The Best Kind of Love

This morning, along with the tea, Matt sent a little something to roil me out of my complacent sleep, maybe as a sicko anniversary present. It looks like it’s a couple months old so probably everyone has already reacted, either in shock or in joy, although I expect more joy. Clever young lady–she doesn’t want to have any children, ever, because she’s crafted such a beautiful life for herself, and so she’s had her tubes tied, in her twenties, but best of all, she gets to write about it for Time Magazine, which makes it look shiny and happy and perfect.

You see, she starts out, “What I want is to be happy.”

And that, I think, is the spirit of the age, if I can go assigning spirits to things, like ages. This is the Age of Happiness. It’s been coming on along time, but it’s finally here, the Time to really be Happy. 2015. It’s the year when you can come right out and say what you want and do what you want and nobody can say anything about it. After all, we have the right to peruse happiness, in whatever form it takes.

And I will say, unreservedly, that if she wants to be happy, or anybody wants to be happy, the best thing in the world is not to have any children ever. This is a true statement and worthy of consideration. Happiness does not come in the bearing of children. It doesn’t. If you want to be happy, you should be by yourself, doing things you like, earning money, or taking it, or whatever. Burdening yourself with responsibility and connections to other people is not the road to happiness.

I think there is so much confusion about this, culturally. I think many many people decide to get married and have children because they think it will at the very least contribute to their already existing happiness, or create happiness where none existed. They go ahead and have the big wedding and then do the deed that leads to the baby (although I believe that that is no longer the accepted order) and all the time they have a great expectation, a great belief that the happiness will come. They make it through the first six weeks of the baby, believing in their hearts that nursing will make them happy. When it doesn’t, they quit, which is totally fine. Nursing a baby never made me happy. Keep the baby alive, I say, when at all possible. They struggle through the intensely boring first year, and then the second year. They prop their existentially unhappy selves up by focusing on the kid, keeping it alive, keeping it clean, trying to make it happy, the shadow of true knowledge that contributing to the happiness of another might bring happiness to the self. But because that knowledge is only a shadow it never comes into real time and space and after a few years they can see very plainly that all the toys and play dates and expense didn’t make the child happy, nor the spouse either. Where happiness is the end, it can never be gained, especially with children.

Here’s another telling line,

Two mothers have actually said to me, “I didn’t know what love was before having a baby. You should reconsider.” I’m happy they’re happy now but “not knowing love before kids” is one of the most acutely sad things I’ve ever heard.

These poor women, they think somehow that love has something to do with happiness. The loving of another person has been worth it to them. In fact, the difficulty and trauma of bringing a life into the world was so transformative for them that they looked back on all their previous loves and discovered them to be inadequate. Something about saying no to the self and yes to another, in this case yes to a helpless infant, brought the discovery that every other kind of love was pale in comparison. I bet these dilluded women, who have stumbled into this different kind of love, don’t always think about themselves and their own happiness. I bet sometimes they go through a whole day and don’t think about themselves at all.

I’ll skip the part where she has a momentary panic that she has made the wrong decision. Of course, of course the forty year old self never regrets anything decided by the twenty year old self. At twenty eight, or whatever, you have known all the true depths and measures of love and happiness and all your decisions should be completely irreversible. She closes her little piece with this,

I get the reasons people want kids. I do. I’m not such a heartless, selfish monster that I’m incapable of understanding the appeal of a small person who loves you unconditionally and relies on you to guide them safely through a scary world.

I want to say straight out that I don’t think anyone who chooses not to have children is a heartless, selfish monster. I do not. I think this woman is making a rational choice, and I’ve read lots of stats this week that indicate that more and more people her age are making this decision. These aren’t the monsters. The monster is Satan, for real. Satan and his spirit of this age, Happiness. Happiness is a great and terrible monster that is eating up one person after another. You can see his monstrous destruction all over these lines. Consider, she says that she’s capable of understanding the appeal of a small person who loves You and relies on You. There it is, still, the self at the center. And where the self is the center, there can never be true happiness.

There is this pesky little verse, towards the end of the bible. You have to make it all the way through the Old Testament, the gospels, and most of Paul before you come to it. It’s in a pastoral epistle, that is, a letter one pastor, Paul, was writing to a younger pastor, Timothy. To Timothy, Paul writes the most offensive words possible for this culture and this age. He writes

Yet she will be saved through childbearing-if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control. – 1 Timothy 2:15

I don’t want to go into who ‘they’ are, nor the context of what and who Paul is talking about. I want to suggest that God, in his loving providence and mercy, built into the created order, from the very beginning, a way for women to be saved, rescued really, from the narrowness of their own selves. This gift isn’t given to men. They must be saved out of themselves some other way, maybe in laying down their lives in battle or something. And of course, of course, we are all saved by Jesus, by crying out for his blood to cover us before the mountains fall. The thing about giving birth, giving the gift of life to another person, delivering into the world free and clear a person who is other than you, who is not meant to be controlled or manipulated or devoured by you, is that the gift causes you yourself to die. You have to say no to yourself. This is the measures of the cross. Take up your cross, says Jesus, die to yourself. And he gives a practical way for women to do it, without even having to think too hard about it. Ever wonder how older women can work so hard and think so little about themselves? Because they were saved, they were delivered of themselves as they delivered and sustained another. And could not these women be counted as happy? Although with a true measure of anxiety and sorrow. Because when your life is bound up with another, as you die so that they can live, you want them to live, you are really sorry and sad and troubled when they fall into difficulty. You can’t be said to be really happy all the time. But you are saved, out of yourself, which is the heart of the gospel. It should be easier for a woman who has given birth to look at the cross and understand what Jesus is doing and why he’s there and why he’s willing to turn away from happiness, to die, so that another might live.