Conforming

Our weekends lately have been packed with sports, social events, errands and projects.  Labor Day weekend we had multiple social events that required a lot of small talk.  It took me a week to recover. First, my husband's brother had a party for the first Notre Dame football game on Saturday. On Sunday we met up with some old neighbors who now live in central California but came to the coast for a weekend with some other friends. And Monday we went to a promotion ceremony for a friend who is in the medical community.  At each event we knew someone very well, and the rest of the people we knew not at all.

So we were introduced: "These are our friends with the seven kids!"

I know it's a good way to remember us.  I identify people by their children also: "That's the lady with twins.  That's Johnie's mom. That's the other lady with seven kids."  I don't mind being known as that lady.  But I'm not quite sure how to respond when people I barely know feel compelled to tell me their fertility stories.  Maybe it's how their husband didn't want more than two kids. Or that "they took care of that problem." Or they ask "Oh, are you religious?"  Maybe it's because we have a baby that people start to tell me about their husband's vasectomies.  In a way it's kind of fascinating: in the past few months, I've heard more personal stories from people I barely know than ever before.

I usually respond pretty vaguely to these stories, something along the lines of "Oh really?" or "Interesting."  I know people are curious about how other people live and why they make the decisions they make.  And some people's choices, because they are moral decisions and not value-free, challenge others: vegetarians, people who don't own cars even when they could afford them, priests and religious, and, presumably, people with large families.  So even though I don't ask people about their contraception or actively promote not using contraception, the fact that I have had a large number of conceptions means I have placed a value on conceiving life rather than preventing it.

I know family size is determined but a multitude of factors, and not everyone with a small family uses contraception and not every large family doesn't use contraception. We knew some people who had six kids who told us that their 6 different kinds of contraception that failed.  I try not to make assumptions about people who have one child or people who have ten. And to be honest, I don't mind being an object of curiosity.

But last weekend I started to get edgy when a guy we know very well began telling me I should read Dan Brown's latest book, Inferno.  He thought I might like it because Dante figures so largely in it.  I pretty sure, without reading the book, that Dan Brown misreads Dante.  But that wasn't what bothered me; it was the ensuing talk about how the bad guy is trying to kill millions with a virus, and how this might be a good thing because the world is overpopulated and how a natural disaster or plague might restore balance in the world because the Church keeps trying to prevent people from using contraceptives. Brown (and his fans) apparently loves to hate the Church.

It's a tired argument, as is this rant about feeling persecuted by people who don't get why we have a lot of kids. I didn't get into a debate with this person about how food production has outpaced growth, or how most of the developed world has a negative birth rate, or how the real problem is over-consumption rather than overpopulation.  I only rehearsed those arguments later in my head.  My sleep that night was interrupted by great comebacks.

The next morning (Sunday) I regretted that I didn't engage.  Had I passed over an opportunity to evangelize?  Should I have defended our choices?  At the time, I couldn't think of any thing to say.  I felt mostly dumbfounded that this friend either felt that we needed to be persuaded to stop populating the world or that we need to be persuaded to leave a Church that seems to believe the world should be overpopulated.

Maybe I should have questioned what "over" populated meant?  Perhaps my response should have been "Who gets to decide who reproduces? Who decides who should be eliminated?" Doesn't he see that those decisions should not be made by a human being about another human being?  It's always useful to compare your adversary to Hitler, but in this case the comparison is apt.  Even in the Brown novel, it is the VILLAIN who wants to eliminate people.  One of the novel's flaws (crushing secular review here)  is that Brown makes the villain's argument seem valid - Brown seems to suggest that only the villain's means are devilish.  (Catholic review here.)

My weakness is that sometimes I forget why we remain committed to NFP when we fail at so many other Christian virtues.  I have not felt called to defend NFP because I know my own will has been wanting. At one point in my life, my defenses would have been set into motion by these encounters with people who question our choices about family size.  But now I feel more humbled by them.

At Mass last Sunday morning, the readings seemed to be directed toward the state of my aggravated heart.

First the complaint against God in the First Reading from Jeremiah 20:7-9:

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;
you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.
All the day I am an object of laughter;
everyone mocks me.

Whenever I speak, I must cry out,
violence and outrage is my message;
the word of the LORD has brought me
derision and reproach all the day.

I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.

Yes, sometimes I feel the Lord has duped me.  I don't like being an object of laughter.  But that last stanza contains the crux - how can you live without the Lord?  God's name is like fire in the the heart- in other words, it is like Love, which can't be held in without being extinguished. Love by its nature must be poured out, overflow to others.  

The Second Reading from Paul to the Romans (1-2) seems to be the response to the first reading's lament:

I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God,
to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. 
Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.

Finally the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew:

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me. 
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world

and forfeit his life?"

I need that transformative renewal of my mind, to remind myself of why we live the way we do, especially when we are confronted with the comfortable lives of those who have chosen differently.  My body has been sacrificed, as have many dreams and ambitions, for a good cause, for love and life.  But sometimes I need to be reminded of that cause.

Several years ago, I felt our family needed to live more in the world, to be salt and light - partly because of our situation, partly out of a missionary desire.  So we have tried to cultivate friendships with people who live a more secular life.  We still kept up our friendships with our friends trying to walk the Christian path, but we also reached out to nonpracticing friends.  So somewhat intentionally and somewhat because of where we are living, we ended up socializing with a more secular crowd.

At the same time, we've had this seventh child, this sign of nonconforming.  But I often miss the shelter of being around others who understand, who "get" us, to whom we are not a circus show.  And I am tempted by thoughts of conforming.  Sometimes I want to lay down the cross and be free and easy for a while.

Temporarily.  That last line, "What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?", is the clincher.  Sometimes I need to be reminded of that future when we will be confronted by Love. In my quest to be a witness, I sometimes neglect to nurture the Relationship that should be coloring every interaction.  Were I to feed my soul more faithfully the questions of curious onlookers would not be persecutions, but opportunities.

The truth is that for every person who seems to think we are crazy for having a large family, there is a person who comes up to us and admires the baby. Several people have told me how much they love seeing our big kids hold the baby.  People are always happy to see a baby and to see that baby being loved by its siblings.  The kids squabble and disagree like all siblings, but they also enjoy having a ready made crowd.  Strangers have come up to tell me not just their sterilization stories but their stories about their connections to big families - their own or their grandma's or their cousin's.

Maybe that is the best form of evangelizing: witnessing the love of a family, the love that creates a family, that is a foretaste of that Perfect Love.