This blog is seriously fun. Watch an aspirant get ready to enter the convent. Yay. All the stuff you never thought about, like, “where do those blue aprons come from?”.
(You can also help pay off her student loans. H/T to Jen @ Conversion Diary for the link.)
It is my firm belief that I have finally caught up on all my e-mail. Which means if you are still waiting for a reply from me, um, maybe you could pester me one more time?
But I haven’t looked at every single facebook thing, which means I might be missing out on links like this one:
A girl neglects facebook at great peril.
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FYI I’ve gone back to submersion here. My apologies to those of you who are in my e-mail backlog, I will get to you soon.
Continuing with the NFP theme . . .
If you travel in the right circles, soon enough you run up against “providentialists”. You might see a reference to “Quiverfull” or “Full Quiver”, or “Letting God Plan Your Family”, or any number of things. The basic idea is this: Married couples should take no measure to avoid pregnancy in any way.
There are variations, and I won’t go into the crazier minorities. Also, we aren’t talking here about couples who take no steps to space or delay pregnancy because they have no reason to do so. That is normal and healthy. If you are a married couple, the default mode is “hope for another baby”.
What I want to address today is the idea that maybe NFP is wrong. That maybe, observing your signs of fertility, and actively choosing to avoid intercourse during the fertile time, is somehow not what God wants. That by doing so you are not trusting God. You are perhaps taking into your own hands something that should remain a mystery. And that what God wants is for couples to go ahead and engage in marital relations with no regard for whether or not a pregnancy will result, even when all indicators are that a pregnancy at this time would be a very, very bad thing.
This is not Catholic. And it doesn’t work. Here’s why:
God gives us free will, and He means us to use it. Let us set out an ideal of complete, childlike trust in God. Now ask: Does that mean that you want your children to be automatons? No. I want my children to trust in me, to obey me, to do what I have taught them even when it doesn’t make sense. But my goodness if the house is on fire, all those years of “don’t get out of bed after bedtime” give way to the other training of “kick through the screen and climb out the window, I’ll meet you at the neighbor’s house”. God gives us the faculty to think, to plan, to control our actions. We are not dogs in heat. We trust in Him, but we still check the classifieds when we need a job.
We aren’t meant to dwell in ignorance of the wonders of the universe. And that includes human biology. I don’t show my “trust” in God by refusing to learn more about the world He created. It would be bizarre and unnatural for me to insist on complete ignorance of the very obvious signs of human fertility.
Our emotions and desires provide valuable information. And they cannot be forced. Although we should not be ruled by our feelings, when they are properly ordered they are essential to making prudent decisions. What sane man could look at the faces of his hungry children and not be filled the notion that his first and foremost mission is to find a way to feed them? That other things must wait. What loving husband could look at his sick wife, and not want to first do what he could to protect her health, and choose to set aside his own natural urges for her sake? In the face of serious reasons to postpone pregnancy, the normal, healthy response is to have a diminished desire for intercourse.
So “providentialism” simply does not work. At it’s logical extreme, it asks us to abandon our role as creatures made in the image of God. To set aside our free will, to insist on willful ignorance of the basic and obvious workings of creation, and to cultivate an animal-like desire for intercourse instead of responding to the normal, healthy instinct to put the good of others before our own pleasure. In face of serious reasons to avoid pregnancy, abstinence — whether 100% or intermittently as required — is a natural, noble, and moral means of sacrificing for the good of the family.
That said, the practice proposed by “providentialism” is in fact the default mode for married couples. It is normal for married couples to engage in intercourse at will, and joyfully welcome whatever children come their way. It is only when serious situations arise that one would actually want or need to choose another course of action. But in those situations, NFP is a sane response.
The biggest complaint about NFP is that it stinks not being able to have sex with your spouse. The rest of the method — observing and charting and all of that — may not be the funnest thing ever, but it beats having surgery or putting weird chemicals into your body, and compared to all the other things parents do, really it’s no big deal. But not having sex with your spouse? That stinks.
And so people complain, rightly, “We shouldn’t have to abstain.”
No, you shouldn’t.
We live in a fallen world. There should be no hunger, no murder, no sickness, no death. But there is. Not because there should be, not because these things are right and natural and all part of what man was made for, but because our world is broken, and the ultimate fix is for the next life, not this one.
“We shouldn’t have to abstain” is also the argument for contraception. Couples instinctively know that their calling is for intimacy and physical union. They mistakenly conclude that whatever enables intercourse is therefore good.
The mistake is in thinking that sex can be separated from procreation. If I have this sense that as a couple we ought to be engaging in intercourse at will, and if a pregnancy would cause a serious problem at this time, the conclusion of contraception is that I ought to keep the sex but avoid the pregnancy.
NFP says: No. The two cannot be separated. If pregnancy needs to be avoided, then intercourse will have to avoided, because you may not separate sex from procreation. (Nor procreation from sex.) The way in which we bring into the world new eternal souls is sacred. It is set apart.
The trouble is that in promoting NFP, we mistakenly compare it to contraception. It is as effective for avoiding pregnancy. It is as easy to master. And, sometimes you will be told, “Well, it’s only a few days a month that you need to avoid”. In other words, you’ll hardly notice.
And we think therefore that NFP should involve no suffering. No difficulty. Because that is what contraception claims: Have all the free sex you want! The free sex you surely need! It pains you, as a married couple to abstain! Surely your marriage requires sex at will, right?
What we forget, is that NFP is only there as a response to a serious problem.
If the world were not broken, there would be no NFP. Couples would marry, and children would come. There would be no infertility, no miscarriages, no stillbirths. No pregnancy complications. No breastfeeding difficulties, nor pregnancies too close one after the other. No health problems that limited how many children one could bear and rear. No concern about feeding or caring for or sheltering the children. No mental health disorders. None of these countless ways that many couples find they cannot simply have sex at will, for the world is broken.
NFP seeks to lighten the load. It seeks to lessen the suffering that this broken world imparts. But like a kindly nurse in the ICU, or a compassionate police officer at the scene of the crime, nothing can erase the underlying World Gone Wrong. If I’m using NFP, it means there is some kind of problem in my life.
The suffering is not imaginary. It is not particularly surprising, even. It’s a broken world. NFP is a moral means to take the edge off the pain, but it’s still a broken world.
Shamelessly goofing off here. Couple links to the modern architecture humor at Unhappy Hipsters, where I found two that totally fit with the homeschooling nerd-mom theme:
This is very funny. It could totally be me. If I drank that much. And this one is also funny in an eerily biographical way, but in addition, wow, what a cool invention. Seriously. Go look. It’s like getting to laugh at me and visit another blog at the same time.
Jen Fulweiler has a pretty good response to the NYT‘s Contraception v. NFP article; Marissa Nichols adds more here, and of course Simcha points out that it’s all eerily similar to playground equipment. [Not like that, get your mind out of the gutter.]
My nine-year-old doesn’t know it, but it also has to do with cleaning the house.
She proposes a remote control with different settings, from “dirty” on through “super clean”. Pushing the desired button automatically transforms the house into the level of cleanliness you have selected. I observed that we didn’t really need the slovenly buttons, we’re very reliable about that part.
Because what we want is to just play and relax all the time. We want all the fun of owning lots of cool stuff, building things, sewing, painting, reading 1,001 books — all of it genuinely good and good-for-you. But we don’t really feel like doing the housework that goes with.
And mind you, there is nothing dangerous or laborious about the work we’re talking about here. It’s just not as fun as the funnest parts. It’s sort of dull. So we imagine we’d be so much happier if only we had the magic remote to take care of the not-so-great parts. Then we could do only the homemaking we wanted, and not have to think that every time we wanted to do an activity, we’d be expected to clean up afterwards.
It’s contraception for hobbies.
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The reason people hate NFP so much is that they keep comparing it to contraception. No no no. NFP is not contraception. It is not like contraception, it does not do what contraception does, it has nothing to do with contraception. Ask a happy contraceptor to use NFP, he’ll quickly confirm this for you.
NFP is a form of abstinence. It’s a method for not having sex.
[Okay, it also doubles as a method for increasing your odds of having a baby when you want one, and we have had great success with using it that way. In that sense, NFP is a fertility treatment, and compares very favorably to the other fertility treatments out there. But no one’s complaining about that kind of NFP. Wish the NYT would run the article. Please.]
So any way, back to not having sex. Which you would think was pretty simple (I’m doing it right now), but actually doing it all the time is not so easy. People who are determined not to have sex often find they have to take elaborate measures to pull it off, such as not spending large amounts of time alone with likely partners. And those measures are tricky to execute when you, hmmn, say, live with the guy. As often happens when you’ve gone and married him.
Which is why NFP is great: Instead of having to not have sex all the time, which is daunting, you can figure out ways to not have sex just some of the time. Which is easier if your spouse has some time-consuming hobby like golf or hunting or smashing concrete blocks to smithereens, that can be employed as a distraction during those “few brief days” (bwahahaha) of periodic abstinence.
–> I have my luddite moments, but there is no convincing me that everything was better back before digital thermometers, when couples who needed to postpone a pregnancy enjoyed the simplicity and peace of just not having sex at all. Complicate my life with technology, please.
(I feel the same way about my washing machine.)
Is NFP good for you? Well, I don’t know.
I know some people who keep a really clean house, and they do it by rarely being home and rarely pursuing any hobbies when they are home, and not really cooking much. That life seems sort of harried and empty to me, because I like all the messy home-livin’ we do. They’re practicing the NFP of hobbies and homemaking, avoiding making the mess so that they don’t have to keep up after it.
I know other people who keep a really clean house, despite having bunches of kids, homeschooling, and eating all their meals homemade. They do it by discipline and hard work. They are the full-quiver, providentialist types of the hobby-and-homemaking world. And they seem pretty happy.
I’m not sure what I’d do if you offered me the magic house-cleaning remote. But I suspect it wouldn’t be good for me. It would make my life simpler and easier and more fun-filled at first, but I bet over time my life would just get crowded by all the non-stop pleasure seeking. And then empty.
I know that contraception is dangerous and empty in this way. (Though, like the magic remote, very tempting.) I know that the people who are able to just conceive conceive conceive, and it is coupled with true generosity and discipline and love, these people are living a life filled with tremendous joy.
But what about us NFP-types? Would we be happier if we just abstained 100%?
Would I be happier if my decision to have sex was not, “Are my reasons to avoid a pregnancy serious enough to wait until the end of the month?”, but instead, “Are my reasons serious enough to not have sex again, at all, until some unknown date when my life might be different?” Would the higher stakes make me value my sexuality and my children that much more?
I do know that couples who have a large family not out of generosity to life but out of uncontrolled passion, sooner or later have to deal with the reality of their motivations. And I know that NFP practiced with an overdeveloped sense of fear can mean missing out on the immense and uncountable blessings that another child would have brought.
It’s powerful knowledge, being able to know when you are fertile.
And I’m just simple and dumb. I like being able to have sex with my husband some of the time. I like that a lot better than having sex with him none of the time. The Church says this is a morally acceptable way to use our sexuality. And I suppose, what with most of our theologians and all of our Popes being “none of the time” people, they probably have an inkling.
If you are looking for a way to feed refugees of the famine in Somalia, Catholic Relief Services is there. Here’s the CRS main page. (H/T to Red Cardigan for the head’s up.)
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Utterly unrelated, but it has to do with CRS: Larry’s Beans makes really good coffee. 100% fair trade, shade grown, and either organic or transitioning to organic. And wow, good. Good. CRS is one of their partners, though I learned about it through an evangelical friend who used to own a coffee shop, and now runs a local Larry’s Beans purchasing co-op. Yes. Sometimes (okay, usually), I think of my evangelical home group as a The Gluttony Group. Because we eat that well. But we also talk about God and stuff, so it’s a wash.
I saw this post from Darwin in my feed reader, but I didn’t read it for the longest time, because the title made it sound too smart for me. But look at this:
As soon as people starting thinking of the economy as some great machine with levers just waiting to be pulled (whether it’s liberals convinced that if only we could put through a couple more trillion dollars worth of stimulus everything would be fine or conservatives convinced that we can always raise tax revenues by lowing tax rates) they set themselves up to cause more harm than good.
Yes. Yes yes yes.
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In White Fang news . . .
I finished the book. It got so much better after it started to be about a dog and not about some whiny guy being chased by wolves.* Here’s what I’ve concluded is necessary in order to enjoy White Fang:
1) A dog of your own. Because it’s a novel about the psychological development of a dog.
2) A good sturdy head cold. Because, well, it’s a novel about the psychological development of a dog.
Once I had both of those conditions in place, I totally enjoyed the book. And all the doggy procreation is firmly offstage, so now I don’t feel so nervous about having sent our other copy to camp with my 6th grader. I was nervous there for a few minutes.
* I myself would be very whiny if wolves were trying to eat me. For your own sakes, hope I never get to write any autobiography about such things.
I’ve learned a useful writing tip: If you have a really whiny character, go ahead and let the wolves eat that one. Your readers will thank you.
Except now I’m kinda rooting for the wolves.
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PS: Our dog is doing GREAT. Completely better. Hurray hurray hurray. We seriously thought we were going to have a dead dog by the end of the week. And now she’s fine. Perfectly normal happy dog. Yay veterinarians. Yipee yay yay.