe he was looking back through rose-colored glasses, misremembering life back then. Yet when I asked other people of his generation, they all replied with the same answer: life is hectic today in a way it never has been before.

I've always wondered why.


Meanwhile, my husband has long been intrigued by the impact of artificial light on health. Ever since a vacation we took to Costa Rica where we experienced the inky blackness of nights with few artificial lights -- and the major impact it had on our physical and mental health -- he's been wanting to do an experiment where we try to go a few days without any artificial light, using only candles at night.

A couple months ago he got all excited to make this happen, and when I went to turn on the kitchen light to clean up after dinner he reminded me to light a candle instead. I became increasingly exasperated as I tripped over unfinished cleaning projects and almost knocked over a candle while transferring clothes to the dryer. Then the dusky candle light started to make me feel sleepy, which only added to my irritation. Finally, when I knocked down a stack of folded clothes from trying to put away laundry by candle light alone, I put an end to this crazy experiment.

"This is absurd!" I huffed as I went through the house flipping on every light I could find.

As my husband and I squinted at each other in the harsh overhead light, he suggested that we try the experiment again another time. I chuckled at his naivete -- didn't he see from the way things had gone tonight that such a thing is simply not feasible? "It's impossible," I informed him. "There is no way we could get by with candlelight alone." He pointed out that it is not technically impossible since nobody even had electricity in their houses until relatively recently in human history.

Though of course I knew on some level that that was true, for a split second it struck me as completely incorrect. How could it be possible that people lived before artificial light?, I wondered. I was hardly past the half-way point of my day when the sun had set, not even half way through my to-do list! How did they get anything done?!

"Look," I replied. "The only way we could possibly do a couple nights without artificial light would be...oh." Something dawned on me as I spoke. The only way we could get by on sunlight and candles alone would be to completely, totally rethink our expectations for what we could get done in a day; to have all major work completed and cleaned up by sunset; to attempt only quiet activities like reading or sewing or family time in the evening hours...to live like our grandparents lived. We'd have no choice but to slash our to-do lists and our expectations of what we could get done in a day. We'd have to get up early and work purposefully and diligently to get the most out of the fleeting daylight. Feelings of panic and rush would be futile since we'd live with a clear sense that we cannot create more working hours than the light allows, that the sun is going to set when it sets, and there's only so much we can do. Life would have a distinct daily and seasonal rhythm.

It would be pretty peaceful.


I've thought about this a lot lately, thinking of the flaming disaster that was our experiment of trying to go even one night without artificial light, and what that says about our lives and how they compare to all the societies that lived without modern technology. Here are some of the things I've come up with:

Just like with modern finances, modern daily life allows us to live under the illusion that we can add working hours to our day at will. Technology allows us to overspend our time just as credit cards allow us to overspend our money.

Life before modern technology was full of hard stops: the work day ended at sunset -- if you didn't finish laundry during the day there was no going back outside to the washboard at 9:00 at night; the work day began at dawn -- if you got breakfast on the table an hour late that was precious time cut out of you and your family's very finite workday; even finances had hard stops -- when you spent your last dollar there were no tempting "0% interest for six months!" credit card offers waiting in your mailbox. And with a life full of hard stops, even the most disorganized, scattered people must have been forced to have some kind of routine, and to limit their to-do lists. Even people as inept at time management as I am must have been gently reminded to get to a stopping point and wind down their projects each day as the sunlight began its slow retreat from the sky.

When I considered also that in many times and places people lived in small villages where the community undertook activities together -- e.g. the men all went out to work the fields at the same time, the women did the washing and cooking in a community area at the same time -- I started to think that maybe one of the reasons so many people feel scattered and overwhelmed these days is because we're just not meant to have to create our own schedules. Humans are used to powerful forces beyond their control like the availability of light or the momentum of community activities structuring their days. Having an Excel printout just isn't the same. It doesn't provide a true hard stop to simply have a line on a piece of paper. We're free to ignore our arbitrary, self-set deadlines (as some employee at some recycling plant no doubt thinks when he keeps seeing papers with labels like "Jen's Daily Schedule" and "Jen's Daily Schedule - NEW" and "Jen's Updated Daily Schedule" fly by).

I realized that without the structure of cohesive communities and the hard stops of life without technology, people like me are adrift. It is all too easy to float past the arbitrary boundaries I set for myself and lose any semblance of a routine; and by virtue of just flipping on some lights, my workday never really has to end.

There are people out there who are good at self-imposing routines, who have a natural tendency to have a clear end to their work days and observe periods of rest. I am not one of them. I love the idea of creating a "family liturgy," of "imposing order through structure and ritual"...yet how does someone like me bring structure and order to my days? How do I make it real when modern technology allows me to do drift out of the ritual and do whatever I want whenever I want? How do I make sure that "Jen's Family Liturgy" isn't just one more forgotten piece of paper down at the recycling plant? How do I create hard stops?

I've been thinking and praying about that a lot, and think God may have answered my prayers. I'll share it in the next post in this series.

Should we want to be sexy?

Literacy-chic of the great blog Words, Words recently had yet another post that really got me thinking. In reference to a commentor who claimed that some breastfeeding mothers don't value their bodies, she writes:

We feel the need to operate within this "sexy-not-mommy," "mommy-not-sexy" dichotomy that exists in society...To put it bluntly: breastfeeding breasts can still be sexy, and breastfeeding moms can still have sexy thoughts about their breasts.

I actually started leaving a comment to jump into the debate about whether or not breastfeeding moms can also be sexy, but as I typed a thought struck me: do I even think that being sexy is a worthy goal? I'd never really thought about it before. I've groused around on this blog about how our society over-values sexiness, but I'd never stopped to ask if there's anything valuable about being sexy.

I mulled it over as I went through my afternoon, asking myself if I think that we women should ever want to be sexy. And I surprised myself when I came up with the answer: no, I don't think we should. I think it's beneath us.

The way I've come to see it, if someone finds you sexy it's a euphemistic way of saying they see you as an object of lust. I think we've been misled to desire to be sexy by our contraceptive culture, which believes that sex is mainly about surface-level pleasure and only very rarely about creating new souls (but you already know that, since I'm always boring on about it, as I did here and here). :) I offer the video below as an example of what I think we women should strive for in terms of physical attractiveness. Of course we want to be visually appealing in one way or another -- it's hardwired into our natures. But there are plenty of ways to do that, as women almost always have up until the present era, that preserve our great dignity as women, humans, and children of God. The women in this video are beautiful. They're lovely, feminine, graceful and elegant -- but they are not sexy. Such an adjective seems far too base, and borders on insulting.

Anyway, this is actually a new thought for me and I was kind of surprised to find myself coming to this conclusion, so I thought I'd throw it out there for comments: is being sexy a worthy goal, or does it devalue us as women? Should we ever want to be sexy?

(Thanks again to Literacy-chic for the great post that got me thinking about this in the first place!)

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UPDATE: I just realized that I have been misspelling Literacy-chic's name for months. The first time I saw it I misread it as Literary-chic and that just stuck. SO sorry!

Friday Favorites for July 6

I've had a crazy week of family visits, scorpion hunting (never found it), and prayerfully discerning whether or not God would approve of me physically assaulting my neighbors who set off fireworks at all hours of the night, so that's left me with little time for blog reading. But I have still managed to sneak in enough time to offer seven great links for your enjoyment:

• Is God part of your story...or are you part of God's story?: My husband and I have been talking about this concept all week. Until I read this post I'd never really asked myself whether I see it as "God's part of my story" or "I'm part of God's story"...and the implications are far-reaching indeed.
  
  
• Guided by the saints: I just loved Anita Moore's story about how she discovered the Third Order Dominicans. A really inspiring read. (And don't miss her follow-up post about what it's like to be a lay Dominican).
  
  
• Homeschooling and Christian duty: Another excellent piece from Sally Thomas, in which she addresses the question of whether or not Christian homeschoolers aid and abet our culture's failings by "withdrawing" from the world. (via The Philosopher Mom)
  
  
• Fun personality quiz: Answer Simcha's three questions, THEN check out the answers to see what is says about you. Amusing.
  
  
• Eat food, not too much, mostly plants: I just liked this disarmingly simple summary of basically every modern health/died book out there. It makes me feel like I've wasted a lot of time reading all those tomes about nutrition and health, since it really does always come down to, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants".
  
  
• Prayerfully expecting: Melanie has some touching thoughts about finding out she's pregnant once again after a recent miscarriage and cancer scare.
  
  
• Your career must fit within your vocation (not vice versa): Catholic Mom has a great post about modern dating services that "[reduce] the concept of marriage to the equivalent of finding a good accountant", and what that indicates about modern society's view of marriage.
  

Have a great weekend!

Contraception and a woman's self-image

On the rare occasions that I used to think about the prospect of having a large family before my conversion, one of the first things that would come to mind is, "Just think of what my abs would look like! And years and years of nursing babies wouldn't exactly leave me looking like a Victoria's Secret model!" and with a shudder I'd perish the thought. There were other reasons that the prospect of having many children didn't appeal to me. But the issue of what my body would start to look like somewhere around baby number five or six was actually a pretty large factor.

Was I just shallow? I'm not so sure.

I was the product of a culture that takes contraception for granted and believes that the primary purpose of sex is for pleasure. Sure, it can be one of a variety of methods for creating life, but the main reason it exists is just for pleasure.

Given that worldview, it kind of makes sense for a wife to prize preserving her physical appearance over bringing new life into the world. If it's true that a fundamental part of marriage is sex, and sex is for pleasure, and men are visually-oriented when it comes to physical attraction, it doesn't seem so unreasonable that a wife would take great pains to look young and fit as long as possible, and perhaps even value that above additional children.

This sort of thing also came up back in college when my pro-choice friends and I would rage about these awful pro-lifers who tried to tell women that they should carry an unexpected pregnancy to term. The horror! Didn't these people know what pregnancy does to a woman's body?! This assumed, of course, that there would be circumstances upon which a pregnancy would be totally unexpected (a la the contraceptive mentality), and that any physical trauma to a woman's body would be so terrible as to be a justifying factor in terminating a pregnancy.

Thinking back to those discussions, we so abhorred the idea of what a pregnancy does to a woman's body because this was our value. What we looked like physically was so intertwined with our value as human beings that to tell us we should have to carry a pregnancy to term -- with all the weight gain and stretch marks and physical changes that would entail -- was to say that we should make our very selves less valuable as women.

It is the same pro-contraception worldview that motivates women's magazines to talk about little else other than "how to be SEXY", for pop culture to insist that older women are STILL SEXY, and for well-meaning people to assure women of varying body types such as the overweight or the disabled that they CAN BE SEXY TOO.

And I believe that it's this same worldview that's changed how the ideal woman is depicted. I thought of this as I looked through this beautiful video of women in art throughout the ages. Contrast the soft, mysterious, classically feminine beauty portrayed in ages past to the hyper-sexualized images we see of women today.

For women in our culture, to be "hot" or "sexy" is to have value. There are a variety of theories as to why this is true but, from my experience, it goes back to the acceptance of contraception and the idea that the primary purpose of sex is for pleasure.


None of this had really crystallized for me until, one day last year, I put on a swimsuit to go to the pool with the kids. I checked my appearance in the mirror and with my pale skin and post-baby figure the word "Yeti" came to mind. I chuckled at my glowing wit, made a mental note to cut out the new habit of ice cream after dinner, and threw a towel over my shoulder to head to the pool. But something about that moment nagged at me, and after thinking about it for a while I realized what it was: how very, very different my reaction was to seeing myself looking a little heavy in a swimsuit than it would have been just a year or two before.

What had happened? Years and years of intense focus and worry about my physical appearance had seemingly just melted away into a much more calm, reasonable expectation of what I should look like.

It was then that I realized how much the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception and the purpose of marriage and sex had changed my life. I had thought of my agreement with and acceptance of Church teaching on the matter to be a purely intellectual decision. But I realized that day that it was so much more than that. It had fundamentally changed where I derived my value as a woman, and where my husband and I had derived the value of our marital life.

Shortly after the swimsuit incident my husband and I attended a marriage course required by our parish to have our marriage blessed in the Church. Oddly, it was Christian but not Catholic, and in their segment called "Great Sex" they completely separated sex from the creation of life, explaining that sex is a gift from God for our pleasure. The odd, elephant-in-the-room exclusion of having children from the entire discussion impressed upon me how hollow our society's view of sex really is: Why would we bring up something as un-sexy as pregnancy and having babies? We're trying to talk about sex here!

I left the course that night feeling sad. Sad for the years I spent mentally compartmentalizing sex and the bringing forth of new life, and the effects that had on my self-image as a woman. Sad for the slightly overweight lady at the table next to me who shifted uncomfortably as the instructors peppily emphasized the importance of staying in shape if you're going to keep things "exciting" in the bedroom. And sad for all the couples who were there because their marriages were troubled, since I'm sure the overly detailed advice they received on how to have a good sex life only added pressure to their stressful situation.

As I listened to the instructors offer tips and tricks for how couples could better bond through the marital act, I couldn't help but think that it seemed like they were just missing it. It almost seemed as if they themselves knew that they weren't exactly hitting the nail on the head with this topic. They offered suggestion after suggestion for how spouses could be romantic, show each other unconditional love, let their partner feel accepted and cherished, etc., involving touch and eye contact and flowers and candy and surprises and back rubs and...whew! I can't even remember them all. Though all of these things sounded nice enough, they seemed so weak and pale compared to the ultimate way of showing your spouse devotion and unconditional love: to implicitly say with every sexual act, "It's OK with me if we should create a life together with this act." What's more romantic than that?


I don't mean to be too hard on the marriage course instructors, who seemed like very sweet people who were genuinely trying to do something good for couples. And I don't mean to alienate or criticize couples who do choose to use contraception. I just wanted to share my thoughts on this aspect of my conversion since it's changed my life in such a big way. Even with challenges like tricky medical issues, financial difficulties and unexpected pregnancy, seeing the world in this new light has brought me more peace than almost anything else I've experienced in my conversion.

"Would you kids be quiet! I'm trying to seek God's will here!"

How do I live God's will at each moment? That is the big question that's been on my mind lately.

Regular readers know that I've recently discovered the concept that we should be seeking God at every moment of every day, not just during scheduled prayer time or Mass. Even first thing in the morning. (Remarking on how very un-saintly I can be in the first couple hours after I wake up, my husband once summarized my attitude as, "It's a good thing Jesus doesn't get here until 9:30!")

Some of the most amazing, powerful insights I've ever heard on this subject came from a book I recently finished called He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter Ciszek. I count it among the most life-changing books I've ever read. In this book Fr. Ciszek recounts the major tests of faith he endured and what he learned about seeking God's will in the 20+ years he spent as a prisoner in Russia. Falsely accused of being a Vatican spy, he spent five years in solitary confinement in the dreaded Lubianka prison, and was then sent to a terrible Siberian slave labor camp for 15 years.

One of the things I found most surprising and inspiring about this book is that Fr. Ciszek's insights are as applicable to the average American suburbanite as they are to the Siberian prisoner. His suffering involved starvation-level hunger and torturous 18 hour days out in the bitter tundra while mine involves laundry trips up and down the stairs with third-trimester aches and pains; his foiled plans involved decades of wrongful imprisonment and harassment while mine involve a really bad week of potty training -- but the lessons are the same.

For example, he has this to say about the depression he and a fellow priest fell into when they first arrived in Russia to realize that nobody even wanted them to be there. They were living in squalor and had sacrificed everything they knew to minister to the Russian people...and nobody even seemed to care. He writes:

We could serve the Church [back in Poland], but we could do nothing here. This whole Russian venture seemed now to have been a mistake.

Though our situation may have been somewhat unique, the temptation itself was not. It is the same temptation faced by everyone who has followed a call and found that the realities of life were nothing like the expectations he had... It is the temptation that comes to anyone, for example, who has entered religious life with a burning desire to serve God and him alone, only to find that the day-to-day life in religion is humdrum and pedestrian...It is the same temptation face by young couples in marriage, when the honeymoon is over...The temptation is to say: "...It is not fair. I never thought it would be like this. I will not serve."

The statement "I will not serve" can mean different things to different people, but I think we've all said it at one point or another. It could be something as severe as a couple divorcing when the going gets rough, or as routine as being unwilling (or only grudgingly willing) to carry out the more inconvenient and mundane tasks required by your vocation. (The latter is sort of a specialty of mine -- you should hear me when toilet cleaning time rolls around!)

Fr. Ciszek explains the enlightening realization he and his friend received after months of physical and mental misery:

And then one day, it dawned on us. God granted us the grace to see...the answer to our temptation. It was the grace quite simply to look at our situation from his viewpoint rather than from ours. It was the grace not to judge our efforts by human standards, or by what we ourselves wanted or expected to happen.

He refers to St. Ignatius' First Principle and Foundation that says that man is created to praise, revere and serve God, and all his efforts should directed at that aim and that aim alone. Fr. Ciszek and his friend had known this fundamental truth very well before they entered Russia. They had prayed about it and meditated on it countless times, but it had only been an abstract theory -- they had never truly applied it to their daily lives. He writes of this realization:

Our whole purpose [in Russia] -- as indeed in our whole lives -- was to do the will of God. Not the will of God as we might wish it...or as we thought in our poor human wisdom it ought to be. But rather the will of God as God envisioned it and revealed it to us each day...His will for us was the 24 hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances he set before us in that time. [...]

Our dilemma came from our frustration at not being able to do what we thought the will of God ought to be in this situation, at our inability to work as we thought God would surely want us to work, instead of accepting the situation itself as his will. It is a mistake easily made by every man, saint or scholar, Church leader or day laborer. [...]

The simple soul who each day makes a morning offering of "all the prayers, works, joys and suffering of this day" -- and who then acts upon it by accepting unquestioningly and responding lovingly to all the situations of that day as truly sent by God -- has perceived with an almost childlike faith the profound truth about the will of God.

To predict what God's will is going to be, to rationalize about what his will must be, is at once a work of human folly and yet the subtlest of all temptations. The plain and simple truth is that his will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. [...]

The answer lies in understanding that it is these things -- and these things alone, here and now, at this moment -- that truly constitute the will of God.

I am a sort of living testament to this concept. I can't tell you how many times I've been engrossed in some great spiritual book, only to be interrupted by some unexpected chaos with the kids. And my immediate reaction is to think, "Would you kids be quiet! I'm trying to seek God's will here!" sighing that if only I wasn't so bogged down with my household responsibilities that I could really start getting in tune with God. If only I didn't have to change this diaper and deal with that temper tantrum and clear all those dishes off the table I could get closer to finding out what it is that God wills for me!

It's been quite stunning, then, for me to realize that changing that diaper and dealing with the temper tantrum and clearing those dishes are God's will. These are the situations that God puts in front of me every day. If I see them through my eyes alone, holding out for God to reveal to me that "his" will is all about me writing that bestselling book or the lottery win (that just so happen to be big fantasies of mine), I grumble through the mundane tasks of my day. And when I do this, when I apathetically plop a dish into the sink or huff and puff about having to sweep the kitchen floor for the second time today, I am essentially saying, "I will not serve." I'm refusing to accept that these humdrum tasks just might be the answers to all my questions about what God wants me to do.

But to see all these diapers and temper tantrums and dishes through God's eyes, to humbly go about my day executing each task with love, appreciating every moment and every little thing around me as a precious gift, is to know and serve God, to do his will. I don't need to analyze it beyond that. I have my answer.

Fr. Ciszek says it best:

To seek to discover some other and nobler "will of God" in the abstract that better fits our notion of what his will should be...was our temptation [in Russia], just as it is the temptation faced by everyone who suddenly discovers that life is not what he expected it to be. The answer lies in understanding that it is these things -- and these things alone, here and now, at this moment -- that truly constitute the will of God...The trouble is that like all great truths it seems too simple.

Its very simplicity renders it almost impossible of human achievement, for our poor human nature is too easily distracted. The very circumstances of our lives -- so constant and so humdrum and routine, and yet the things that truly constitute the will of God for us each day -- are also the very things that serve to distract us, precisely because we are so involved with them. [...]

And yet to grasp this divine truth, as simple as it sounds, and work at it, to face each moment of every day in the light of its inspiration...is to come to know at last true joy and peace of heart, secure in the knowledge we are attempting always and in everything to do God's will, the only purpose for which we exist, the end for which alone we were created. There is no greater security a man could ask, no greater serenity a man could know.

When your spouse is an atheist / agnostic

A reader emailed me the other day to ask if I had any thoughts on how to discuss faith with an agnostic spouse. I don't want to divulge any identifying details, but a rough summary of his question is this:

I am a recent convert to Catholicism and my wife is agnostic. She is content with her life, not really intellectual, and not "searching" spiritually. So far our marriage is a happy one, but I worry about big conflicts arising from our differing views if we have children.

I feel very disheartened that she has no interest in this faith that is to crucial to my life, and that I don't even have any friends who share my Catholic faith. It seems that whenever I try to be a good Catholic and Christian I get accused of being a "party pooper" or "holy roller".

I feel down about all this and could use some words of encouragement.

So I sent him a lengthy reply. But the topic still nagged at me, and after re-reading the email I sent I realized that my advice probably wasn't going to be that helpful.

It occurred to me that regular commentor Steve G. (who recently had some great thoughts on another subject here and here) had been in this very situation in his own marriage, so I emailed him to ask what he thought. As usual, he was able to distill what he learned from his own experience into some really powerful advice for any new converts whose spouses don't share their faith. It was too good not to share, so with his permission I'm posting his advice in case others may find it helpful.

He writes:

Around the time I converted, my wife could also have been described as a mostly content, non-intellectual who just doesn't really care about faith. That non-intellectual part is not an insult in the least. My wife is plenty smart, she just happens to be one of those people who lives more in the real world than in her head (i.e. like me too often). Sometimes, I really think being an 'intellectual' is a huge disadvantage. :-P

Since I am that type of person myself, I do draw so much information, knowledge, and edification from reading, listening to, and devouring the types of books and tapes I've often spoken about. At the beginning, lacking any semblance of humility, and even less insight into the different ways people relate, I clumsily offered book after book, apologetic after apologetic argument, tried to get her to watch EWTN, etc. All to no avail (except possibly causing a lot of resentment). After a few months of seeming dead ends, I almost despaired at how I was going to reach her with what I'd found.

All this is to say I know how tough it can be. St. Paul was right, being unequally yoked is tough, very tough. In fact, it's downright painful. So I'll offer what advice and encouragement I can:


First, I need to boldly and happily say that there is hope! Don't be discouraged! I honestly could never have envisioned my wife (raised as an atheist) would convert to Catholicism. At one point, I was just happy enough that she 'tolerated' my own growing devoutness. Yet just about two years after my own conversion began, there she was getting baptized at the Easter vigil. And now some 6 or 7 years after that, I am in a Catholic marriage, with three baptized children, and we are fighting the good fight of trying to faithfully live out the Church's teachings together.

Will it happen in every case? Will it happen as quickly? Only God knows, but this is just to encourage these spouses to have hope. It does happen. It's often times quite unexpected, almost miraculous. But then God specializes in the miracle of conversion of hearts.

Here is some advice I would offer:

1. As St. Francis says, preach the Gospel in actions and not words. This is SO important. At some point after my clumsy attempts to convert my wife, a good friend basically told me in roughly these words, "Why not just keep your mouth shut and focus 100% on being the very best Catholic husband you can be. Stop trying to convert her, that's God's work, and get about what you can change...growing closer to God, becoming a better Christian, becoming a better husband."

His words actually stung me a bit as I was still just in the very beginning stages of recovering from a life of total unmitigated pridefulness, and the thought that I couldn't bend her to my will was humbling.

In truth though, if I had any hand in converting my wife, it was after I heeded this advice. It was only after my behavior as a husband, a son, a brother, a friend, a person, had drastically changed for the better that she began to become open to the possibility that there might be something to that whole Catholicism thing. To her non-intellectual personality, the proof was in the pudding. My actions spoke louder than any words I could have used.


2. Remember to have fun. There definitely is a tendency, especially for those of us who convert in very isolated circumstances such as he describes (one man show, no Catholic friends, etc.), to withdraw very rapidly from all things with even the slightest hint of taint of the world. It's understandable, maybe even laudable. After a life of sin, you feel you've been rescued and you want to protect yourself from those things. It is exceedingly difficult at the beginning to strike the balance between being in the world, but not of it. The tendency is to go towards the extreme and indeed, it's easy in that case to come across as a humorless holy-roller.

Again, indeed this was my own experience. I don't really regret it because there is a sense in which it was a necessary withdrawal to more or less gather my bearings as I was setting my foot on this path of faith. But looking back, I have to be honest and admit that I was indeed a bit of a killjoy. I was so overly sensitive to all things I perceived as impious that I could actually be quite a bore.

But then I learned (thanks to writers like Lewis, Chesterton, and many other 'joyful' men and women), that this is not how we should be. We are Catholics! We are not Manicheans. We are not Puritans. We are Catholic! We know that grace builds on nature, and we can affirm the good wherever it is found. And we can, and should laugh loud and often! In the words of Hilaire Belloc:

"Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine / There's always laughter and good red wine."

...and so it should be. Even our current pope is on record as saying that we Catholics have so much to be joyful about that we should be exuding that to the world. Let us be careful no to confuse piety with somberness. Let us be not only joyful, but also capable of enjoying (morally, of course) God's gifts (including our yet to be converted spouse).


3. Be careful not to require too much in the way of motives for your spouse. This might sound confusing, so let me explain.

While my wife did begin to be open to the possibility of becoming Catholic through the changes she saw in me, if she'd been left to her own devices, she'd probably have taken the whole thing MUCH slower. When she finally did decide to convert, it was as much for me, for our family's unity (we were pregnant at that time), and for peace in our marriage as anything else.

This would often trouble me. I wondered if she felt forced (though I honestly don't recall pressing her after the initial foolish period of trying to convert her). I wondered if she 'really' believed (how in heaven's name can that be measured?). I wondered if she really FELT it in her heart. I was suspicious that she was doing this way too much for me, and not enough out of conviction and true belief on her part.

I realized how right I was when she told me later that during the Easter Vigil itself at one point she had actually had a dialogue with herself in which she came very close to turning to me and telling me she just couldn't go through with it.

So what's my point? That God meets us where we are. OK, so her motives weren't as 'pure' I would have thought they should be in the beginning, but look at it another way...how humble of her to have taken such a leap for her family and marriage! Would God not honor such humility? Of course he would. And he has. This wonderful woman who took those first, humble steps towards God, has been increasingly drawn to him in her depths as she owns her faith more deeply, draws strength, wisdom and love from it daily. This woman is today a Catholic who probably has about 1/100th of the book knowledge I have about the faith, but regularly manages to put me to shame in living it out.

God of course will use whatever he can to draw us to him. Even our broken, conflicted, impure motives. And looking back, can I really hold my own motives as so pure? I wonder. The point is again that conversion is God's work. Let us be able to set aside our expectations of what it should or will look like for others (even those most dear to us). If and when it happens, it may very well look very different than might be expected.


4. Finally, the last bit of advice I have is to pray. Pray, pray, pray, pray! Reading is wonderful, enlightening, edifying, helpful, and plenty of it needs to be done to fill the intellectual life of the intellectual Catholic.

But always, under girding everything must be the entering into of the life of prayer. In particular, get in the habit early on of finding at least a few minutes a day to withdraw from the noise and bustle of life, and just prayerfully listen for God's voice ("Speak Lord, your servant is listening" is how I begin).

If there is one practice, aside from frequent reception of the sacraments, that I would encourage a Catholic to partake of, and to not let go of no matter what, it would be to somehow spend at least 10 or 15 minutes each day listening in silent meditative prayer. Again, aside from the sacraments, this serves more to allow God to transform us and draw us to him than anything else I can think of. This life of prayer empowers us to do the good work of becoming that husband who images Christ to our wives, who turns the other cheek, who sacrifices for her.

MegaMom Interviews: Milehimama's story

I have a fascination with big families. Probably because I am an only child and have almost no first-hand experience with large families, yet I am probably (hopefully) going to have many children of my own, I have a million questions for moms with lots of kids.

Since I know that there are other people out there who share my desire to know more about the day-to-day operations of families with a house full of kids, I decided to start doing email interviews with some of these "megamoms" who are commentors and fellow bloggers.

And who better to kick it off than Milehimama, who has seven children under the age of nine. I asked:

Q: A lot of people in our culture would probably look at how many children you've had in such a short time and wonder what compelled you to sign up for that. Why not, after you had two or three great kids close in age, decide to take a break for a few years to give yourself some time before the next one?

Her response:

I think what it boils down to, is control. I didn't sign up to have as many kids in as short of a time as I could; but I did decide to turn the matter over to God, trusting in Him fully.

This didn't happen right away - when I got married, I had turned my back on the Church (I told people I had survived Catholicism and was never going back). I married a "backslid" Baptist, meaning that he had, at one point, gone to church and been "saved" but now was living as a heathen, so to speak. [...]

Our first two children were born 13 months apart (and our firstborn came along 3 days after our 1st anniversary). When baby #2 was 4 months old, I started working at a pro-life pregnancy center one morning a week, and I got pregnant again. (I wasn't Catholic, but I was pro-life). My husband and I hadn't really discussed birth control (believe it or not!), but working as a counselor at the pregnancy center I decided that I would never go on artificial hormonal birth control.

We had a miscarriage, and people were so cruel! The doctor told me I "already had enough children". I think those two events really changed my heart towards God. I remember during the miscarriage begging God for our baby, but in a very conscious way also submitting - "Thy will be done." I also realized that I really had no control over when babies would, or wouldn't come. I could use birth control to ask God not to bless us with a child, but that's no guarantee.

I could also beg and plead and pray and fast asking for a baby - still no guarantee. So I let it go completely and surrendered myself - "Do with me what thou wilt", as the prayer says.

He can always draw good from bad! That was one of two events that brought me back to the Church. [...]

And so, we surrendered control of our fertility to God. My husband is not Catholic (yet!), and he will usually talk jokingly about getting a vasectomy when I'm pregnant but as soon as the baby's actually here, he doesn't mention it again. I think he's a sucker for the babies too!

Fully surrendering means accepting God's will for our family, whether that means many children, no children, or only a few. In our case, God has blessed us abundantly - but there is another end to marriage, which is sanctification of the spouses. God also uses our children, and situation, to refine us and, if we cooperate, become holier.

We have never used NFP to conceive or delay pregnancy. We don't use anything at all, which is ironic because I know people think of us as proof that NFP doesn't work!

I guess the answer to the question, why not wait and space them further apart, is that God does our family planning. He is infinitely wiser than we are, and loves me, my husband, and our children more than we could ever imagine. I fully trust the He knows what is best for our family. I've given control to Him.

May you be filled with His peace,

Milehimama

[NOTE ON COMMENTS: Milehimama was so kind to take the time to answer my question and so openly share her story for me and my readers, please make sure that any comments or questions are courteous and respectful.]