For Better FOREVER, Revised and Expanded. Lisa Popcak
The Celebration Continues
A Life-Giving Love
In the last chapter, you discovered that as married couples commit to living out the free, total, faithful, and fruitful love that comes from God’s own heart, he gives them two special blessings to celebrate throughout their lives; an incredible Christian union and a life-giving love. So far, we’ve looked at the ways marital grace empowers you to experience an uncommon degree of unity between you and your mate by winning the Battle of the Sexes and creating shared meaning by growing together in your Christian identities.
Don’t Stop the Party
But, as evidenced by our abundance of feast days, Catholics love a party. So naturally, there is still a second celebration to which all Catholic couples are invited: the celebration of a life-giving love. These two goals of marriage — unity and procreativity — are really inseparable from each other and feed into one another. A true, unifying love must also be a life-giving love (and vice versa), not just metaphorically, but literally, in the procreative sense. Children represent the miraculous unity between a husband and wife like nothing else.
In his Letter to Families, St. John Paul the Great told us:
Rather than closing [spouses] up in themselves, [a couple’s unity] opens them towards new life, towards a new person. As parents, they will be capable of giving life to a being like themselves, not only bone of their bones and flesh of their flesh … but an image and likeness of God — a person. (n. 8)
Of course, Jesus himself said that anyone who welcomes a little child welcomes him (Mt 18:5). Spouses who truly love each other and love our Lord will welcome the children he wants to give them.
This is a timely message. Challenging the low birth rates that are causing social problems throughout Europe, Pope Francis asserted, “In a world often marked by egoism, a large family is a school of solidarity and of mission that’s of benefit to the entire society” (comments to the National Association of Large Families, 2014).
Over the years, certain people have taken a lot of swings at what they think is “the Church’s position” on sex and procreation. Unfortunately, these people are often too blinded by their own ignorance to see that what they are swinging at isn’t the Church’s teaching at all, but rather a Monty Pythonized (cf. The Meaning of Life), pop-culture bastardization of Church teaching. Later on, we’ll look at how you can experience a truly joyful, intimate, soulful sexual life with your spouse. For now, we want to simply explore a few brief points about how welcoming children as a gift from the Lord can help you celebrate the fullness of your marriage.
Celebrating the Joy of Creative Love
“Because God is a lover, he is also a creator” (Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine). God is love, so part of his very nature is to create new things to be loved. This is why God seems to be endlessly fascinated with creating new things. It gives him more to love.
God especially loves to create people. As the Church tells us in the Vatican Council II document Gaudium et Spes, the human being is “the only creature on earth which God willed for itself.” Why? Because we are the only creatures he gets to spend an eternity loving. We are the only earthly beings built to last — so to speak. One can only guess that for God it is a joy beyond words to create creatures whom he can love eternally. This same God, who generously longs to share all of his joy with us, gives husbands and wives a taste of the particular joy that encompasses creating and loving the creation by inviting us to bring his children into the world.
Pope Francis noted that “each child is a great miracle … that changes life” (2014)! When a couple conceives a child, they are making a statement. They are saying, “This child is a living witness to the intimacy and love we share.” There is no more real way for two to become one than in the act of creating a child together.
This isn’t just a theological point. In her book The Good Marriage, secular relationship researcher Judith Wallerstein argued that when married couples close their hearts to children, their relationships take on the form of a “romantic anti-marriage” that becomes cold and isolating with time.
Rather than being antithetical to joy and intimacy, being open to life makes lovemaking a powerful, spiritual, earth-shattering, even redemptive, event. All of the books in the popular press about “spiritual sex” and “tantric lovemaking” have nothing on the sheer joy, vulnerability, spirituality, and total self-gift that accompany knowing that “tonight we are making a baby.” Likewise, there are many books that proclaim the virtues of “simultaneous orgasm” — and, to be honest, they speak a truth. But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to the profound joy that occurs when a husband, a wife, and God climax together — and a life is created. How sad it is that our sexuality has been so perverted by the pagans and misrepresented by the media that such a statement might actually be shocking to many of you reading this book. But the fact remains: sex is a good that God gave to the godly. The pagans stole it from us when we weren’t looking, and it’s time we take it back (see more in Chapter 11). Through the procreative work of marriage, God gives us the grace to do just that. To paraphrase theologian Scott Hahn, God empowers us to experience a love so profound that in nine months it has to be given its own name.
Celebrating Partnership Through Creative Love
But what about those times when a couple isn’t ready to have another child?
Even when a couple has valid reasons for delaying or postponing pregnancy, appreciating the value of “openness to life” can help the couple celebrate a more intimate sexual partnership. In fact, a great help to couples wishing to celebrate this unique sexual partnership is the practice of Natural Family Planning, or NFP.
NFP and artificial contraception (the pill, condoms, etc.) exemplify two radically different mind-sets about sexuality. Contraception is isolating. It prevents a husband and wife from giving themselves totally to each other, and it is almost always one spouse’s responsibility (usually the woman’s). Contraception promotes a fear-based approach to sexuality by treating pregnancy as a disease that should be prevented — an optional by-product of pleasure. Various forms of artificial contraception (the pill, for instance) often have harmful side effects (NIH, 2015); increase women’s risk of breast, cervical, and ovarian cancer as well as a 200 percent increased risk of brain tumors (NCI, 2012; Andersen, Fiis, and Hallas, 2014); they poison the environment (Parry, 2012); they are prone to failure (up to 30 percent for condoms — CDC, 2013); they make sex habitual rather than special; and they can present physical barriers to intimacy.
By contrast, NFP promotes the union of the couple by making family planning a shared responsibility of a husband and wife. As the Church’s Letter to Families puts it, NFP makes it so that “Both [spouses] are responsible for their potential and later actual fatherhood and motherhood. The husband cannot fail to acknowledge and accept the result of a decision that has also been his own. He cannot hide behind such expressions as: ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I didn’t want it,’ or ‘You’re the one who wanted it.’ ”
NFP facilitates ongoing, prayerful communication between husbands and wives about their fertility. Studies show that NFP is as effective as hormonal contraception — over 99 percent (Hermann, Heil, and Gnoth, 2007) — and it is becoming both more practical and effective than ever because of simple-to-use electronic fertility monitors and NFP-related apps powered by sophisticated and highly accurate computer algorithms.
Interestingly enough, while many Catholics believe the Church is behind the times, the secular world is beginning to wake up to how cutting edge the Church’s views really are. More and more, secular physicians are promoting Fertility Awareness Methods of family planning — which is really just NFP without the spiritual dimension (Kunang, 2015). Secular feminists are promoting the method. As one woman put it in in an article on FAM on the popular wellness site Well+Good, “How can we consider ourselves to be the feminists we are if we don’t know the cycles of our body?” (Gallagher, 2015). Additionally, many women are beginning