Eight years ago I held a small body in the palm of my hand, the baby I miscarried near the end of my first trimester. Last week I was grading projects in which my students described congenital anomalies and to my surprise I found myself leaking slow tears into the keyboard. I was remembering that little body, delicate and still.
His tiny ears were set low on his face, right down at the angle of his jaw. This is a marker for a bunch of bad things: chromosomal anomalies, various syndromes, teratogen exposure.
I was so sad -- so sad. We named him Dominic. Our priest came and blessed a little patch of ground next to our apartment for the burial. I will never stop missing him.
In the brouhaha over the election he seems to me like an emblem for what's wrong with American politics. One side argues that the continued existence of babies like Dominic should be at their mothers' discretion. The other side thinks that they ought to be born, but insists that the idea of communal responsibility for their complex medical and developmental needs will lead us straight to godless government and financial ruin.
I am so tired -- so far beyond tired, actually -- of hearing that I should go along with one of these errors for the greater good.
Heather King's writings on the American political system have spoken to my heart. I have been studiously avoiding political links on Facebook all through the election season, but what did I do on Sunday night? I shared a link to her recent post. Some part of me said, "Hey! Let's offend everybody, all at one time, by sharing a link that compares Obama and Romney to Hitler and Goebbels!"
Monday morning I woke up and said, "What was I thinking?" I deleted the link. Somehow, though, it was still floating around FB later that day. My friend Patrick saw it and declared King's thoughts on contraception "one of the most disturbing things [he'd] ever read." (With his permission, I'm pasting his whole comment down below in the comments on this post.)
The idea of contraception as morally problematic is regarded as a wacky one these days, the furthest purlieu of the bleak hinterlands inhabited by hardcore fanatics. It attracts derision and disbelief. In the first year that I was blogging I wrote about controversial things like abortion and Church teaching on contraception. Is it sensible or cynical that I don't touch those topics these days? I can't say for sure. What I know is that if you spend your twenties and thirties saying "Yes! I will be open to life!" you'll probably be too busy in your forties to argue about it online.
So I'm not really interested in arguing. I am only here to say that I am grateful for the Church that challenges me to say yes: yes to serving the least of these, yes to growing in the greatest of these. Yes to the crazy idea that fertility is a gift to be welcomed and not a scourge to be subdued. In the comments on that Shirt of Flame post Heather King responded to a man whose reaction was much like my friend Patrick's. She said, "when sex isn't open to life, something gets torn, something gets
divided."
In my twenties I used to say that it damages the integrity of the sexual act, this idea that we can separate unitive and procreative purposes like bits of velcro. I used to talk about how empowering I found NFP. I used to say, a little smugly, "Humans are not baboons, with uncontrollable urges driven by estrus." I don't say those things these days -- in part because I'm rarely trying to persuade anybody these days and smug is something I try hard to avoid, and in part because NFP is harder in my forties than it was in my twenties and thirties.
I have learned, though, that things worth doing are often hard things. My finding them difficult doesn't mean I have the freedom to give up on them. I don't say that lightly or smugly; I say it a little wearily. When I write about my Dominic I am keenly aware that it is easy to love the remembered baby and to mourn what might have been. I can only guess, from years of working with disabled people, at the difficulties of the might-have-been scenario. I have seen enough of those difficulties not to trivialize them.
At the same time, I have seen enough of difficulty to say that fear of difficulty should not be a barrier to doing God's will. As my spiritual director reminded me this evening, we don't count the thorns when we look at a rosebush. Life's not about the thorns. Instead it's about Jesus, who calls us and equips us to offer the greatest of these to the least of these. Jesus, who did not wave a magic wand to eliminate suffering but instead suffered with us. Jesus who is with us in the mucky mess, mysteriously enlarging our capacity for love and trust. Jesus, bigger than the brokenness and surely, mercifully, eternally, bigger than this broken political system.
Recent Comments