Right now I am a recovering Windows person. Getting used to the Mac.
I know that it's supposed to be all like, “It's so easy, Mac is the best.” But I'm used to the other. Finder? What is a Finder. Things are bobbling on the task bar thingy down there. Things launch. I miss my desktop image. {Insert whiney whines here.}
Most of all, IPhoto? The worst, and that's been cramping my style over here with this blogging thing.
Figured out Picasa on my new Mac Mini though! Go me! (By not using IPhoto. It's hard to describe to you what my mental image of the operating system of a computer is, especially as it relates to programs, and as they in their turn relate to files. In some ways I use a computer very well. Super savvy.
In other ways, I'm conceptually challenged. And tend to slog along with things a mess. It comes of having started when the whole thing started, rather than coming into it when the kinks had been worked out. That is to say, not my fault.) (And thanks, Will, ever patient, ever kind; never, ever ready to throw his camo snuggie over my head to make the questions stop.)
(Speaking of Will, he's currently painting my room. Which is awesome. Except for the ongoing reminders of why I never want anything painted. Upheaval. Let's leave it at that.)
And all the appliances break at once. There is no reason for that, other than the universe being in Smite Mode.
Hot water heater, toaster, computer, and, tragically, microwave.
I'm diving back in to things by taking these past couple of weeks little by little in photos here.
Hopefully I'll be up to the Cali trip by Thursday for some extended {pretty, happy, funny, real}.
In the meantime, let's talk encyclical, because nothing says “cheer up” like a little theology.
Am I right?
Last time we got up to paragraph 9. I have made myself a little schedule. Mondays and Fridays I will try to post, and hopefully we will get through the whole thing by Holy Week.
Like this:
Today: Children
Friday: Fidelity
Monday: Sacrament
Friday: Errors, and that will take through the following week because Errors are, well, you know, bad.
And take time to talk about.
Then, Holy Week: Solutions, because we will need to be hopeful by then.
I reserve the right to stray into Easter Tide. You know me so well.
So let's talk about The Goods of Marriage. They are three. Children, Fidelity, and Sacrament.
The hardest of these — to talk about and to be understood — is Children.
And the reason it's hard is because we have fallen into a modern tendency to think in terms of Individual vs. The Rest of the World.
So, when we read, say, Paragraph 10 of this document, we get the wrong idea, maybe. We get a little panicky at the thought that marriage might be something else other than a big “me” project.
We have to step back, just for a moment, even if it makes us just a little anxious at first, from all our ideas about ourselves as individuals.
See that God made man and woman in His image, and that the Image of God is fruitfulness. Father, Son, Holy Spirit — the Persons love each other, are Love, and that love spills over into creation. This is how God made man to love.
Thus, when we form a family, by nature (and I use the word in all senses), its purpose is fruitfulness.
Fruitful is what it is. Children are the fruit.
Now, we see this in nature. Biology dictates that living things are, above all, oriented to reproduction. But man is different in that he doesn't procreate mindlessly, but with love, and in the context of the family. (11)
Children are necessary for there to be man on earth. Have we come to the point where we don't think this? Yes! We have! Crazy! Un-real.
We tend to think that all the inventions, institutions, efforts, and energy — all the neighborhoods, communities, towns, cities, countries — on this earth are for individuals, or sometimes we might think they are for “society,” which in turn for us is a collection of individuals. But actually, it's all for children — children in families.
It's all for the protection of children. It's all so that we have the peace we need to be able to tell our children what they need to know to grow up and have their own children.
Ultimately, this procreation has a divine purpose as well as a natural one. Life is more than what we find here on earth. We are really meant to give everything back to God, and to be with Him when we die. (12)
That's the covenant that He made with our first parents.
Things get a little tricky in Paragraph 13. I call this the “God has no grandchildren” doctrine of human generation.
You see, Original Sin is passed on by generation — it's in our DNA, so to speak. If you think about it just a little, you will see how this must be so. The fallenness has to be acquired somehow. If you think of it as a condition, the way C. S. Lewis did, it makes it easier to understand. This condition is passed on by the very fact of being born human. Our nature didn't change when Adam and Eve fell, but it became subject to living under a cloud. Any other way of contracting this condition would take away its universality, wouldn't it. We might start to think that somehow man might be perfectible, if only we could raise him up properly from the beginning. Some people do think this, in the face of all evidence, which is that there is something about being conceived human that brings the fallenness with it.
That is the idea of “generation” — the generative act itself — being the source of fallenness.
Later we will see that this necessarily entails the corollary that sex is the means of perpetuating Original Sin. Of course, since humans are generated through the sexual act — we don't reproduce by splitting or grafting! It's easy to then conclude that sex is sinful. Easy, but wrong. So it's best to get this whole thing straight now. The sexual act between the spouses is covenanted — it's good and holy. The means, however, of transmitting Original Sin is through that act. That is all.
The remedy to Original Sin is, of course, Baptism. And this is the spiritual regeneration which the family offers to the children, to bring them into the kingdom.
Because God has no grandchildren.
He has children.
Each child must become His child.
The best way — the way He ordained — is for each child to become His child by means of the loving education provided by its parents. Not by generation. By RE-generation.
So just as the earthly realm is being augmented by the fruit of generation, the spiritual one is being augmented by the fruit of regeneration.
This is what makes being a mother so joyful (14). To be the co-operator in this outpouring of creativity of the Godhead is an amazing privilege. It's she who lovingly teaches the husband to be a father by means of her motherhood, as Pope John Paul said. The whole enterprise of begetting and educating children is an awesome, two-fold adventure. (15-18)
This is it! In this adventure is the whole of earthly and heavenly experience contained! Fruitfulness, loving nurturing, careful tending. Mother, father, child.
If we don't understand this we won't understand anything about this document. Step back. See that the workings of the world, if they are to be just and good, turn on how we value the primary place of the child.
Kathryn says
Thanks for bringing this encyclical on marriage to my attention. I read it last night, and it puts what marriage is into perspective. I am a wanna-be Catholic married to a non-Christian. So this helps my marriage because it is truth.
Also, the definition you give here on what makes motherhood so great was defined in a way that I knew in my heart without ever having defined it, if that makes sense. It made me smile.