How Babies Can Save the Human Race

First off, let’s all agree that the world is presently screwed up. For proof, click here. We’re too busy, too angry, too focused on work, too ignorant towards each other, too selfish, too lazy, etc… (or is it just me?)

Well, don’t despair! I’ve discovered in the past 10 months that salvation is near at hand.

BABIES CAN SAVE THE PLANET.

Oddly enough, you may have heard just the opposite. Some propose that babies eat up the planet’s resources, that there is a “population crisis”, and that we should all feel very, very guilty and irresponsible for not routinely contracepting and for ever considering having more than 1.5 children. Because aside from being stinky, babies leave a “carbon footprint” everywhere they go. As to the “population crisis” click here and check out Caritas in Veritate, section 44 to top it off.

But I believe the secret to building a happy, vibrant, life-affirming, love-soaked Civilization lies in a healthy abundance of those squishy Little People who are utterly dependent on us Big People. Here are Ten Reasons Why Babies Will Save the Human Race (feel free to add more reasons through the comment link below):

1. Babies make people talk to each other in parks, who normally might not give each other the time of day. Talking to people builds friendships, friendships build communities, communities build parks. Babies hang out in parks (and around and around we go!)

2. Babies learn EVERYTHING from their parents, by watching, listening, studying, and looking up at Mommy and Daddy…. and so should we.

3. Babies are the greatest “man-made” creations in the universe; they shall grow up and outlive the stars, each in their own way altering the course of human history, each absolutely unique and unrepeatable. How cool is that?

4. Babies are the fruit of the sexual union between a man and a woman. We need to be reminded that that’s how it works.

5. Babies are aware of everything and everything amazes them: lights, noise, colors, tinfoil, keys. We could all stand to be amazed again by the ordinary things around us.

6. Babies smell really good.

7. Babies conversely can smell really BAD. They need us to clean up their “poopy.” A constant reminder that we have our own “poopy” to clean up.

8. Babies are completely innocent, regardless of the way they were conceived, and have no guile, no sarcasm, no agendas. They are pure as the driven snow, fresh as a sea breeze, vulnerable as a flower. We need more purity, sea breezes, and flowers in this world.

9. Babies need us and we all need to feel needed.

10. Babies see the world as their playground, a wonderful gift made just for them. And so should we.

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Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

The Sadness and Madness of Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger, the foundress of Planned Parenthood, has recently been awarded a place in the National Portrait Gallery. She is quoted as saying that the poor and mentally handicapped are “human weeds” that “clog up the path…. drain out the energies and the resources of this little earth.” Her solution? “We must cultivate our garden.”

The more I read about this woman, the more bizarre it gets. And this is the woman that Hillary Clinton is in “awe” of for her heroic work? Sanger was a massive proponent of eugenics and quite clearly a racist. Her own words convict her, as cited in her letters and books captured in this disturbing video. And our tax dollars are supporting her agenda by honoring her in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. God help us to see the lie behind the curtains of these so-called Planned Parenthood “clinics.” Please watch and learn from the video for yourself.

For a more in depth look at Margaret Sanger’s thought, watch a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace here (the transcript of the interview is available as well). It’s a bizarre interview, be warned. Aside from Sanger’s thoughts on human life, marriage and the Catholic Church, Mike Wallace holds no punches, and keeps plugging Philip Morris cigarettes! Weird.

PS – Wallace quotes the Church as saying the sole purpose of marriage is the procreation of children. The full teaching is that marriage’s end is two-fold: unitive and procreative, that is, it is for the love and union of hearts and for the fruit of that love and union…. life. In this sense, I feel Margaret’s pain when she fights him on this point. It seems in her experience, women were looked on as merely baby-making machines and subjogated by marriage and pregnancy. Clearly the vision is skewed here. For the ideal vision and definition of marriage, read this!

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Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

"Be Empty and Stagnify"

“Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind… driving you mad.”

– Morpheus, The Matrix

The more deeply I delve into Pope John Paul II’s new sexual revolution (found in his teaching on the Theology of the Body) the more I come to realize the absolute insanity of the present state of things.

WARNING: The following words will either ruffle your feathers or unbind them so you can take flight.

Look objectively for a moment at the way the human body is treated today. Look at the magazine covers in your local supermarket, assess the value of the human person by spending 10 minutes watching television, and you’ll be tempted to believe that sex is a drug and we are all inextricably addicted. (Sex, that is, torn apart from its true meaning.)

We’re gorging ourselves on feelings and casting away our fertility. We’ve severed the life-line that is tied to the ship that is meant to take us home. The most God-like attribute we possess, that of generating a new human life, is stripped away from the sexual embrace. Something tells us that there must be more to sex than just feeling, bonding, pleasure, comfort. A still, small voice in our hearts whispers…. “in the beginning… it was not so.” There is a deep mystery welling up in this act that has always drawn us along, like the fragrance of the Orient in the Song of Songs. But our vision has been disoriented. Our senses have been desensitized.

How and why did this happen? Who told us that separating the fruit from its roots would bring us true happiness? Let’s review…

1. In the beginning, God creates many different things to compliment each other and form one thing – the Universe; sun and moon, earth and sky, land and sea, then man and woman in His image, that is, in the image of the Blessed Trinity, that Divine Whirlwind of ceaseless infinite Love that made all thing

s out of love. It’s a beautiful dance and an exchange of opposites that attract. To quote the old song – “You are the sun, I am the moon, you are the words, I am the tune…. play me!”

2. This play was the first word God spoke to us (nobody remembers this today!), He placed the man and the woman naked in a garden paradise. God’s first command to the happy couple is “Be fruitful and multiply!” Notice it does not begin with “Thou Shalt Not.” It’s actually more akin to “Let’s party!” God offered them the freedom to enjoy the Gift of one another as husband and wife; to love and begin a family of persons (just as God Himself is a Family in the Trinity).

3. Now this party is not, however, about a quick fix or some hedonistic indulgence. Through the sincere gift of self, the first man and woman enter into the mystery of that one flesh union that has literally spawned the human race (again, just as God’s generous Love generates the Universe). Adam and Eve’s embrace is a glimmer or a foretaste of that heavenly rapture that awaits all who love God. The Catholic Catechism says that in the “joys of their love, God gives spouses a foretaste of the joys of Heaven.” Amen! The gift is a total gift; free, faithful, and fruitful. It keeps the totality of the person (fertility and all) intact. Anything less would be a diminishing of love.

So far so good! But what happened? Well, there was one thing they were asked to respect and refrain from taking from; it’s the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If we grasp at that tree, we die.

Fair enough. God is the Creator after all; He’s the One Who alone reveals the Good and warns us of the consequences of not choosing what is Good for us. Good and Evil, God is showing us, are constants, objective realities as steady as the stars. They are meant to guide us. Good is what the human heart is made for, Evil is the dark hole left when Good is stripped away.

Was the Original Sin a refusal to trust this Truth? Was it an abuse of human freedom, a misdirected grasping at pleasure or power over the purpose of human life? Was it a failure to image God?

Today, across the boards we see the counter-sign, the alternate reality, and the twisting of the Truth we were made for all around us. God’s call to us to “Be fruitful and multiply!” has become a “Be empty and stagnify.”

And empty we are. The results of the so-called sexual revolution of the 60’s surround us. Are there better marriages, happier relations, peace in the battle between the sexes? Is Life celebrated, family loved and respected, children seen as a gift and fertility valued as a woman’s greatest power? Quite the contrary. By grasping at pleasure apart from procreation, we have left in our hands only withered remains of the dream of happiness.

But there were two trees in that First Garden. Beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the Tree of Life. And God’s mercy invites us to rest beneath its shade. This is the fruit that lasts and the love that truly satisfies. And God invites us to it! Did not Jesus, the New Adam, die on this Tree to save us? Isn’t the Wood of the Cross the One Tree that has borne fruit for so many centuries? To this Tree of Life the men and women of our time are invited to “taste and see” and to “take and eat.”

This Tree alone can plant the seeds that will finally blossom into a Culture of Life!

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Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org

Happy Birthday Humanae Vitae!

This year the Church “celebrates” the fortieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s theological lighthouse, Humanae Vitae, a brief letter highlighting what human life is all about and what human love is meant to reflect. It materialized like a beacon atop a pillar of rock in the midst of the fog kicked up from a so-called sexual revolution in the 1960’s. I call it a lighthouse because today, anyone with half a brain can see that the revolution shipwrecked in turning away from it; the Yellow Submarine sank just as soon as it set sail, and we’ve been floating through some pretty dark wreckage ever since. The proof is in the statistics.

Forty years ago, public and parochial reactions to Paul VI’s letter were said to have broken his heart. Souls abandoned the Bark of Peter in droves and chose rather to find their own way through the deep and mysterious waters of human sexuality. But we have paid a high price for jumping ship…

Dr. Janet Smith (click here for the complete text) recently wrote an article highlighting the prophecies that Pope Paul VI made concerning what would happen if the Church’s teaching on contraception were ignored. For one, he said that the widespread use of contraception would lead to more cases of adultery and a general lowering of morality (anyone want to argue with that one?) The Pope predicted that men would lose respect for women and “no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium,” coming at last to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.” Paul VI also foresaw that the widespread allowance of contraception would put a “dangerous weapon . . . in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.” (enter China’s one child policy, for example). Finally, contraception could lead humanity into a distorted sense of dominion over our own bodies. As Dr. Smith mentions, “sterilization is now the most widely used form of contraception in the U.S.; individuals are so convinced of their rights to control their own bodies that they do not hesitate to alter even their own physical make-up.”

Despite these forty subsequent years of tragically fulfilled prophecies, many still cling to the hope that condoms and the Pill will somehow tame the teenagers and bring us “adults” a marital tranquility that won’t be “interrupted” or “disturbed” by expensive and intrusive children. Forgive us Father, we know not what we do. *

Humanae Vitae hit the culture like a bomb, and many are still picking pieces of its razor sharp clarity out of their shattered dreams of sexual license and reproductive autonomy. This teaching still burrows into the skin of many Catholics, like a piece of metal the spin doctors missed. We can’t figure out why the Church won’t “stay out of the bedroom” – as if the Church were a building built apart from flesh and blood. Perhaps we should recall that the Church is born in the bedroom, for it’s a living body after all. Where else would the Church be found?

Humanae Vitae told the world that the natural and sometimes fertile flow of love from man to woman that held the power to unify hearts and bring new life into the world should never be blocked, barricaded, or belittled into something merely biological, or merely pleasurable. Sex should (and could) always be knit to love and life, pleasure and procreation, bonding and babies. Our biology is never separate from our theology. That would be a divorce. What God has brought together, let no man separate.

What the world wanted to divide, Pope Paul VI announced, the Church would hold together. And I’m so glad he did. But he paid a price too, like Gandalf facing his enemy, standing on the bridge between life and death. The rather intense image in this post was inspired by a talk of Christopher West’s I attended this summer. I was given permission by the artist Ted Nasmith, himself a non-Catholic, who was gracious enough to let me “alter” his work.

What a hero we have in Pope Paul VI, for his courage in holding fast to the beauty of the sexual embrace, of fertility, of life, of its sacred character from womb to tomb. May it be soon that his spirit of love and sacrifice resurrects like the Grey Pilgrim from the abyss in which our culture is falling. That a true Culture of Life prevail…. free, fruitful, and full of hope.

Pope Paul VI, pray for us…

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* I recognize the strong tone of this post may offend certain readers who disagree with the Church’s teaching on contraception. It is certainly a very personal and sensitive issue. I would like to welcome any comments or questions and I pray that a fruitful dialogue might come from it. This is a teaching that I and the Church I love feel very strongly about. For a deeper understanding of the issue, please read the letter of Pope Paul VI first, found here.

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Inspiration for the New Evangelization
http://www.missionmoment.org