Author: simchajfisher

And that’s exactly why I wrote my book.

Okay, so I’ve been trying not to grouse publicly about it every time someone says boo to me. This is not that!

I came across a review that thought the first two third of my book (“NFP and your spiritual life” and “NFP and the rest of the world”) were good, but he really didn’t like the third part (“NFP in the trenches”).  He’s an NFP teacher, and thinks that maybe we need to talk about intimate things, but only in an intimate setting:  literally, person to person. His review got a comment:

I, too, have taught & used NFP for a long, long time and see or been told all sorts of things. In short, this is difficult ground to cover and perhaps this book has sold out too much to the sexual comfort levels of our current culture.

And I says to myself, I says, Well, that’s exactly why I wrote my book.  This person teaches NFP, and she thinks that sex should be uncomfortable. For way too many people, that is the message they’re getting about sexuality and their faith: don’t get comfortable! Don’t be honest. And God forbid you should be a product of “our current culture.”

But what if you are a product of our current culture? What are you supposed to do? When people are already wounded, it’s not very helpful to say, “What a shame there are wounds.” We need someone to lift the bandage.

Listen, I know this book is not for everybody. I may have a monstrous ego, but I never imagined I was writing The Definitive Compendium of Ideas that are Perfectly Suited for All Conceivable Audiences.  I know there are plenty of people who don’t want or don’t need to get really specific or frank about sexual matters. The cover was supposed to serve as a warning: Attention, squeamish people! Nakedness inside! If the cover freaks you out, you should probably pass on what’s inside.

But there are an awful lot of people who are hearing nothing but, “Sex is beautiful. Sex is meaningful. Sex is profound” and they want to believe it and they want to live it, but they are having a hard time figuring out how it applies to their actual specific naked bodies.  Many people read about covenants and veils and sacredness, and end up thinking either (a) this doesn’t apply to me. There must be something wrong with me or (b) this doesn’t apply to me. There must be something wrong with the Church.

So, that third section of my book, where I get pretty specific? It’s not supposed to answer all your questions about sex. It’s to help you and your spouse ask and answer those questions together — and to let you know that it’s okay to talk about these things. Yeah, I can live with that kind of “selling out.”

*****

(DISCLAIMER: I didn’t link to the review, because I’m not trying to heap shame on anyone’s head, or encourage any kind of comment duel. I love getting reviews, good or bad, and I don’t want anyone to feel like they can’t criticize me! I just thought the remarks I quoted were especially telling, and highlighted something important.)

RIP Jeremiah Denton

PIC Jeremiah Denton

Denton was the American POW who famously spelled out “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code with his eyelids when he was forced to be part of a Vietnamese propaganda film. According to the New York Times:

Commander Denton was held in various prison camps, including the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” and endured beatings, starvation, torture and more than four years of solitary confinement, including periodic detentions in coffinlike boxes. He and other officers nevertheless maintained a chain of command and a measure of discipline among the prisoners.

“I put out the policy that they were not to succumb to threats, but must stand up and say no,” he told The New York Times in 1973. “Figuratively speaking, we now began to lie on the railroad tracks hoping that the sheer bulk of our bodies would slow down the train. We forced them to be brutal to us.”

The commander was often punished for urging others to resist. He also devised ways for prisoners to communicate by signs or numbers, tapping on a wall or coughing signals in a sequence.

I don’t know much about his post-war career as a senator; but I read his war memoirWhen Hell Was In Session as a teenager, and was struck by how compassionate he was toward the soldiers who did break under torture.  A very strong man, but not merciless.  Jeremiah Denton was a Catholic with seven children. Eternal rest grant unto him, o Lord.

Springtime in New Hampshire

We’ve been stuck inside for a long, long time, and tempers can flare

and maybe we don’t feel as sorry as we should

but then Mama calls us in for supper

and we run right in

or at least we try.   (Yes, I actually had to get her unstuck. That mud is not fooling around!)

P.S. No sisters were harmed in the making of this photodrama.  But they did get muddy.  Really, rea

Love and betrayal and love again

I don’t have the mental energy to rehash everything that’s been said by me, Emma Smith, Leticia Adams, Calah Alexander, or anyone else in the debate over how to talk about fidelity in marriage.  If you missed it, you can probably count yourselves lucky!  It was a doozy.

But for anyone still standing, here’s what I keep thinking of: a passagefrom The Screwtape Letters. The “patient” — the soul the devil is trying to win — has converted, then failed, then returned again to God in true humility. Screwtape, the master tempter, says to his apprentice:

The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of “grace” for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation! This is very bad.

The first conversion, when everything was new and thrilling, was absolutely necessary.But it’s not sufficient. Here’s what Kate Kelmelis had to say on my Facebook page:

I’ve been following this exchange and when I think of the original article (and the other newlyweds who piped up in agreement) what came to mind was Peter. “Even though others may leave you, Lord, I WOULD NEVER”. And in response to Jesus telling him he would deny him not once but three times that very night, more confidence from Peter “I would follow you even to death!” We all feel that way when first in love. It’s not strange or unusual that young couples “know” that they could each “never” betray one another. Catholics and non Catholics alike feel this way. And like Peter there’s nothing bad about it really, except that they haven’t been tested. Until you’ve been put to the test you just don’t know what you will or won’t do. You don’t know who you are (or will become). Not to say adultery is an inevitably. Just that I’m really wary of ever thinking there are sins that “good Catholics” just don’t commit. Good Catholics are as vulnerable to temptation as anyone else. I don’t see why some people would get so offended by that fact. Is our love for our spouse more pure than Peter’s was for Christ? Seems doubtful.

Yes indeed.  And it was only after Peter realized that he was capable of betraying Christ that he became the head of the Church on earth.  It was only after he sinned and was forgiven that he had the strength and courage to die for the one he loved.

And I have something else to say.

Many people are complaining that it’s dangerous or scandalous for engaged people or newlyweds to hear married people speaking about infidelity or betrayal of various kinds.  This may be true; but it’s also true that we’re not always talking to engaged people or newlyweds. Not everything that’s said in public has to be specially tailored for every conceivable audience.   It’s okay for people to discuss things that don’t apply to you or aren’t aimed at you.  If you are reading something that is upsetting or scandalizing you, stop reading. It’s really that simple.

If I were thrilled to be pregnant with my first child, I wouldn’t spend hours and hours reading about the reparative therapy that babies go through when they have serious birth defects. It would FREAK ME OUT, and rob me of the joy of my pregnancy. But it would be insane for me, as a pregnant women, to say, “I know that my baby will never go through that, because I take my vitamins and eat kale and get plenty of sleep.” And it would be downright offensive to tell mothers of those other babies, “You can’t say these things in public. It’s sad, and might scare other women away from wanting to have children.”

You know what’s scandalous? It’s scandalous to tell suffering people, “Don’t you speak.” It’s scandalous to tell them that their sorrows are making other people sad.  Good heavens. There are worse things than being sad. One of them is being happy and telling other people that, if only they were stronger, they’d be happy too.

At the Register: Mary as Hero

She unmade the darkness.

Mary said “Fanks”

PIC annunciation

From John Herreid, here’s a painting I’ve never seen before:

 

The Annunciation by Master of the Retable of the Reyes Católicos (15th century)

Here is a detail, showing the Word of God proceeding from the mouth of the Father:

Cross already in hands. Oh, Mary.

And a short interview with my daughter, who is almost 5. I am not sure why the conversation started with a discussion of her rabbit Daffodil’s  eating habits; and YES I fluffed at least two opportunities to clear up theological misunderstandings. But around 2:53, she says something that never occurred to me before, but I bet she’s right:

After the angel told her she would have a child, and He would be Son of the Most High, she said . . . “Thank you.”

Converts are the best!

I love converts. Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been Catholic, you will learn something by witnessing someone discover the beautiful truths of our faith.  Check out this blog I recently discovered, Mackerel Snapper, by Matthew Tyson, who is a young husband and father, a convert with a conservative fundamentalist background, and a man on fire to share what he now knows about the Catholic Church.

My OSV interview with Bonnie Engstrom: ‘Miracle’ baby helps Fulton Sheen cause

From “Who is that guy? He looks like a vampire!” to “Fulton Sheen brought my dead son back to life.”  Here is my interview with the delightful Bonnie Engstrom of A Knotted Life.

‘Miracle’ baby helps Fulton Sheen cause

At the Register: Desperately Seeking Spring

Not gonna write about frozen garbage today, just little green shoots in a cold world.

God is faithful, but we’re not marrying God.

PIC split tree bound back together

Every day, I bless a merciful God that there was no internet to speak of when I was younger. This means there are no insanely humiliating photos of me in a crop top and acid wash harem pants. It also means that I never published an article like this one in Catholic Exchange:  Marriage Is Work.

In this piece, which I absolutely would have written as a newlywed, the earnest, not-yet-married Emma Smith hears her secular coworkers lamenting the way their ex-husbands had cheated on them

“There’s so much of that out there!” my boss exclaimed. “I know one of my girlfriends who is cheating on her husband and I know a couple of other people where both of them are cheating. I guess you’re lucky if it doesn’t happen to you.”

Smith goes on to explain to the reader that she knows that her soon-to-be husband will never cheat on her.  She knows this.  She knows for a fact that it simply will not happen.

Marriage isn’t a drawing of the straws, where if your spouse cheats on you, well, “sorry, you just drew the short straw. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent it!” It’s not an institution where if you are a strong, happy, and healthy couple you’re just “the lucky ones.”

And she knows, she says, that people will think she’s just young and naive for knowing that her husband will always be faithful.

And yet, I can say that. I can say that because I have a faith and a God who stand behind me in that statement. And I can say that because the love my fiancé and I share is not human, it is divine. We love each other because we love God and we have discovered that in loving one another, we get to love God more fully. Moreover, the love that we have for one another is divine in origin. God gave it to us at our baptism and it had a full 15-20ish years to grow and mature so that when we met, it blossomed.

Well, let’s start with all the ways that Smith is right.  She says that “marriage is something you work on … marriage is a calling.”  And she is right.  She says:

Our faith allows us to make these promises [of faithfulness] because He who gave us love was faithful in His love until the end. … We as Catholics are granted the same strength of faithfulness to the end when we return our love to the one who is love. When we participate in making our love a sacrament, when we make a way for God’s grace to enter the world every day, when we demonstrate outwardly our inner devotion, we can say with full knowledge and confidence that we are not in a game of luck.

Yes indeed. A strong marriage doesn’t just spring into being on its own. If we translate our love of God into love for our spouses, and when we let our love for our spouses nourish our love for God, then we will be fulfilling our vocation.

But that’s it:  we’ll be fulfilling our vocation, period. That is all we can depend on: that God will be faithful to us.  Beyond that, things can get very messy.  When Catholics fulfill their vocation of marriage, it can turn out looking like an awful lot of things, and that includes ugly, painful things that may or may not ever get resolved in this lifetime.

Because here’s the deal: you aren’t marrying God. You’re marrying another human being. Your spouse is marrying you, and you are a human being.

And what do we know about human beings? They sin. They sin, and they sin, and they sin. Sometimes they enter into a valid marriage and then they cheat. Sometimes they understand fully what they are supposed to do, and they just don’t feel like doing it. Sometimes calamity strikes, and they crumple under the blow.  Sometimes they let their own sorrows and weaknesses and selfishness overcome the love that is offered to them. Sometimes — no, my friends, always — they are a tangled ball of good intentions and bad habits, unhealed wounds and unfounded desires.

Many, many times, the grace of the sacrament helps us to avoid serious sin. Sometimes, though, the grace of the sacrament helps us to forgive each other when we sin. Sometimes it helps us to survive when our spouses refuse to repent.

So the confident if untried Emma Smith is right in sighing over the fatalistic modern view of marriage — right in condemning the idea that some people just get lucky, and there’s no way of improving your odds. But she is disastrously, innocently, offensively wrong when she thinks that we can somehow guarantee that things will turn out well, just because we intend to work hard.

Ever heard of Hosea’s wife? Ever heard of Israel? Ever heard of the entire human race? God knows that this is what happens when you enter into a marriage with another human being: one way or another, sooner or later, your love will be rewarded with pain. And I know this because I love my husband — my faithful, loving husband — and I’ve hurt him.
I pray to God, and I hurt my husband.
I understand marriage, I believe in marriage, I have spent years upon years working on my marriage, and I hurt my husband. And He forgives me, just as I forgive him.

I am glad that Smith understands so well that the grace of marriage is something that must be actively pursued, consciously acted upon. And I hope that her confidence in her husband is rewarded with unbroken faithfulness and love, and that she will not be shattered when she discovers that he does have flaws. I hope that people read her piece and realize that it makes sense to look hard for a spouse who is trustworthy.

But I hope to God she is never involved in any kind of marriage ministry — not with the childish understanding of marriage that she has now. What will she say to the woman whose husband is cheating? Or to the man whose wife won’t stay sober, or won’t stop gambling, or won’t stop browbeating him in public? What will she say to the spouses who do work hard, and have found themselves sinned against? Maybe “Let’s put our heads together and figure out how you could have worked harder to prevent this. Good marriages aren’t just a matter of luck, you know.”

And what will she say to herself when she finds herself sinning against her husband? Maybe she will not cheat, but oh, she will hurt him. She will.  This isn’t a warning about your husband-to-be, dear confident, untried brides. It’s a warning about you.