Just some things I was pondering today.
I may be banned from JCecil’s blog from commenting, but doesn’t mean I can’t read. Anyway, he apparently received the question along the lines of, “can I practically disagree with everything the church teaches and still be Catholic?” His response was:
In my response to my reader, I stated that one could murder a person in cold blood, rape the murder victim’s children, torture the murder victims’ parents, deny Jesus ever lived and swear your undying allegiance to Satan. It doesn’t matter. If you were baptized, you are a Catholic in the eyes of God, himself, and in the eyes of the Pope.
It reminded me of something I taught my kids from the kindergarten edtion of the Image of God series
But my favorite part of the lesson is going outside and bringing in a bucket full of dirt! The dirt represents our sin. As we go through our day to day a little dirt falls on the mirror here, and a bit there, and pretty soon the children can’t see their image in the mirror. So it is with our little sins in that eventually we fail to be good images of God! That’s when we need to go to confession to wipe the sin away just like we can clean off the mirror. But if we don’t make a good confession, or if we find ways to rationalize and even like our sin, that dirt keeps piling up on top of the mirror, higher and higher. Eventually there doesn’t appear to be a mirror there at all, just a pile of dirt.
In the eyes of God there most certainly a beautiful mirror underneath that pile somewhere. Whether or not it is or will ever reflect a beautiful image of God again is another matter.
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On Saturday, I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel called Men Having Babies. It was about a gay couple that had hired a women (who was also part of a lesbian couple) to have their baby for them. The men both donated sperm and had a donor egg which was fertilized and implanted in this lady. Her name was Jennifer.
Aside from the unusual circumstances of this pregnancy, Jennifer seemed like a very sweet caring and loving pregnant woman who was starting to have the usual anxiety about labor and delivery. She mentioned to the two men that at one point in the labor, she wasn’t quite sure when, she might need to have some space and she might need for them to leave. One of the men told her “Well it says in our contract that we can stay.”
I felt great sympathy for Jennifer when she told this story. You could see a bit of hurt in her eyes. I certainly know what it’s like in labor and there are times you just need to be alone to regroup, to pray, to gather strength, and to get your mind in order. A husband, although he probably will never know or understand what his wife is feeling and thinking, wants what is best for his wife. He loves her. It is his child and he loves the child. During labor and delivery he is their to love and protect his little family and doing whatever it takes during birth to help.
As Jennifer told the story it was clear that to these men, Jennifer wasn’t a wife. She wasn’t even considered the mother of this baby. In some ways her humanness wasn’t even a consideration. She was a vessel, a means to an end, a way for a baby to be born. There was no love or protection for her and her thoughts and feelings on how her body and mind were to work during labor took a back burner to the contractual agreement they had all signed.
Could there be a clearer example of why the church has taught us not to separate the physical, spiritual and loving aspects of reproduction from each other?
I did Google these couples after the show. Apparently the no longer have any contact with each other at all.
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