One of the families in the homeschool group I grew up in was a picture of modesty and discipline, outwardly; all the girls wore long skirts, and the mother was constantly in kaftan-length denim dresses. She was so delicate, she didn’t even let her children say the word “bra.” The boys were altar servers at the fine traditional church with the organ music. My sister was the same age as the two eldest daughters. She visited them occasionally, but she didn’t like to go to their house. The father was always complaining that women couldn’t do anything, that women were worthless and stupid. And then one day, she told me that her friends’ teenage brother had come into his sisters’ room, and offered them money if they’d undress for him.
That’s an extreme example, but there were others. There was the family with four homeschooled children– four was the small end of respectable by our group’s standards– who actually didn’t homeschool them; the father worked a night shift and the mother worked a day shift, so at any time one parent was asleep and the other was at work, leaving the children with no supervision to feed, mind and educate themselves out of the home study packet’s teacher guide. There was more than one case of a mother crippled by mental and physical illness who wouldn’t get sufficient help but just kept getting pregnant instead. It got so bad at one point that she was throwing high heeled shoes at her teenage son. He got a bad concussion but ran away to a friend’s house instead of going to the emergency room.
A family with many children is a blessing from the Lord, and it can be an outward sign that the parents are generous people with a proper reverence for life. But just like every other good thing in this life, it can easily become an idol. If we value a large number of children too much or in the wrong way, this becomes a stumbling block to holiness. You might end up treating someone as a spiritual authority, when that person should not be in authority at all. You might end up condoning child abuse, because you’ve decided that parents of large families are too holy to be abusive so it must be your imagination. You might commit the sin of pride and look down on someone who is conforming to God’s will by having only a few children. You might break the bruised reed and drive a struggling mother away from the Church. You might even ignore the actual vocation God has planned for you, because you spend too much time obsessing over why He didn’t give you the particular grace of a large brood of children. There are many other graces, and many other vocations just as precious.
The Holiest Family that ever lived, after all, had only one Child. Blessed are they among all families. We are all to conform to the Holy Family, but each will conform in a different way.
Blessed is the one who follows the Lord’s commands, who seeks the Lord’s will in his or her own life. For some people, this means having a gaggle of children and accepting all the joys and sorrows of that wonderful vocation. For some it means a few children, or one, or none at all, and they are just as blessed if they conform themselves to the will of God.
Never, ever mistake a blessing for a deity, and don’t go around making your own saints. Let the Church canonize saints. Don’t make presumptions that large families are holy, and please don’t presume that small families like mine are less holy. Judge not, cast down your idols. Eyes on your own plate.
(image via Pixabay)
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