The Anchoress
Over at the Corner, they’re quoting Bruce Thornton: [Europe is not reproducing because] “children are expensive. They require you to sacrifice your time and your interests and your own comfort. If your highest good is pleasure, if your highest good is a sophisticated life, then children get in the way. Why would you spend so much money and so much energy on children if your highest good is simply material well-being? That’s sort of the spiritual dimension of the problem.”
Read Dr. Melissa Clouthier on the news that she was pregnant with twins at challenging time of her life H/T Fausta:
That’s what happens when you choose to love and go out on a limb and take a risk. Most people don’t view having children that way, but it’s true. When you make the choice to have a baby, you think about the love and the expansion of your life. You imagine holding him and caring for him and loving him. The excitement. The anticipation. The romance clouds your mind.
The reality of children is that suddenly, you’re more vulnerable. Suddenly, you have something to lose. Suddenly, it matters a whole lot more when a politician makes a stupid law or creates debt for the next generation. Suddenly, healing the world takes a back seat to protecting your children. Suddenly, the society’s scariness comes into sharp focus.
Loving makes us vulnerable.
Withholding love doesn’t make you strong though. This is one of life’s paradoxes. Being a rock, being an island might spare you pain but it also isolates a person creating a brittleness of being. A person can protect herself and by doing so, limit vulnerability. It calls to mind something G.K. Chesterton said. He described a soldier, timid and afraid versus a soldier bold and engaging. Often to save his own life, the soldier has to risk it, because to try and protect it is to surely die.
Very wise.
Yes, love makes us vulnerable, and you can’t love without being willing to hurt, too.
I’ve realized over the years that anti-life action, abortion, euthanasia, are all failures of love, and failures to be willing to open yourself up to all the ache and beauty that love brings. People don’t mind the beauty but they don’t want the ache, so they settle for a beauty less vibrant but safer.
A long time ago I wrote:
So this is how God keeps us going! It’s not the babies, per se, it’s not the corporeal creation – it’s the LOVE that becomes created at the [new birth]…THAT is what keeps us going.
Think of it. Little Isabella, still a question mark in the womb was already loved by her parents, and by all of the prospective grandparents…then she arrived, and with her came to all of them a love that hadn’t existed in the world before, but exists now, in our world, and feels as real and intense and palpable as something that has existed before time. The love between Isabella and her Mama in that photo didn’t exist in the world before her birth. Now, the parents are awestruck with it…a Love so complete, so unconditional and all-encompassing, that they would die for it.
If God is love, here is God, renewed constantly through this Love – Ever Ancient, Ever-new.
[One] understands why abortion is such a triumph for the dark side. Every time a babe is aborted, this love is denied, is not allowed to Come. It cannot be Brought Forth. God is shut out…With abortion, there is no Coming of Love.
Pope Paul VI pretty much predicted all of this in HUMANAE VITAE, didn’t he, the selfish-absorption (and perhaps a self-loathing) that would lead to the devaluation of life, the destruction of human relationships and the diminishment of man and society? Prophetic. And most people, without even reading that document, just waved him off as knowing nothing because what could a celibate possibly know about life and love?
Related: David Warren on the Death of Europe
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In