Tag: love

Love, Blame and Hope in the Movie MUD

PIC Mud poster

This movie wasn’t about what is wrong with women, or what is wrong with men. It was more about how difficult love is, and how little it helps when we lie to ourselves. It was a sorrowful movie, but not a depressing one; and it left lots of room for at least some of the characters to learn from their suffering and to forgive the people who failed them. Yes, the snakes that have been waiting will get you in the end. No, you will not die. But don’t let yourself get bitten again — unless it’s for someone you love. And around it goes, and the sun keeps shining off the open waters ahead.

Read the rest at the Register.

Men, try whispering these seven simple words into your woman’s ear, and watch her melt.

“I did that insurance paperwork for you.”

PIC woman swooning

Why I don’t say “I’m so blessed.”

The other day, a woman lashed out at me for announcing my latest pregnancy online. This particular woman’s stock in trade is lashing out; and since I’m pretty sure I don’t (as she accused me of doing) parade my perfect children around like perfect trophies to prove that I’m a perfect Catholic mom, I didn’t give her anger much thought. Just another angry person on the internet.

Later, out of curiosity, I read more of her comments. And then my heart broke.

It was a lot of what I expected: You Catholic moms think you’re so great! You think I’m bitter, but I’m not! Who cares what you do with your stupid perfect lives! You think you’re happy, but you’re not!

You think that just because I don’t have any kids, God doesn’t love me!

Oh.

It was as transparent as a child who howls and screams that he is not tired, not tired at all. Only no one was going to come to this woman, pick her up, soothe her, and put her to bed. No one was going to say, “It’s all right, sweet one. I hear what you’re saying. Let me help you and give you what you need, so you will feel better.” She thinks that God doesn’t love her, because He didn’t give her any children.

It’s not true.  God loves you. But I don’t know how, just like I don’t know how or why or how much He loves me. He makes rain fall on the wicked and the just, and woe to the just who think that they deserve the rain.

This is not easy. When we love somebody and want to show them our love, we give them things – do nice things for them – make them feel our love in the way we know best. If I spent four months hunting for the perfect present for my husband, and he acted like it just randomly fell out of the sky because he’s a lucky fellow, I would be annoyed. No! I would think. I gave you that on purpose, to prove that I love you! This is personal!

And it is personal when God gives us good things.  But it’s not proof of His love, exactly. It’s not that simple. Yes, everything that is good comes from God, and He deserves our thanks and praise for the things He give us. But the problem comes when we look at His gifts and draw conclusions about ourselves.

This is why I rarely say, “God has blessed us” when I mean, “We have good things” — whether it’s things like the sunny little house where we live, or a car that keeps running one more year, or a happy weekend, or a living, breathing baby (or ten). I say, instead, “We’re so lucky.”

I mean that the good things that come to us are only the hem of the mystery of God’s goodness. They are only a rumblings in the outskirts of the real workings of the economy of grace. It is a very good thing to be grateful and to praise God for the things we receive. It is a monstrously bad thing to conclude that we got them as a reward for good behavior. And all too often, at least in the 21st century of the United States, that is how we use the word “blessing.”

Witness the blaspheming Osteens telling us,

To experience [God’s] immeasurable favor, you must rid yourself of that small-minded thinking and start expecting God’s blessings, start anticipating promotion and supernatural increase. You must conceive it in your heart before you can receive it. In other words, you must make increase in your own thinking, then God will bring those things to pass.

Tit for heavenly tat, in other words. Well, Jesus wasn’t small minded. Jesus’ Father loved Him, and look at Him. Look at Him:

PIC Grunewald cruxifix

 

 

This is why I do not say that I am blessed, even though I know that this is the word that is technically, theologically sound. I think it means something different to modern ears. I am afraid that it says something so loathsome that I don’t want to risk it.

If my happiness is a sign that God has blessed me, what does that equation say to people who aren’t experiencing “promotion and supernatural increase”? To the people whose house is washed away, whose husband is shot down, whose womb is barren? It says what my reader said, without knowing she was saying it:

God does not love me.

So I don’t say that I am blessed. Instead, I say that I am lucky to have all that I have, because it is closer to something that I cannot express:  in my best hours, my witless bafflement in the face of God’s mercy to me and my family. I am lucky, not because my good fortune has no meaning or no purpose or no design, but because I do not know why it happens. It happens because God loves me in this way at this time, when I am just and when I am unjust. I do not know why.

Why do I have, and why does she not have? I don’t know. It is easy for me to see that God loves me, because I am simple: I see that He has given me many things, and to my childish soul, that spells love. When I pray for other people, I often ask that He will bless them in obvious ways, that He will make it as clear as possible that they are loved. I suppose this shows some arrogance, telling God how to do His job. But really it’s fear.  I am afraid to learn more about the other kind of love.

How I learned to stop worrying about wifely obedience and love my husband

s and d wedding

Ephesians 5:22!  Ephesians 5:22! Let’s all panic about Ephesians 5:22!

Nah. I’m not afraid of it anymore. But it’s not as big of a deal as I thought it was, either.

I’m not going to tell you what a Catholic marriage ought to look like. I’m just going to tell you what our marriage looks like, now that I’ve stopped trying to make it TheCatholic Marriage and started letting it be Our Catholic Marriage.

 

When I was first married, I was dying to leap feet first into the perfect Catholic relationship. So I took a deep breath and prepared to Ephesians 5:22 the heck out of my husband. He would tell me to do something, and I was going to obey him, by gum. (Like many couples, I yeah-yeahed my way past Ephesians 5:25-28, where the husband is supposed to treat his wife like Christ treats the Church, which is approximately ten krillion times harder than just obeying your husband.)

So I waited. And dammit, he never required me to obey him. Sure, he expected things of me — some reasonable, some unreasonable. We were just married, and we had a lot to figure out. But in general, the issue of obedience just didn’t come up. I was afraid this meant that we had a spiritually inferior marriage — that we were limping along with some kind of second rate modern system which would get us through the years, but which was keeping us from . . . something. I don’t even know what. Spiritual fruit of some kind, which I didn’t even know enough to recognize the lack of, because I hadn’t sufficiently molded myself into an obedient wife.

 

Where did this idea come from?  Wifely obedience is portrayed in many Catholic circles as the main feature of marriage — more important than prayer, more important that personal formation of any kind, more important than caring for children, more important than anything.  Just wifely obedience as a state of being.  Gotta submit, gotta obey, gotta be meek, gotta acknowledge your husband’s all-encompassing domination over the family with every breath, every word, every gesture, every thought, every decision. Without wifely obedience, we have chaos, we have the feminization of men, we have divorce and bitterness and unhappiness of every kind. When the wife isn’t panting to obey, marriage becomes a black hole into which, with a faint scream, the domestic Church as a whole is sucked, never to return until the Second Coming, when Jesus comes back for the main purpose of yelling at all those lippy dames.

But here’s the truth: If marriage is in a shambles, it’s not because of wifely disobedience. It’s because of a very old reason: selfishness. Sometimes it’s the woman who’s selfish, sometimes it’s the man. Sometimes it’s both of them.

When my husband and I got married, we were both young, and he would readily admit that he didn’t have any more life experience or wisdom or inside information about anything than I did. He’s better at some things; I’m better at others. There are some things we’re both bad at, and  need to hold each other accountable for. The “he decides, she complies” model? What for?  Our relationship had never been like that when we were dating, so why would it change when we started a family and things became complicated?

 

We fought a lot, and sometimes still do; but gradually, we started to realize that when we disagree about something, it’s usually because we aren’t listening to each other, or don’t believe yet that the other person understands something that we don’t. Usually, when we really start to listen (and sometimes we have to have the same fight over and over and over again before we can really hear each other), it actually becomes very obvious that one of us is right and the other one is wrong. And then it becomes easy to know what to do: you do the right thing. We’ve been through enough crap together to know that neither one of us is going to push hard for something that would be bad for the family. If he really, really wants something, I trust that he has a good reason; and vice versa.

In general, the person who bears the brunt of the decision at hand is the one who gets to make the call.  So if he wants to make a career move that I’m not crazy about, it’s ultimately his call, because he’s the one doing the job. If I want to make a major change in the kids’ education and he’s hesitant, it’s ultimately my call, because I’m the one who spends more time with the kids, and the I’m one who deals most with their daily schedules.

But here’s the thing: even if there’s something that affects one of us more than the other, there are zero decisions which only affect one of us. Even little stuff. That’s how it is when you’re one flesh, for better and for worse: nothing is just about you. What is the point of joining together if you behave as if one of you is more important than the other? That would be bad for both of you.  One spouse making autonomous decisions without considering the other person is like trying to set a course if you know your latitude, but not your longitude. You’re gonna get lost.

 

Here’s what everyone needs to understand about the grace of the sacrament of marriage. One of the main ways you receive it is . . . guess how . . . through your spouse. It’s not as if the husband can just go about his husbandly business being a good husband by standing in a shower of Husband Graces once a week. No, he learns how to be a good husband by drawing closer to his wife.

Many years ago, my husband was going through a really rough patch. He had tons of serious problems all at once, and he couldn’t sleep for the anxiety. He lay in the dark, begging God to help him out. And then he suddenly realized that I was there, in bed, next to him. And that was the answer. Not that I could solve his problems — I really couldn’t — but I was there to help him. That’s why I was there.

 

Authoritarian husbands often point to Mary and Joseph to illustrate “He decides, she complies” as the true Catholic model. But what do we actually know about St. Joseph? Mainly that (a) He utterly failed to stand on his rights and get rid of that seemingly disobedient, seemingly sinful, seemingly rebellious young chit of a girl who turned up pregnant without his say-so, and instead he (b) cared for his wife and child.

And what about that idea that a husband should love his wife as Christ loves the Church? What do we know about Christ? Mainly that He served and gave and served and gave, and then He died for her, and then He came back to life so that He could serve and give some more. That’s what we know.

In our marriage, obedience is an emergency tool. My husband uses it when I am being truly insane: when I’m delirious, or exhausted, or too overwhelmed with guilt and self doubt to think clearly. Then he asserts his authority and insists on . . . taking care of me.

I can also see obedience being useful if a man simply has the kind of personality where he needs to have his way; or if the wife has the kind of personality where she simply doesn’t want to deal with things. Obedience would help the marriage survive, in the same way that a tourniquet might prevent you from bleeding to death — but it’s hard to imagine that that kind of system isn’t fostering selfishness and childishness. It’s like what Fr. Longenecker said about gender roles, only more so:

Rigid gender roles are subjugated to the law of love. Loving our spouse and children in a free and generous way is what it’s really all about. Gender roles are not law; they are there to help us achieve complementary love.

There you go. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re fulfilling Ephesians 5. If your marriage is loving, then you’re doing it right.

How does it work in your marriage? Do you and your spouse — or you and your peers — have conflict over how the issue of obedience? Have you come to understand Ephesians 5 better over the years?

Life is too short for bad sex with a good husband.

This is the greatest letter I’ve gotten in a million years. It’s from MightyMighty atLetters To Us. I’ve bolded the best lines. She mentions Greg Popcak’s excellent bookHoly Sex, which I’ve been meaning to review for a long time; and also references theReal Catholic Love and Sex blog, which is full of good and honest discussions. Here’s the letter:

I don’t want to be a freaky fan girl, but would like to take a sec to tell you how awesome your book is. I read it during a loooooong period of abstinence after our 3rd was born. It was sort of funny the way it worked out. I was reading a book about how sex is good and not a joke on women & reading similar things on realCatholicloveandsex.com [now apparently defunct – leads to porn site!]. All while waiting for some clear signs of fertility to start showing up so that we could chart. By the time it happened at 11 months postpartum, I was actually enthusiastic about sex for the first time since before our first was born.

Normally my interest is completely tied to what’s going on with me physically, but thanks to your book, I’ve realized how that’s not being very loving–it lowers sex into something that is just about scratching an itch. If it’s really about love, it is worth making the effort to be together throughout whatever parts of the month are open to the couple. My husband has now read your book (he wanted to understand the huge change in attitude) and he is working on making some similar changes himself. We’re both pretty guilty of first asking, “Am I in the mood?” instead of asking what our spouse/marriage needs in this moment. I pointed out, “We don’t do that about other things that are good for us, like exercising or paying the bills or eating. Maybe we ought to stop acting like being together is as optional as watching Netflix together.”

I feel like reading Popcak’s “Holy Sex” helped me start shedding some of the prudery I had about sex being a little bit frivolous/selfish and your book helped me shed the rest of it + the poisoning lies the culture teaches about sex. (Men are animals, women are the gatekeepers, sex is mostly about getting pleasure, God sorta hates women for setting them up for either 20 pregnancies or no sex when their hormones are cooperating, etc.) At some point I thought, “Life is too short for bad sex with a good husband. I am going to get to middle and old age and really regret spending the healthiest years of my life this way, just like I already regret spending my teens and twenties dressing like a frump.”

My dad died at 61 last year and my mom just said last week, “I really regret not lavishing more affection on your father. He shouldn’t have had to coax me. I should have been more….[hand gesture indicating va-va-voom]! He deserved that!” I was shocked, but glad to see that it’s really never too late to get a healthier view on sex.

 

PIC dancing peasant couple

In another letter, she says:

 

It was very helpful to read your (semi-sarcastic) comments about developing some skill in bed. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has put minimal effort into any session that I was participating in out of duty/charity. I find that putting in the same effort as I do when I’m all gung-ho (when I’d honestly rather just read in bed) takes the session (is there a better word??) from kind-of-degrading-to-both-of-us-because-I-feel-used-and-he-feels-judged to just as good as when I was up for it. For whatever reason, I needed permission to stop acting like a prude and start trusting that my husband wouldn’t be scandalized by me being enthusiastic.

I now realize that acting like sex is dirty if it’s too enthusiastic gives power to the smutty culture that reduces sex to “consensual pleasure.” God made sex awesome and me participating in it fully is good, not dirty. What’s dirty is when two married people feel smug for having sex without having given each other their all, including the trust needed to let go, unconditional acceptance for each other’s everything, and the effort to really be generous with one another, not just their fertility. Good job! You ate a protein bar at a 5 star restaurant! You went to Italy and never left the hotel! Good job, you’re Catholic and you still managed to separate love from sex!

 

 So smart. Thanks, MightyMighty!

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.

Why give birth? Why love?

Wow.  Many, many thanks to Garard Nadal for posting this incredibly pro-life short film from Unilever:

I do not know what Unilever’s Project Sunlight is about, but man, the clip is lovely, and will do much good. A great companion, as a matter of fact, to this comic illustrating a quote from C.S. Lewis, who died fifty years ago today.  (Thanks to Jason Bach for sharing the comic on Facebook!)

Hope doesn’t mean you know nothing will go wrong.  As Lewis says:

The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

 

An unthinkable story of love

Devin Rose has written a harrowing account of their adoption story.  It begins,

Several years ago we adopted three children. We are no longer their parents. This is the story of what happened.

Everyone should read this.  Everyone.  It is so important.  It’s not only about adoption, it’s about making decisions in love.  God bless Devin and Katie and all of the children they love and care for.  I am so grateful to them for having the courage to express these dreadful truths so clearly.

 

Because my husband said I should . . .

Here is an excerpt from the chapter I’m contributing to a book about marriage:

Children give our bodies purpose.  I always have to laugh when people complain, “The Church treats women like baby-making machines!”  The truth is, the secular world is the one that treats women that way—and expends tremendous amounts of money and effort in trying to find the “off” button, often putting women through years of physical and psychological contortions with one kind of contraception after another.

The Church, on the other hand, teaches that the bodies of men and women are designed the way they are, reproductive systems and all, because they have a specific purpose in life.  What is that purpose?  Something huge:  to make love, literally — to create something, to bring new love into the world.  Sometimes this looks like physically bearing children (whether many or few); sometimes it looks like adopting; sometimes it looks like simply becoming aware that we are all here to love and to be loved.

When we can witness our own, familiar bodies actually doing this right before our very eyes – making something where there used to be nothing, bringing something new into the world – we are compelled to think about why we are here, and why God made us, and what it means to make love.

The book is by Our Sunday Visitor Press.  Will share more details when I get the green light!  It looks like it’s going to be a great project.

Catholic Digest: Pro-life Even at the End of Life

Oops, just realized I have a second article in the latest edition of Catholic Digest.  Do get your hands on this one if you can!  The strength and clarity of the people I interviewed is just astonishing. I wish I had had enough space to include all of what they had to say about making end-of-life decisions for the people they love.

I wrote about the experience of tackling this harrowing subject in a post called “Bright Wings.”  I’m just going to reprint it here (it ran first in the Register on Jan. 17, 2013), because it dovetails so nicely with Thursday’s Bigger on the Inside post.

****

I’m writing an article for Catholic Digest about end-of-life issues.  To be more precise, I’m finally writing this article.  I was putting it off because (a) I’m lazy, (b) it involved conducting interviews, and I get very nervous talking on the phone, (c) it seemed like a depressing topic, (d) I was petrified of getting some detail wrong, leading readers astray, and causing the needless deaths of countless helpless grandmas, and most of all because (e) I was scared.  Scared of finding out exactly what the Church actually teaches.

I knew the secular ideas of Church teaching were wrong.  I knew that the Church is not cruel or heartless, and I knew that her teachings are derived from hundreds of years of rigorous scholarship, and are guided by the Holy Spirit.  I knew that sometimes people suffer needlessly because people misunderstand Church teaching.

But I also knew, without even realizing I was thinking this way, that what God wanted from us was awful.  Or, in the older sense, awe-ful.  Scary, hard, intractable, too much to bear.  Without realizing I was thinking this way, I thought I’d have to massage the facts into something more palatable for the general public, so as not to scare people away from fidelity to the Church.

Yep, I thought God would need my help.

I did five interviews in three days, I read the catechism, I looked up the relevant documents, and I got some clarification from Rich Doerflinger.  I did my research with the same internal posture as I take on externally when I’m watching a horror movie that everybody says is really, really good and I shouldn’t miss:  I was tense, defensive, ready to cover my eyes as the hero slo-o-o-o-owly opens the door to see what’s inside the creepy old shack in the woods.

So, I opened the door. I found out what the Church really says about end-of-life issues — how to make the decisions, how to care for people, how to do your best to strike the balance between letting technology do its job and letting nature take its course.

Guess what the Church teaches?  God loves you.  He loves life.  He has life to share, and He shares the light of His eternal life by sending the Church as a support when we are weak.  He sends the Holy Spirit into the ICU and the NICU with the respirators and dialysis machines, into the womb that holds the anencephalic child, into the hospice room with the 80-pound man who no longer wants or needs to eat.

And because He is a God who loves, He is a God who grieves — not only for the sick and the dying, but for the living, who have to carry the burden of their decisions after sitting up night after night without sleeping, without a change of clothes, without knowing clearly if they are causing pain or bringing relief to the ones they love.  That every life is valuable, and that includes the lives of caregivers.  He enlightens the minds of nurses.  He strengthens the hearts of parents.  He brings clarity to grown children.  And He grieves.

What I learned is that the Church teaches, “God loves you, God loves you, God loves you.”  Always and forever, in the darkness of doubt, and in the light of the truth.  This is what is at the heart of all the teachings of the Church; this is what we will always see when we force ourselves to uncover our eyes and watch the story as it unfolds:

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.