What's so wrong with trashy books (or movies)?

Our weekend was filled with runny noses, pink eyes (I die. The second worst of childhood ailments, dethroned only by vomit), and lots and lots of reading.

The kids and I and even daddy all had books in piles around the house, freshly liberated from the library down the street and competing with Netflix for our winter-bound attention.

I must confess I spent the better part of Saturday reading a book I probably should not have finished...and I'm going to tell you why.

But first, a little background. Last week I asked my lovely readers who follow along on Facebook for some literary recommendations. And boy did I get some. You guys are so awesome, you flooded my newsfeed with more than 100 titles.

One evening later that week, after bedtime, I snuggled down with my laptop and my library account and went on a little hold binge, filling my e-cart with close to 50 titles. It was addictive, like shopping without money. Well, maybe like shopping with taxpayer money...but less of a sting than Amazon, for sure. (50 titles was a bit enthusiastic though, I will admit. Especially since 20 of them popped up in my email the next day as "ready for pickup." Oops.)

I trudged through the snow with one small boy in tow and we retrieved about a dozen titles, probably more than I could read in 2 weeks, but hey, a girl can dream. 

Sure enough, the powers of illness and weekend frigidity combined and was stayed inside reading plenty. Enough for me to finish one entire novel and crack into another one, only to be discarded and replaced by a 3rd option.

Here's where things get weird though. You see, the first book I read, while engaging, was ... questionable in terms of content. It was little things here and there at first, offhand references to casual sex. Details about make out sessions. Backstories involving (thankfully) derailed trips to the abortion clinic. And things kind of escalated from there.

The problem was though, I was so engaged in the story line and the characters by the time things got really steamy (read: super trashy) it was hard to shut the book and walk away. So I didn't. I read the whole dang thing and pretty much enjoyed it but definitely squirmed through increasingly larger sections of it. 

And afterwards, I felt acutely that I had betrayed an essential part of myself: my conscience.

For someone who can write confidently about skipping 50 Shades of S&M and has no problem flipping over the top copy of Cosmo in the checkout line, when it came to a book that was already in hand and being enjoyed, I had a more difficult time stepping away, even though I was fully aware that it was bad for me.

And no, I don't think that I committed any mortal sin by finishing a smutty novel, because I was skimming through the squirmy parts and was definitely repelled by - not attracted to - the sins being committed on the pages. But still. I didn't look away.

And I should have. I should have shut the book and played with my kids. Or picked up another title and tried again. Or, hell, painted my toenails or jumped on the elliptical or taken a nice long bath. There are plenty of things a tired mom can do with her limited leisure time that don't involve torrid affairs and steamy sex scenes in the back of cars.

Because here's the thing: every time I expose myself to the glamorization and normalization of evil - be it promiscuous teens losing their virginity, extramarital affairs, premarital sex, period - I lose a little bit of my natural (and supernatural) sensitivity to these sins.

It matters little that I will probably never personally commit them, (and I'm more than aware that there but for the grace of God go I); but when I am granting them entrance into my imagination - and my heart, because it dwells there, too - then I am throwing open an opportunity to grow not in virtue, but in vice. To do one thing with my "real" life, but to play by different standards inside the equally-real world of the mind.

And why invite those imaginary characters to come and live inside of me, occupying space in my brain and my heart where I'm desperately trying to cultivate virtue to impart to my kids, and to overcome the smallness and the very real fallenness of my own interior world?

We all struggle with sin, and thanks to the grace of God, we all have access to the grace to overcome them. Again. And again.

But that is by no means a license to roll around in the mud in our minds, rationalizing away the imaginary teflon divider between body and mind, spirit and flesh.

What we put into our bodies - our minds, our selves - matters. It matters because it becomes a part of us, just as much as the food we eat and the water we drink. It is incorporated into us in a permanent way. And as much as I have the authority over what will become irrevocably a part of me, it is my duty to exhort quality control over the raw material.

That's why it's not okay to go see a porno movie, even if it's mass-produced and wildly popular.

That's why I should probably delete that raunchy rom-com from my Amazon playlist, even though "it's a cultural classic" and "a little smut never hurt anybody." Because actually, all sins start small, and they have to start somewhere.

It's hard enough to cultivate virtue in a culture that is anti-virtuous, the enshrines and celebrates the very things we are commanded to avoid: murder, adultery, gossip, slander. 

Why compound the difficulty by filling our brains with the crap we're trying so hard not to step in ourselves?

Why read stories about characters succumbing to temptations we're striving mightily to overcome ourselves, entertaining plot lines that, if played out in vivo, would land us right in the confessional (and maybe divorce court, or prison)?

The past 6 years of living without cable has made me much, much more sensitive to televised smut than college Jenny ever dreamed of being. So yeah, my standards there are fairly high, but its' because I'm not regularly exposed to it. The boiling frog effect hasn't set in, and I'm instantly repulsed  when I see something graphic on tv that I know is wrong, in part because it's so shocking and so out of the ordinary.

I need to be more careful about what that looks like in terms of reading material too, though. Because just like you can never unsee something once it's flashed across your vision field, it's very, very difficult to divest yourself of the written word, too.

And I'm having an epic enough struggle swimming upstream in this culture. God knows I need all the help I can get.

I'm not going to undercut myself with friendly fire by reading "harmless" chick lit filled with innuendos and sex scenes between imaginary characters. Because they might not be real, but I am.

I'm a real flesh and blood woman with real struggles and real proclivities to sin. And I've also been entrusted with a husband to care for, and 4 little souls to guide back to Him.

My God, I need all the help I can get. 

And when I do need to escape (and I do, very much, very often in these exhausting early years) it ought not be to a place I have no business visiting, even if only in my imagination.

There's plenty of other stuff I could be doing with my free time, anyway. I could paint my daughter's toenails, watch a make up application tutorial on Youtube, write my husband a love letter, curl my hair, shop online for some cute unmentionables, go for a run (or a walk, as this widening load would have it), call my best friend, stare at maternity style posts on Pinterest...etc.

(I'm intentionally leaving out the titles of the books in question, partly because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or embarrass them if they did make the recommendation, and partly because I do believe that different people have different thresholds for what makes them squirm.)

 But I do want to challenge myself - all of us - to be conscious of that threshold, and how we can deaden or attune our own consciences with the choices we make and the company we keep, even in our own imaginations.

Maybe especially there.

Oh, and for the the record, I'm currently reading O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, at someone's excellent recommendation. And loving it. There's plenty of grit, there too. 

Because I'm not looking for an impossibly squeaky clean "unrealistic" universe, but for one that plays by natural law. Think "Les Miserables" ... plenty of sex, plenty of sin...and plenty of realistic consequences for what happens when we fail to choose the good. That's the kind of steamy I can handle.

Or a bath. I can always handle a nice hot bath. If only the kids would all nap at the same time.

50 Shades of pain: sterile sex and the problem with porn

I've seen dozens of articles about 50 Shades floating around the internet the past week or so, and I've read a handful of them. One or two are worth reading, this piece and this piece in particular.

The thing that has me scratching my head over the whole situation, the fact that a trilogy of pornographic novels have been adapted to a reportedly dismally-cast and middlingly-entertaining big screen production, is how we got here in the first place.

Not whether it's wrong or weird or nasty to plan to take your spouse on a hot date to the movies on Valentine's day to see Anastasia get spanked by Christian (though it is assuredly all of those things), but how it is that we have arrived at this destination, en masse, as a culture.

Let's look at the numbers; these books have sold 100 million copies since their release in 2011. That's some kind of record, and whatever else we can take from those numbers, we can presume that there's definitely an audience for the stuff. And in the pornographic culture we live in, it has become perfectly acceptable to identify oneself as a paying member of that audience and synch up the Kindle for a little smut to ease the long layover or kill the time in carline.

Because you see, the overwhelming majority of that audience is female.

I'm sure plenty of guys have read 50 Shades too, but it wasn't written for them. Romance literature (if abuse and domination can be so categorized) is the centerfold pull-out of the female demographic. It's printed porn, spelled out in characters and punctuation marks instead of screen shots and video clips.

And there's a growing market for smut of the feminine persuasion, because yes, it has become more socially acceptable to raise one's hand and identify oneself as a woman who consumes porn, but also because, I think, there are a lot of sexually-unhappy ladies out there.

So why is that? Aren't we all liberated and unshackled from the fear of pregnancy and the stigma of unmarried sex? Isn't everyone entitled to access anything they could ever have dreamt of, in terms of the erotic, now that all bets are off and all taboos have been discarded?

And yet what we're longing for, apparently, is something so "exciting" that in polite circles and legal terms, it is actually defined as abuse and battery?

Which leads me back to the title of this piece.

I have a pet theory about sex in the current cultural climate, and it goes like this: when a couple removes all of the mystery, all of the suspense, and all of the "riskiness" from sex, perhaps it becomes intolerably boring.

Maybe your interest in your partner fades, over time, because sex becomes merely another option in a long list of activities which can be pursued after the dishes are done.

Obviously my husband and I are in a unique and temporary season of marriage, during which time it is actually possible, when everything is functioning properly, for us to get pregnant.

On paper, that means that every time we decide to have sex, unless we're already currently pregnant, we first have to discern whether or not we're disposed to receive another child into the mix. Because that is always a possibility. When the answer to that question is "not right now," we still have to enter into the act prepared that the outcome might be another diaper-wearer, even when all our calculations and observations tell us otherwise.

Translation: even when we're in an NFP "safe zone," scientifically-identified as a period of infertility, there's still always a chance that we're wrong. I might have missed an observation or miscalculated a date. Or, since I'm not God, it could happen anyway, despite our best efforts otherwise. Because I'm not the one in control of my fertility, ultimately.

I didn't design me, and, short of a hysterectomy, I cannot 100% guarantee that I can suppress my fertility.

(An aside, that's why "surprise" babies in contracepting couples always strike me as such an odd concept. I mean, sure, you were using condoms or taking the Pill, but did you really think that if you did the thing that makes babies, there was zero chance you might end up making one?)

Honestly, this does add a certain level of excitement/fear/wonder at the unknown to the mix.

I'm not saying it's comparable to the, uh, thrill, I guess? of being tied up and hit, but frankly, I don't have the time to entertain thoughts of spicing things up with whips and chains. Nor the inclination.

I wonder if couples who can have all the sex they want - as much sex as they can physically stomach, kind of like the Golden Corral of the bedroom - thanks to contraception, aren't getting a little bored?

Is that why Christian Grey is a welcome figure in the imagination of a woman who is already being used, on some level, by her partner?

Is that why a man feels comfortable taking his girlfriend to a movie where a young woman is physically and psychologically abused by an older guy, because it's a little thrilling to control her like that?

Maybe there's no real correlation, but I do think it's worth considering that porn and contraception influence each other, even if only because they are both simultaneously so prevalent.

But sex doesn't need to be increasingly dangerous and forbidden in order to be satisfying. There isn't some kind of pleasure threshold that only riskier and kinkier behavior can satiate; indeed, the further we drift from the Christian ideal of sex as a total gift of self, the more dissatisfied (and sexually dysfunctional) we become as a civilization.

Because at the end of the day and in the dark of the night, what we do with our bodies and to the bodies of the ones we love matters. It matters very much. And a relationship that purports to be loving but that trades in the currency of use abuse is anything but romantic.

   

Unspoken Faith: When Couples Don't Share Beliefs

Today I have the real privilege of hosting a guest writer I think you guys will really enjoy.

During the month of October when I was running my 31 days series on Catholic teaching on sex and marriage, I got a ton of questions about mixed faith or faith/no faith couples, and what it might look like for marriages where one spouse doesn't practice the Faith, or maybe any faith at all.

Here's one answer to that question.

Sarah* has been generous and vulnerable enough to offer a reflection on what life looks like with 3 young kids and a husband who is supportive of - but not actively practicing - her Catholic faith.

I hope you enjoy.

A couple of months ago, my four-year-old son and I were having a conversation about the Mass. I was trying to explain the Eucharist to him when he cut in: “Oh, but dat’s just for girls.”

“No, Communion isn’t just for girls!” I protested. “Your daddy doesn’t take Communion, but lots of other daddies do. You’ll see – I’ll show you next time we go to church.”

I protested, I assured, I tried to tell myself that his was nothing but a silly little remark, but my heart sank. “Oh no,” I couldn’t help but think: “He’s already noticed.”

In my personal experience, believing is left to the women.

My father is not Catholic. Nor is he a religious person of any persuasion. I’ve only ever seen him go to church for the sake of someone he loves: He accompanies my mother to Mass on Christmas, Easter, and some random Sundays when it seems to matter to her; he attends family baptisms, first communions, and confirmations; he goes with my grandmother to her Methodist church on Mothers’ Day. He does it for our sake, not his own.

Of my mother’s large, Catholic family, few devoutly practice the faith. None of her (many) siblings are married to Catholics. Most have raised their children in the Church, but they’ve done so without the help of their husbands. My cousins (and many of my friends) attended Mass like I did – sitting in the pew every Sunday without our fathers.

As normal as this felt, it always bothered me.

It’s lonely to sit at Mass week in and week out with part of your family missing. It’s especially lonely on days when family blessings are given or on Father’s Day, when dads stand up for a blessing of their own. It’s hard to sit there, looking around at the men scattered throughout the congregation, biting your tongue to keep from shouting out, “I have a daddy too!”

So I resolved that when I grew up and had a family of my own, my children would have their father at Mass with them. I wanted to spare them that loneliness. And I wanted them (particularly any sons) to have the example of a father who attends church.

I did not, however, resolve to consider only devout Catholics for a husband – or indeed only Catholics at all. Because – my father. Ruling out non-Catholics felt too much like ruling out my own father. My wonderful, supportive, loving father – who is in almost every way, a beautiful example of what it means to be a husband.

Without a doubt, my parents have the best marriage I’ve ever witnessed. Growing up, I was just about the only child I knew who never, ever doubted that her parents loved each other and who never, ever feared that her parents might someday divorce.

My parents’ relationship just has that one, gaping hole: they don’t share a faith.

When I met my own husband after years of hoping and praying for “the one,” everything fell into place easily. So easily that I couldn’t help but see Providence’s hand in it. My husband is kind and gentle, hard-working, responsible, smart – all sorts of good things. Our values align. We work well together. We hold the same views on how to raise a family.

I was beyond relieved to learn that he was Catholic. But I was made a little nervous by how he said it: “I was raised Catholic.” Not I am Catholic. I was raised Catholic. Past tense.

Still, he harbored no ill will toward the Church (as too many, sadly, do) and he seemed to think it was valuable for children to be raised in a Faith. He attended Mass with me occasionally. He understood that I was serious about my Catholic Faith.

As our relationship progressed and we discussed marriage, he agreed that we would raise our children as Catholics and that he would attend Mass with us. He was happy to be married in the Church. He was fine with the prospect of not using contraception. And he never, ever pressured me to have pre-marital sex. (As far as ‘devout-Catholic-marrying-someone-who’s-not’ goes, I realize that my husband made it pretty easy on me. Many are not so fortunate.)

But though my husband was raised Catholic and though he (now) attends Mass regularly, I wouldn’t say that he and I share a Faith. That hole in our relationship may not gape as far as my parents’ does, but it’s still there.

I don’t know that he believes.

I don’t know that he doesn’t, either. We don’t talk about it. 

Because to be honest, I’m afraid to hear his answer. Actually afraid: I’m afraid of the sadness it might bring me.

So, we go to Mass. We say Grace before meals. We give to the Church. We do a family prayer whenever I can make it seem as seasonally-required as possible (say, over an Advent wreath). We carry on with the motions of the Faith, me hoping that in the doing, my husband will one day come to believe.

I also pray for him. I’m afraid to say, however, that I don’t do an awfully good job of it. I don’t have an awfully good prayer life, period. I pray in fits and spurts through the day, tossing prayers heavenward as I drive or do dishes or lie in bed. It’s one of the many parts of my life that I continuously try, and fail, to improve upon.

It’s easy to blame any number of things for my failure to pray as I should, but the hardest to swallow is the thought that if I had a devout, prayerful husband, he might encourage me in that effort. I hear (or read) from Catholic friends and bloggers this idea that a husband and wife’s primary goal in life should be to help each other get to heaven. And I’m … left short.

What an idea.

I’m sad to admit how foreign it is to me. In my mind, I visualize this space – say, a square – which represents all that a marriage is supposed to contain: things like love, patience, kindness, hard work, compromise, consideration, generosity, appreciation, etc. And I think, “We’re doing pretty well. We check those boxes. We must have a pretty decent marriage.”

But then I read one of my favorite Catholic blogs, where I learn of spouses praying together as they work to come to an important decision, or a husband engaged in a ministry at church, or a father praying over his children – and I start to see a space beyond that square. I see that there can – and should – be so much more to a marriage, to a family.

I see freedom.

I see the freedom to own one of the most elemental parts of who I am – a believer. I see the freedom to be open about my beliefs, my questions, my doubts – and to know that my husband will reciprocate. I see the freedom to accept our weaknesses, to say them out loud and to – together – ask for God’s help in overcoming them. I see the freedom to lean on my husband, to trust him in this part of my life, just as I do in others.

I also see grace.

What grace must come to a husband and wife who pray together. What grace must come to their marriage, their family, even their friends and the community to which they belong.

I wish I had that.

But I don’t. At least for now, I don’t. So I’m left to work on this (very important) part of life by myself. And I wonder: How can I be more open about my faith, so as to expose my family to it and help them to see it as normal and important? How can I provide them with examples of men who believe? How can I encourage my boys to consider a priestly vocation? How can I attract my husband to the Faith without hitting him over the head with my evangelism?

How can I help to open my husband’s heart and mind to God?

A couple of weeks ago at Mass, I found myself standing in the vestibule, looking through the glass at my husband. He was sitting in a pew a few rows from the back, mostly by himself. The baby sat quietly on his lap; there were no squirming, climbing boys to distract him from the Liturgy of the Word. (Our older boys were attending the Children’s Liturgy of the Word – big mistake – and I was standing at the ready in case they caused a ruckus.)

As I watched my husband, I prayed for him. I prayed that those quiet moments, those sacred words, might have some effect on him. I prayed that he would – bit by bit, Sunday by Sunday – someday come to believe. And that he would someday express that belief to our boys.

While I stood there, our three-year-old ran up to me. “I haffa tell you somedin’!” he said with some urgency. “I find Jesus up dayer!” He was pointing at the large crucifix above the altar. My boy was breathless; his eyes were wide. He saw Jesus.

I knelt down next to him, followed his pointing finger to the crucifix, and expressed some of the excitement he was giving off. I smiled and hugged him and said a few words about Jesus.

But the short, sweet moment was soon tempered by worries I’m only now starting to recognize:

“How long will this last? How long do I have before he grows tired of church, of thinking on Jesus? 

How can I help this all sink into his little mind before he chooses others’ influence over my own?” And the most worrisome question of all: “When they’re grown, will my boys believe?”

I have to admit, when I think on the situation much, I’m left feeling quite anxious. But one thought soothes me no matter how grim things seem: 

“Every time I go to Mass, I love my husband more.”

I realized this when we were first married and it’s held true ever since. Whether we go together or I’m alone, whether we’re happy or in the middle of a disagreement, I leave every single Mass loving my husband more than I did when I walked in. I can only attribute this to God and the graces he bestows on us through the sacraments.

 Though my husband may not believe (or if he believes, may not care much), he and I both received the sacrament of Marriage. Though he hasn’t received the Eucharist since our wedding day, I have received it countless times.

These sacraments matter. They matter, and I believe we continue to receive blessings because of them. 

So I hope. 

I hope that after witnessing the Consecration for the 942^nd time, my husband will feel moved to receive the Eucharist himself. I hope that my boys will notice the good, believing men of our parish as they line up every Sunday to receive Communion. I hope that I will receive the graces I need to nurture my own belief and to be a convincing witness to my family. 

I hope that someday, we will all feel the freedom and experience the graces that come from sharing a Faith.

*Not her real name.

Talking sex (and marriage) with Fountains of Carrots

(I cannot WAIT to see the google search results for that title)

Hey, I got to do something really fun last month and chat it up with two of my favorite bloggers, Haley from Carrots for Michaelmas and Christy from Fountains of Home. They've recently launched a new weekly podcast, and I think it's going to be really good.

I really love finally hearing people's voices after I've "known" them by their writing voice alone, you know? It's almost always a huge surprise how they sound in real life. So, just to set your expectations nice and low, expect me to sound like a 15 year old girl from Southern California. (Except I'm double that age, and originally from the Bay Area.)

Anyway, enjoy my little brush with celebrity, and have a beautiful wine-drenched and pie-filled Thanksgiving.

Catholics, sex, and marriage: the elevator pitch

Man, has it been a month or what? 

I told you guys when I started writing this series that I had some serious resistance going on, but I had no way to prepare for the all out spiritual warfare that this venture would trigger. I'm not actually even being facetious. 

It.has.been.real.

Which has me even more convinced that these conversations, virtual though they may be, are so deeply necessary. 

And the point is not that they remain virtual, you know? I'm fully aware of the limitations of the internet as means for evangelization. I get it. Things don't always translate, and layers of complexity and nuance are all too often lost amidst the keystrokes and the fiery rage of the combox.

But the internet is a great place for sharing information. Which, in turn, is good for facilitating communication. It's up to us to do the actual communicating on a one-to-one level though, got it?

So, to wrap things up, here's a tidy 2 minute overview of what Catholics believe about sex and marriage, and why.

Sex is good. It isn't dirty or naughty or some kind of half-hearted concession to our fallen animalistic nature...it is good, just as it was good in the beginning. Be fruitful and multiply, He said. And so we are, and we do. 

And we absolutely have to teach our kids that. Early and often. There's no such thing as "the talk" in good Christian parenting; rather, it must be a series of talks, spanning childhood into early adulthood, continually drawing children into the beauty and the truth of human sexuality. If you're waiting until your little snowflake starts middle school to say anything positive or informative about sex and the human person, well, I'm sorry to say it, but you're about 3 years too late.

We live in a sexually saturated culture, and our children's eyes and brains are bathed in provocative, violent, and sadistic images of a sexual nature at every turn. It's our job to combat that with beauty, and goodness, and above all, the truth of who and why they were "created, male and female." 

Marriage is also good. For the majority of people, it's not only good, but it's the means of our salvation. If you are called to the Sacrament of Marriage, it is through those graces (and crosses) that you'll make your way to heaven, leading and alternately being led by the spouse you choose. 

Marriage and sex go together. You might even say that attempting to separate them is at the root of almost every problem facing our society. We reserve sex for marriage not out of prudishness or repression, but for the same reason you wouldn't build a nuclear bomb in the garage: that kind of power demands respect. Mishandle plutonium and you're going to have a disaster, because you are violating the stuff's nature. You can't change nature. You can ignore it, or deny it, or repackage it as something of your own creation, but the stuff is still radioactive.

That's the reason the Church will never change her position on marriage: she doesn't have the power to. Marriage is the union between one man and one woman, designed by the Creator of plutonium, etc. to produce brand spanking new humans. We can tinker with the definition and broaden and rewrite all we want...but we can't alter nature. Even if the State does. Even if every country on earth proclaims marriage to be "an open ended living arrangement featuring a rotating cast of 4 or more adults featuring occasional collaborations with domesticated animals." Or something. Even then, the Church will not alter her stance on what marriage is, because it isn't hers to alter.

The Catholic Church's teachings on sex and marriage are profoundly freeing, which is a shocking claim to make on a libertine, pleasure-worshiping culture. But it's true! There is such freedom in chastity and fidelity and wild abandonment and trust. And while there's never a guarantee for happiness, it sure makes sense to stack the deck in your favor when it comes to matters of the heart.

If you think you know what the Catholic Church teaches about sex and marriage, make sure you've actually read and learned what the Catholic Church teaches about sex and marriage.

Humanae Vitae

Evangelium Vitae

Letter to Women

Theology of the Body

Sex is good. Marriage is good. Life is very, very good. Now let's go live it like we believe it.

As a guy I really like was fond of saying,

"Be not afraid."

Click to read the rest of the month-long series on the Catholic Church's teachings on sex and marriage.

I'm Catholic, can I get a vasectomy/tubal ligation?

There have been a number of questions about permanent sterilization during this month-long series, and while I wrote a post on it a while back, I think it deserves a fuller treatment, and a more nuanced explanation.

I know this is a question that many, many couples wrestle with. Even couples who have zero moral qualms whatsoever about shutting down their reproductive functions struggle with the permanence of surgical sterilization, because, well, it's permanent. And that makes you feel something on a deep emotional and, dare I say, spiritual level.

We know this part of our bodies is sacred. Walk into any delivery room or birthing center and watch the miracle of life unfold and just try to remain unmoved.

There is something profound and powerful at work in our fertility.

The short answer for why Catholics don't practice permanent sterilization is the same one you'll get for why Catholics don't use any other form of contraception: it isn't broken. 

For those of us who are called to marriage and to parenthood, the invitation to participate directly in God's creative process by bringing forth new human life is a staggering, gut-wrenching responsibility.

Vasectomies and tubal ligations take the "I will not serve" of contraception and carry it a step further, beyond the moment to moment "not this time" of hormonal contraceptives and barrier methods. They allow us to say with our bodies, in effect, I will not act in accordance with my nature, not now, and not at any point in the future.

In other words, God, you screwed up. I'm not supposed to work this way.

The Church isn't anti contraception because it's science. Or because it's artificial. Or because she has million dollar stock options in thermometers. The Catholic Church (and, up until about 100 years ago, all of Christianity) opposes contraception because it is in direct defiance of the very first thing that He commanded us to do, once He created us, man and woman.

Do you remember?

Be fruitful, and multiply.

(Not: have so many children your uterus falls out and you go bald/die of starvation because you have more children than can fit in your doublewide. But be fruitful, and multiply.)

Children, in Scripture, are only and always a blessing. For couples who have many of them, and for couples who wait in longing for a single one. (Ahem, Abraham.)

There is never a point at which God says, okay, I think we're good here, plus, you guys, college is so expensive right now, you probably need to go ahead and shut things down and start maxing out that 529 because otherwise you are going to be SO screwed.

If He sends them, we accept them.

And if we can't accept them? If we are simply not in a place where it would be prudent/loving/responsible/safe/possible to accept a(nother) child?

We don't. Have. Sex.

If you cannot welcome a child into your family you should not be doing the thing which invites children into your family. It's that simple. And it's that difficult.

For couples who have grave, serious reasons why having a child would be absolutely disastrous, how could anything else but abstaining be loving?

Because what if it happens anyway? We all know that couple who still got pregnant, in spite of their best efforts to prevent it. And then what? Hopefully not abortion...but what if the reason for not getting pregnant was a grave medical complication for the mother? How is that fair or loving to her?

It's not just that, though. It's not just the "you might still get pregnant even though you're fixed" argument. It's also because it's sexually bulimic. It's doing one thing with your body, but meaning another. When we do that with our words, it's called lying. So when we do that with our bodies...it's still lying. And denying the truth has consequences. Real, tangible, physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences.

Marriage is hard enough when everything is on the up and up. But when a couple chooses to consciously and systematically say one thing with their bodies but mean the opposite, there is going to be tension. There is going to be strife. There is going to be a breakdown in communication and mutual respect. And God knows we don't need anything more stacked against us, not when it's already an impossibly tall order. (Matt 19:10)

This is not a condemnation of couples who have made this decision and who regret it. This is, hopefully, a wake up call to couples who have never considered the real spiritual and emotional ramifications of physically severing the connection between sex and reproduction.

While there is no guarantee that either tubal libations or vasectomies can be reversed, there are doctors out there who are willing to try. Depending on the individual circumstances of the procedure, it can sometimes be done. And even if it doesn't work, what a huge opportunity for grace and for reconciliation to make that sacrifice, bodily, to attempt to restore what has been damaged.

For couples who are older, it might look a little different. While there is no way to return to one's childbearing years and make different choices, there is a huge opportunity for older couples to minister to younger couples in the trenches who are considering making this decision for their own marriages.

It's a message that younger couples desperately need to hear, and there are far too few voices speaking this truth: your bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made, sex was created for marriage, and marriage is designed to be fruitful and life-giving. 

Don't separate your love! Don't try to undo what God has intentionally and lovingly written into your bodies. It is good that you are together, and it is good that you love each other enough to participate in bringing forth new life out of that love.

And God knows this world could use a little more love.

Click here for the rest of the series.

JPII, we still need you

A couple of decades ago the world was introduced to a new kind of pope when Cardinal Karol Wojtyla stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s, arms held high in greeting to a massive crowd who could not pronounce his name.

Cardinal who?

It was a tumultuous season in the life of the Church, and in the world. Communism held eastern Europe and Russia in a death grip. The West was in the throes of the fallout from the sexual revolution. War was everywhere. The family was under siege, both in the media and in the news. The Church was struggling to communicate the fullness and freshness of the Gospel to a world grown cold and indifferent to the message of Christ.

In short, it wasn’t a whole lot different from where we stand today.

Pope John Paul II was exactly the man for the job. Born into a loving Polish family, Karol would lose everyone who mattered most to him by his 21st birthday. With each subsequent heartache, each desolating loss, young Karol found himself drawn further and further into the mystery of the heart of the Father. Rather than running from God in his grief, he allowed his suffering to transform him, and his heart was enkindled with an unquenchable love for human love.

This man who lost mother, father, brother, and friend to all manner of hideous diseases and atrocities at the hands of the Nazis was transformed, by God’s grace, into one of the greatest lovers the world has ever known.

Maybe it’s strange to think of a celibate man as a great lover. Or maybe it’s just an unfamiliar application of the word. Our modern concept of sexual love is very narrow, and it’s very limiting. Sexuality has been reduced to mere animal lust, its scope and grandeur stunted by the pornographic times we live in.

But it’s true, JPII was a great lover. He was able to see into the depths of the human heart and, through his work with countless hundreds of young people and married couples, he had a unique perspective on human love. You might say he was an expert on matters of the human heart.

He saw the divinity in our humanity, and he stretched our minds to the breaking point trying to communicate it through his years-long series of Wednesday addresses, which we know today by another name: Theology of the Body.

George Weigel, the late pope’s official biographer, made a sort of prophesy about Theology of the Body more than 20 years ago, calling it:

“A theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences sometime in the third millennium of the Church… It has barely begun to shape the way the Church understands herself and thinks about herself, barely begun to shape the Church’s preaching and education, but when it does it will compel a dramatic development of thinking about virtually every major theme in the creed.”

A theological time bomb? Sounds like we could use one of those right about now.

Set to change the way the Church thinks about herself and virtually every major theme in the Creed?

Sounds kind of like a big deal.

Now, you could say that Weigel was overstating his case or that his prediction was mere conjecture, but you cannot deny the dire need for the Church to re-propose the Gospel and the meaning of life and love to a world such as ours, in a time such as this.

We are at war. We have always been at war in this fallen world, it is true. But today we are warring in a particular way for the very soul of human love.

Everything that we know to be true is open for debate: Marriage. The dignity of the human person. The meaning and purpose of sexuality. The fundamental right to life itself. Every bit of it is being reexamined and reconfigured by a world in crisis.

And we have all the answers. Literally at our fingertips. Because the internet. Because massive literacy levels across broad sections of society in many cultures. Never before has information been so easy to disseminate in all of human history.

And yet we sit idly by as our civilization self-destructs, one marriage and one family at a time.

Listen, fellow Christians…this is on us.

We were each of us hand-selected for a time such as this, and we’ve been entrusted with a powerful message from the Creator to the rest of creation in this Theology of the Body.

This stuff is visionary. It’s powerful. And it isn’t going to transform a single heart or convert a single soul so long as it remains untaught, unread, and inaccessible to the average person in the pew or on the street.

St. John Paul II, we need you. More today than when you were here with us on earth.

Pray that we may find the same kind of courage that faced down communism, defied tyrants and dictators, and saw in the face of every person an unrepeatable icon of Jesus Christ.

(cross posted at Catholic Exchange.)

A little porn never hurt anybody

I escaped from momdom for a couple hours this afternoon and found myself with a hour left on the baby-sitter-meter and nary an errand or appointment to occupy my remaining 60 minutes of freedom.

I have a deep seated weakness for the pedicure chair. Maybe it's because I went into labor for the first time while seated in one. Or maybe I just like polished toes. But whichever the case may be, I found myself cozied up with a stack of Good Housekeeping magazines and a truly hideous shade of mauve that I swore up and down to myself was stone-cold Autumn in a bottle, but looks fairly corpse-like on my feet. C'est la pedi.

As I flipped through my extremely age-appropriate choice of magazines and relaxed into the pummeling of a massage chair set to "drunken kidney punches" I came upon a strange interview with Jennifer Garner, aka Mrs. Ben Affleck.

She had the weirdest reaction to one of the interviewer's questions about pornography.

Just for reference, she has a new movie coming out about the internet, and her A-list husband reportedly flashed some serious skin in his latest blockbuster, so I was curious to see her answer.

It was ... odd.

Basically she started by saying that she was afraid for the day her daughters might find something scary online, and that she really needed to be mindful, as a parent, of what they were exposed to. Okay, so far, so good.

But then...then she said that pornography between two adults was probably fine, and that there was "probably a time and a place for porn" if two people are on the same page and mature. Or something. But still, not for her daughters. Not now, anyway.

I can understand a mother's heart wanting to protect her children from harm. What I can't understand is ever not wanting that.

The truth is, there's no such, this as "a little bit of porn between two consenting adults," because first of all, the camera man makes three. And even with selfie-style contemporary amateur porn, the inevitable internet makes three...million.

Part of what makes porn so destructive is the intrusive nature of making something so intensely private as sex, public, and not only public, but actually intended and designed to be consumed by an other, an outsider, an observer.

Porn degrades sex into a transactional exchange, into an open invitation to use a human person as a tool, to consume them as a product. 

Everyone involved, from the "actors" on the set to the producers behind the product to the consumer on the other side of the computer screen is participating in the use and abuse of a human person.

There's no such thing as just a little bit of porn. And there's no acceptable age at which it becomes "healthy" or "normal" to consume porn, or more accurately, to be consumed by it.

Because even if two consenting adults were to sit down with a completely digitally-acted movie and use it as a means to introduce a level of erotic excitement into their own sex life, it's still an utterly self-centered means to arousal. When you're watching porn with your partner, you're not experiencing any kind of intimacy with them as you both get excited by the person on the screen in front of you.

It might be titilating and it might lead to sex in real life, but at what cost? You just used another person's body (either actual or CGI, it really doesn't matter) to bring yourself to sexual arousal so that you can, essentially, dump your feelings (and then some) into an available receptacle in the form of your partner.

Self, self, self.

But that's not what sex was made for. Sex was designed to draw us to the other, to invite our small and selfish little hearts to open wide enough to let another person inside, and to pursue their happiness above our own, seeking to outdo one another in love.

That's part of why St. John Paul II was so (and scandalously so, for his time) insistent that mutual climax be the goal of sexual union between spouses, so that husband and wife were continually seeking the good of the other, constantly trying to outdo each other in love.

Porn seeks the opposite. It wants immediate self gratification.

Forget delayed gratification, porn says 'give me what I'm owed, and if you can't deliver it, I'll just click over to the next option.'

And even if it's used alone, in the privacy of one's own bedroom, with nary another flesh and blood participant to be found, it's still deeply damaging. To the person consuming it, to the person performing it, to the spouse or boyfriend or daughter on the other side of the closed door, perhaps unaware but not unharmed by the transaction taking place on your screen.

There's never a time or a place for it, and there's no relationship on the planet that's better off because of it.

The reason that a little porn never hurt anyone, is that there's no such thing as a little porn. It's a dark, insidious, addictive,  and destructive force that feeds on human love. And God knows we've got too little of that to go around these days, anyway.

Click here for the rest of the series.

Why does the Catholic Church care about what I do in my bedroom?

This is a valid question, and it's one that gets asked frequently, especially in our sexually schizophrenic culture. On the one hand, we're super freaked out by the idea of anybody, for any reason, asking anything about our sex lives...let alone having opinions or making judgements on what goes on behind closed doors.

Then again, reality tv. And pornography. And sexual deviance the likes of which the world has probably not seen since the days of ancient Rome.

So we're both consumed by the idea of sex as something private all while simultaneously flaunting our sexuality in an intensely public manner, making sure the whole world, starting with the stranger on the subway or the unsuspecting fellow parent on the playground, knows precisely how things are going in that department.

Then we've got this Church. This 2,000 year old, preposterously behind-the times, headed-up-by-a-celibate-male-hierarchy Church, trying to tell people who are having sex all the ways they shouldn't be having it.

What?

First off, the whole "celibate male hierarchy argument." Let's just put that one to rest, shall we?

Catholic priests are called to a life of celibacy and chastity in imitation of the life of Christ. They give up the great good of sexual expression within the context of a human marriage for the greater good of a spiritual union with Christ, and a fruitful life given in service to the larger Church. So sex is good, and priests surrender this very good thing as a gift to the rest of the Church. A life devoted entirely to Christ, to His Church, and to the proclamation of the gospel.

Some of my closest friends are priests. One of my girlfriends left her job, her friends and family, and her life this past summer to enter a religious order. Their lives are beautiful, fruitful, and deeply meaningful. And they're never, ever going to have sex! In the year 2014...can you even fathom it?

It's no small sacrifice, but it yields some beautiful fruit, and as Catholics, we believe that it offers a glimpse of eternal life as "in heaven people are neither married nor given in marriage." Not because marriage isn't incredibly good, but because marriage itself is just a preview of eternal life with God who is love.

So, just to recap, sex and marriage = good.

Good enough to have a few rules around it for its - and our - protection.

Catholics are expected to behave a certain way in the bedroom. Namely, to practice faithful, chaste, sacrificial love for our spouse within the exclusive and permanent commitment of marriage.

We're also expected to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to refrain from committing murder, along with a handful of other commandments.

In other words, there are rules for everything. Not because God hates us, or because sex is shameful, or because we're hysterically guilty about everything...but because we live in a fallen world that has been redeemed by a loving God.

All relationships have rules. Otherwise they're just hook ups. And God doesn't want to hook up with us. He wants to wed Himself to us for eternity.

So the next time someone questions you about the Church's stance on sex, be sure you're prepared to explain that actually, there's no other place on earth where human love is held in such high esteem.

Click here to read the rest of the series.

Hey Pope Francis, it's the 21st century, what's up with contraception?

One of the most difficult Catholic teachings to accept - for believers and non believers alike - is the Church's position on contraception.

I imagine (actually no, it's not imagined. I get these questions all the time) that people are confused primarily about the motives behind the teaching, all while simultaneously reeling in disbelief that anyone could - or would - live without birth control in the modern world.

First, let's start with a couple reasons why the Church doesn't forbid contraception.

It's not because:

- The Pope is attempting to raise a standing army of believers to vanquish the Islamic state

- Catholic women are being imprisoned by the productivity of their own uteruses and prevented by perpetual morning sickness from running for office or owning small businesses

- The Church doesn't want sex to be enjoyable

- Screw the environment, let's have a crusade

Whether or not you agree with the Church's teaching on this matter, know that it has NOTHING to do with the above reasons, promise. And you're not being particularly funny or original when you insist otherwise at a cocktail party or in the com box. 

Now how about some of the reasons why Catholics are forbidden from using contraception?

- Most forms of hormonal contraception are abortifacient (capable of causing abortion) in addition to being contraceptive

- The introduction of contraception into the marital relationship opens a pathway for mutual use of the other and makes truly selfless love really, really hard ... and unlikely.

- Contraception is fundamentally anti-woman and anti-child. It says, in effect, that the female body is broken/in need of suppressing/better off poisoned than functional, and that the child is disposable.

- It makes a woman "on" 24/7. And if you're available for sex 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you better be ready to perform ladies, or else he's gonna look elsewhere to have his "needs" met.

This last point is worth expanding on, because in the oft-maligned and eerily prescient bombshell encyclical, Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI warned about 3 very specific things which would result from the introduction of widespread contraception:

1. A decline in the moral standards of the young leading to greater marital infidelity in entire generations (more premarital sex, more promiscuity, more teen pregnancy, more divorce.)

2. A lowering of respect for women as men see them more and more as tools to to use to serve their own desires. (more spousal abuse, more domestic violence, rise in sex trafficking and sex slavery)

3. Contraception will become a tool in the hands of amoral or immoral states seeking to control populations and repress entire classes. (Aid dollars tied to contraception and sterilization campaigns, "benevolent" foreign governments seeking to sterilize poor, indigenous populations "for their own good,"Western-style contraceptive campaigns undermining traditional values in non-Western countries)

So basically, check, check, check.

Every single thing the Church warned about has happened. 

And every single time the culture tries to fix the above issues by calling for "better access to women's healthcare (aka suppressing or mutilating the female body), better access to condoms and birth control for poor, indigenous populations who just don't know any better and who there really should be fewer of, anyway (aka eugenics), and younger and more aggressive introductions to the Pill for adolescent girls, the problems get worse.

You can't fix all the things contraception has helped to bring about with more contraception. 

But there's good news, too. Really good news, I promise.

But you're going to have to come back later this week because I'm not even joking, a certain 2-year-old just projectile vomited all over the couch. Biological/spiritual warfare or hilarious irony? You be the judge. 

Click here to read the rest of the series.

I'm contracepting because I'm being responsible

So you're going to have a baby. Congratulations! Now let's sit down and discuss how much that's going to cost you, exactly. I think the going rate is like 300K from birth through college, but I don't really have time to google it. So be my guest. Anyway it's a crapload of money, so I hope you've got a great job, a banging 401K, and an unlimited slush fund for plastic surgery, because also, your midsection is headed down the road to ruin.

I've heard over and over again from plenty of people all the reasons why having more kids is stupid/too expensive/too dangerous/not possible in their situation.

I don't want to make light of suffering and real, incredible hardships. Are there couples who absolutely cannot find another penny to afford another morsel of bread or drop of milk to sustain the lives of their children and should therefore be conscientiously choosing to postpone or avoid the conception of additional offspring. Absolutely. All over the world. In our county too. There are couples who are suffering and whose families are under incredible strain, both financial and otherwise.

And to these couples the Church champions the ONLY sane, compassionate and 100% failsafe approach, and that is abstinence during times of fertility.

To act otherwise, to do the thing with your body that says "I am open to life, I am doing the thing which has the potential to create new life" and then to be shocked or saddened or horrified when life finds a way (as it often does, Dr. Grant) is madness.

Here's the bottom line here: when there is a circumstance that would make having another baby absolutely positively bat shit out of control crazy ... you should not have sex, which is how babies are made.

Now let's talk about the less serious issues driving the "we just can't have any (more)" narrative. I get it, kids are expensive. The economy is crazy. Life is uncertain.

But that's just it. Life is uncertain. You never know what the next year or hell, even the next day is going to bring. There's just no way to entirely leverage your risk and manage your exposure in this life. And that includes the realm of family planning.

Now, the Church does not encourage wild, unfettered pop-em-till-you-drop copulation at the expense of the mother's (or father's, or family's) health or sanity. That's a tired old stereotype that was probably born out of some poor pastoral care and some truth. But we have such beautiful, life giving and profoundly freeing teachings on sex and love and marriage literally at our fingertips. It's breathtaking.

(Go ahead and google "Humanae Vitae" right now. I'll wait. Okay, now leave it open in your window and promise you'll read it next. It's like 5 pages long.)

Meanwhile, we are trying so desperately and so futilely to control and to manage and to arrange every single aspect of our lives - it's as though God is not present at all, or at best is some doddering deadbeat of a deity who grumps at us from the Old Testament and shouts "thou shalt not's" at us from his celestial perch.

The Church's teaching on contraception is not a restriction. It is not a "thou shalt not." It is an invitation to freedom. To wild trust and abandonment. To another way of living, to a fuller way of living. It is, quite simply, utterly counter cultural and completely unreasonable.

But whose standard of reason are we applying?

The world's?

How's that working out for us?

I'm extending an invitation to you to take a second look. To open your mind to the possibility that it might not be completely stupid to take the the Bride of Christ, the Catholic Church, at her word when she invites her children to not do the thing which will harm them. Jesus asks hard things of us when we take up our crosses and follow him. Sometimes the hard things are shaped like babies. And sometimes they're shaped like seasons of abstinence and self denial. And sometimes they're shaped like little pink pill cases nestled into the bottom of the bathroom trash can, opening up a new chapter and a new season of possibility.

Never say never.

Read the rest of the series here.

Why do Catholics have so many kids?

"Wow, you've sure got your hands full."

No matter how many times I hear this and no matter how well intentioned the speaker, it always rubs me the wrong way. One time in the grocery store I did actually lift my hands from the cart, bearing two blonde heads, and hold them up in the air whilst the baby dangled from the Ergo across my midsection and loudly announced "NOT RIGHT NOW I DON'T!" which sent the kindly fifty-something woman sharing the bread aisle with me scooting backward, nervously, laughing out of confusion and fear.

But yes, I suppose my hands are full. I just feel like I'm in some kind of bizarre, narrative-driven ABC family drama when complete strangers announce it to me over and over again. Can you imagine yelling to a man walking his dog down the street "wow, you must pick up crap all day long!" or maybe suggesting to a person in a wheelchair "Man, I bet your arms are always tired!" Not that I'm comparing my children to dog poop or a mobility impairment, but come on people, let's try to be a little more creative.

Moving on.

Catholics do, in fact, tend to have larger than average families, though that number is sadly diminishing, at least among the cafeteria variety who don't actually practice what the Church preaches.

(This is emphatically NOT a jab at smaller Catholic families who are for whatever reason unable to have child(ren). This piece is a must read for facilitating better understanding between families of all sizes in the pews.)

And why do we have more children than the average family? Ding ding ding, I'll take patriarchal oppression and denied access to contraception for a thousand, Alex. 

Oh, wait, nope, that's actually not the reason. Want to know the real reason Catholics have more kids?

Come closer.

Closer.

Okay, are you ready for this?

It's because we like them.

Like we actually full on appreciate small humans and think the world would be a better place with more of them around. Isn't that bizarre?

And it's also because we practice realistic sex: sex as it actually exists in reality, in nature, in all it's messy and impressive and inscrutable design.

And in reality, sex is where babies come from, when everything is in proper working order.

Did you get that? Catholics have more babies because babies are sometimes the result of having sex. And since we believe that sex is good, true, beautiful, and perfectly designed by a God who loves us and wants us to be happy, we accept it on His terms, embracing the mystery and honestly, sometimes, the suffering inherent in our fertility.

Now, just a little PSA because I'm kind of embarassed by this as a fellow female of the species but did you know that you can't actually get pregnant save for a small (or large, in my case) window each month during a woman's cycle? Apparently like 90% of adult women have no real idea how their bodies work and that's just sad to me. And a little bit the opposite of empowered and independent and free choice-y. But I digress. We'll get there later this week.

Back to the babies. Oh, those babies. See, the reason we keep having them isn't, contrary to popular belief, because we haven't figured out what causes them, or because we don't have a television. The reason they keep showing up is because, frankly, they're kind of the best thing about being human, and having them is an incredible privilege and it's hard as hell and yes, self denial and self obliteration on a daily basis but ... it's so worth it.

And since we're not supposed to be using contraception, we actually have to discuss the possibility during seasons of fertility (i.e. months where you get a regular cycle) whether or not it would be prudent to have another child at this juncture. And then, if the mutually discerned and prayed for answer is: do it, then we do it.

Ba dum ching.

But seriously, do you know what kind of freedom that can bring into a marriage? And how selfless you have to be to ask these kinds of questions over and over again? And how incredibly incapable you know you are to handle yet another little responsibility with your last name, but then they get here and you can't imagine having said "no," and slowly your grinchy little heart begins to grow and you actually become a better, more productive, and - please God - holier member of the human race.

It's a wild ride.

But seriously, we're just in it for the sweet retirement party. And for the moment when we can whip out our iPhone 27s in the grocery store and torture innocent bystanders with holograms of our 8 children and 34 grandchildren because finally, our freaking hands are empty and we can work the keypad.

Click here for the rest of the series.