bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • That Document.

    On Priesthood and Those with Homosexual Tendencies, that is.  Here’s my translation of what the document says, for those of you who don’t feel like reading the whole thing (which is pretty short).

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    Introduction:  We have already taught plenty about homosexuality.  This document answers only one question:  "whether to admit to the seminary and to holy orders candidates who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies."

    I.  Only men can be priests.  The priest represents Christ as "head, shepherd, and spouse" to the Church.  The priest makes a gift of his whole personhood to the Church.  Therefore only mature men who can relate correctly to both men and women may be ordained.

    II.  Homosexual acts and homosexual tendencies are different.  Homosexual acts are inherently wrong.  Homosexual tendencies are disorders which are difficult for many who suffer them.  Today we must state clearly that men who have sexual contact with other men, who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or who "support the so-called ‘gay culture’" cannot enter the seminary or be ordained.

    This is because men who have sexual contact with other men, who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or who support the so-called "gay culture" are hindered from relating correctly to men and women.  Bad things can happen if men with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are ordained. 

    Not all homosexual tendencies are deep-seated.  Some are the expression of a transitory problem, for example, of immaturity.  Such tendencies must be overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate [which is a prerequisite for ordination as a priest].

    III.   Desire alone doesn’t give a man the right to be a priest.  The Church gets to decide, from among the candidates, who enters the seminary, how seminarians are formed, and who gets to be ordained.  It’s the bishop’s or the superior’s responsibility, and if he has a serious doubt about a candidate, he mustn’t admit him to Holy Orders.   The rector of the seminary must tell the bishop or superior what he thinks of each candidate.  The spiritual director is bound by secrecy, but he has the duty to try to dissuade an unsuitable candidate from seeking ordination.  The candidate has the most responsibility and he has to be honest and trust the judgment of his superiors.  Dishonesty does not characterize someone who believes he is called to serve Christ and his Church.

    Conclusion:  Bishops, bishops’ conferences, and superiors must observe this document for the good of the candidates and to make sure that we always have good priests.

    —————————————————————-

    OK, so what here is new?  Only a clarification: 

       — Homosexual tendencies (by which I think they mean same-sex attraction, or SSA) and homosexual contact in the past do not automatically exclude a man from ordination.  If a man has not had sexual contact with other males for three years; and if he can show that his SSA is insignificant, or that it has been outgrown, or that it does not prevent him from relating correctly to men and to women; and if the latter has been true for at least three years — then he may be admitted to the diaconate.

      — But if the candidate has "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," or is currently sexually active as a homosexual, or "supports the so-called ‘gay culture’" at this time, he may not be ordained.  Period.

    On first reading, I thought that there were two serious flaws in the document:  a failure to define the term "deep-seated," and a failure to define "the so-called ‘gay culture.’"  Surely these definitions are necessary to make the appropriate distinctions? 

    But on further thought, I decided that given the other content of the document, the terms are clear enough.   

    What is deep-seated?  If a candidate can overcome his homosexual tendencies and remain victorious over them for three years, then they’re not deep-seated and he can be ordained, assuming he meets other qualifications.  If he hasn’t done that yet, they might be, and he shouldn’t be ordained.

    And what is the "support of gay culture" that makes otherwise suitable candidates unsuitable?  At minimum, to "support" something is to believe in it.  It might also mean political support. What sort of beliefs and politics would render an otherwise suitable person unsuitable for the priesthood?  Only heretical beliefs; only politics contrary to Church moral teachings.  Therefore, the document must mean that those who contradict Church teaching in their beliefs and politics, relative to homosexuality and homosexual persons, can’t be ordained. 

    So what this comes down to is:  To be ordained a priest, you have to be faithful to Church teachings, and you can’t be currently struggling with homosexuality or permanently self-identified as a homosexual.

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  • Using words in sentences.

    Today I required Oscar (age five) to read words from a list and use each one in a sentence.  These are the sentences he came up with.

    Soon:  The pizza man I hope’s coming soon.

    Bless:  Father D____ [our parish priest] blesses children.

    Dress:  I weared my sparklest dress.

    Ice:  I freezed with ice.  No!  I freezed like ice.

    Place:  I placed the Ten Commandments in a holy… um… tomb?  So the people couldn’t touch it ’cause they would get dead.

    Fasten:  I need to fasten up my seatbelt because there’s an emergency.

    Muscle:  My muscles are getting stronger when I eat food.

    Part:  I am building a race car.  But I need the parts!

    Arm:  My arm is strong!

    Yard:  I builded in my yard a flowerpot.

    Star:  I’m looking at the stars for nights.

    Borrow:  I am gonna borrow your race car to race.

    Sorry:  I am sorry I breaked your race car.

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  • Group B Strep: To test or not?

    I commented to a pregnant friend a few weeks ago that I had never been tested for Group B Strep colonization with either of my two pregnancies, and that I would rather not be tested as I might have to do somaething about it if I found out I were GBS+.  She reacted with a bit of shock, and after thinking about it I realized that I actually didn’t have a handle on how rare GBS is and whether it was a good idea to avoid testing.

    GBS is a bacterium that normally inhabits the digestive tract but occasionally poses a risk of disease, particularly to newborns.   Nobody was really talking about it much when I was preparing for my first birth, but these days it seems to be the latest scare.   And there  a little bit of reason for it:  If mothers transmit GBS to their newborns during delivery, 20% of those babies will die, and many of the survivors will have ongoing problems.  Scary, as I said.   Because of the standard protocol for GBS+ mothers is to administer IV antibiotics, which reduces transmission by 70%. 

    For mothers who birth in the hospital, this intervention is a small matter.  There are already so many interventions going on — what’s a little IV?  And a lot of those mothers were going to have an IV anyway.  So it’s not a big deal, relatively speaking, to add yet another layer of intervention.

    But for a mother who was planning to minimize intervention, adding an IV can be a big deal — they tend to restrict movement.  And for a mother who planned a homebirth, adding an IV means changing everything — because it usually means moving from home to hospital.  Is this layer of protection worth it?

    To know this, we need to know the risks of transmission in the first place.  (The  numbers in what follows are from the CDC.)  Before GBS prevention strategies were implemented widely, the incidence was 1.8/1000 live births in the U. S.  If this still reflects the risk of transmission overall, the chances of delivering a baby free of GBS disease are 99.82% if the mother’s culture is unknown and if she does not undergo IV antibiotics.

    Women who test positive for GBS are 25 times more likely than women who test negative to have a baby with GBS disease.   Let’s be conservative (on the side of testing) and assume, for the moment, that virtually all of the infections come from women who would test positive if they were tested.  Ten to 30% of women are colonized.  If ten, then the chances of GBS disease among babies of women known to be positive would be 1.8 percent; if thirty, 0.6 percent.

    IV antibiotics reduce the risk of transmission by 70 percent: from a range of 0.6-1.8%, to a range of 0.18-0.54%.

    So let’s take a look at the case for testing. 

    If you don’t test and don’t do anything:

    • Chances are 99.82% that you won’t infect a baby with GBS disease.
    • Chances are 99.96% that your baby won’t die of GBS disease.

    If you take the test:

    • Chances are 10-30% that you will test positive.

    If you are positive and you don’t undergo IV antibiotics:

    • Chances are 98.2-99.4% that you won’t infect an infant.

    If you are positive AND you undergo IV antibiotics:

    • Chances are 99.46-99.82% that you won’t infect a baby with GBS disease.

    So let’s see.  Since I am deciding whether to (a) not test or (b) test and, if positive, use antibiotics, I am deciding whether to take a step that would improve my perception of the outcome from, at best, 99.82% favorable to… at best, 99.82% favorable.

    The real outcome is improved more than that, because the real outcome includes the 70-90% chance that I would test negative.   Including that, the outcomes with testing and prophylaxis are improved to 99.95 percent.

    To sum up: 

    Going from unknown GBS status to testing and planning to use IVA if positive: improves chances from 99.82% to 99.95%  (reduces risk from 0.18% to 0.005%)

    Going from positive GBS status, no IVA, to positive GBS status, using IVA:  improves chances from 98.2% to a maximum of 99.82% (reduces risk from 1.8% t0 0.18%)

    My conclusion is that it’s not worth testing.  But that’s me.  What do you think?

    (UPDATE.  Perspective.  Total neonatal mortality in the U. S. from all causes was, in 2001, 4.5/1000 live births — your chances that your baby will not die in the first 28 days of life are "only" 99.55%.)

    UPDATE AGAIN.  Only a culture taken in the last five weeks of pregnancy is predictive.  Testing before the 35th week is useless!

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  • Belloc: A continuum-concept writer?

    (Pardon the formatting — I’m using a different computer and the buttons have mysteriously disappeared.) UPDATE.  Formatting fixed and some more information added.

    I’ve been reading Hilaire Belloc’s 1902 book The Path to Rome, the story of a pilgrimage he made on foot. He made this comment after wondering why it is so satisfying to attend Mass in the morning:

    And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is
    that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon
    thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment
    that I am astonished people hear of it so little.

    Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can really be very happy for long–but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more important, decent and secure of our souls.

    Thus one should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one’s
    food–and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on
    the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and
    one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God
    put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.
    Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said
    lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should
    do a little work with his hands.

    Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if
    rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and
    spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing,
    were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and
    to the tradition of the race.

    Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by force.

    Reminds me of the Continuum Concept: 

    the continuum concept is the idea that in order to achieve optimal physical, mental and emotional development, human beings — especially babies — require the kind of experience to which our species adapted during the long process of our evolution.

    I mostly spend my time trying to apply it to raising my children, but it is nice to be reminded — even from a 1902 European — of its importance to the lives of adults, too.

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  • Two-year-old fury.

    Milo, age two, was feeling thwarted by me the other day.  I can’t even remember what it was exactly — I stopped him from doing something he wanted to do?  He wanted something and I told him No?  Something along those lines.

    Furious, his little face screwed up and tears welling up in his eyes, he pointed at me and screamed:  "POOPY!"

    Then he immediately dissolved into giggles.  I couldn’t help snickering, too.  I think the whole idea of calling me Poopy must have been so funny to him, it completely relieved the tension between us.   He wasn’t angry after that, and he happily went without whatever it was he had been denied.

    The same thing has played out a few times since then.  Ordinarily I would tell a child that it’s not okay to call someone names, but I can’t help thinking of this as more funny than anything else.  It’s almost turning into a joke between us.

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  • Three Advent suggestions for diving into Scripture.

    Rich Leonardi suggests a number of online resources to mark the start of Advent.  One that looks pretty good to me:  Basic Scripture, an e-course of sorts hosted at Catholic Culture. 

    Rich also notes:  This season’s Sunday readings focus on the Gospel of Mark, which is the shortest and easiest Gospel to read.  Why not kick off Advent by reading the whole thing in one sitting?  If you like the NAB, which has its faults but is certainly a comfortable translation to read, you can begin at Chapter 1 and click through all 16 chapters.

    Finally:  I finished last night reading the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s  Life of Christ (1977).   This was my first exposure to Archbishop Sheen’s writing (I have heard some recordings of his radio broadcasts).   It’s excellent!  It’s not dry at all, but neither is it dumbed down in any way.  He’s writing it like a storyteller.  He points out many little details from the Gospels that I had never noticed or thought about.  I enjoyed reading it the way I enjoy Lewis and Chesterton.

    I think the best parts of it are the ones that deal with the Mother of Our Lord — because they are so deeply rooted in the texts of the Gospels, I think they can help us explain to non-Catholics, in a framework we share with them, our devotions to the Blessed Mother.   Here’s a bit from his section on the wedding at Cana, discussing why Jesus addresses her as "Woman," then and from the Cross:

    As soon as He had consented to begin His "Hour," He proceeded immediately to tell her that her relations with Him would be henceforth changed.  Until then, during His hidden life, she had been known as the mother of Jesus.  But now that he was launched on the work of Redemption, she would no longer be just His mother, but also the mother of all His human brethren whom He would redeem.  To indicate this new relationship, He now addressed her, not as "Mother" but as the "Universal Mother" or "Woman…" 

    The moment the "Hour" began, she became "the Woman"; she would have other children too, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.  If He was to be the new Adam, the founder of a redeemed humanity, she would be the new Eve and the mother of that new humanity.  As Our Lord was a man, she was His mother; and as He was a Savior, she was also the mother of all whom He would save.  John, who was present at that wedding, was also present at the climax of the "Hour" on Calvary.  He heard our Lord calling her "Woman" from the Cross and then saying to her, "Behold thy son."  It was as if he, John, was now the symbol of her new family… On the Cross, He consoled His mother by giving her another son, John, and with him the whole of redeemed humanity.

    Even  though the book is pushing 30 years old, it’s still fresh.  It’s only a little bit dated (there are some references to Communists!)  I heartily recommend it.  I think it would make great "daily reading" for a season of the Church year, too, because each of the 62 chapters  is pretty self-contained and short.  (OK, for Advent you’d have to do 3 chapters a day.  Maybe it’s better Lenten reading.  Still, not so bad.)

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  • Proper beef stew, finally.

    Last week, for the first time in my entire life, I made a beef stew correctly.

    I owe this, like so many of my recent culinary successes, to the people who produce Cook’s Illustrated, which has to be the best cooking magazine that has ever existed.  Most of the recipes are tested dozens of times with many different minor variations, all trying to come up with the perfect version — the tastiest, the easiest, the least error-prone — of some dish.  Many of them are new takeoffs on old classics, remade for the modern kitchen or using easier-to-find ingredients.  It’s also got equipment reviews and ingredient taste-test results and kitchen tips.   Oh, and it’s beautiful. 

    Mark got me a subscription for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I have already informed him that he must keep it coming every year, or I will go on strike.  At least in the kitchen.

    So what’s with the beef stew?  What have I been doing wrong all this time?  The short answer:  Not baking it in the oven.   Every beef stew I have ever made in my entire life, up till last week, was made either on the stove top or in the Crock-Pot brand slow-cooker.   I had no idea, none at all, that these are inferior stew-making techniques, at least if your stew is thickened with flour or some other kind of starch.

    According to Sarah Wilson, the author of  "Beef Stew, Provencal Style" (November and December 2005):

    Why do we prefer [cooking the stew in the oven] to a stovetop simmer?… At moderate temperatures, the flour in a braising liquid gradually absorbs water, thus thickening the sauce.  If the liquid gets too hot, however, the starch breaks down and loses its thickening properties, resulting in a thinner sauce.  Because stovetop cooking heats from the bottom only, the flour closest to the heat source loses its thickening ability.

    A Crock-Pot provides more even heating than the stove, but I think there must still be some hot spots in it, because the stew I produced from Wilson’s recipe was silky, thick, and luscious, better than any I’d ever made.   I am now determined to tinker with every standard American stew recipe I’ve ever made, trying out the new technique.  The key sequence appears to be (1) browning 2-inch cubes of meat, (2) browning the aromatic vegetables in the beef drippings, (3) stirring in flour and browning it slightly, (4) adding all the liquid and other seasonings and then baking, covered and undisturbed, at 325 F for 3 hours.

    The beef stew recipe, roughly:

    • 3/4 oz       dried porcini mushrooms (I used shiitake), rehydrated in hot tap water
    • 1                  boneless beef chuck eye roast (I used plain chuck), 3.5 lb, in 2-inch cubes
    • 1.5 tsp       salt
    • 1     tsp       ground black pepper
    • 4 Tbsp      olive oil
    • 5 oz            salt pork, rind removed
    • 4                  large carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
    • 2 med        onions, sliced
    • 4                  garlic cloves (I used 6, of course)
    • 2 Tbsp      tomato paste
    • 1/3 c          all purpose flour
    • 1                  bottle bold red wine (I used a Cabernet/Shiraz blend)
    • 1 c              chicken broth (I used homemade stock from my freezer)
    • 1 c              water (I used more chicken broth instead)
    • 4                 3-inch strips zest from an orange, cut into thin strips
    • 1 c              pitted nicoise olives (I substituted half a jar of capers, well drained)
    • 3                 minced anchovy fillets
    • 5                 sprigs thyme (I substituted a teaspoon or so of dried thyme)
    • 2                 bay leaves
    • 1 14.5 oz can whole tomatoes, drained and diced
    • 2 Tbsp      minced fresh parsley

    Heat oven to 325 F.  Season beef with salt and pepper.  Brown in batches in olive oil and set beef aside.  Brown the salt pork, carrots, onions, garlic, and tomato paste in the pot, 2 minutes.  Add flour and stir 1 minute.  Deglaze pan with entire bottle of red wine.  Add broth and water and beef, and bring to a simmer.  Add mushrooms and the rehydrating water, orange zest, half the olives (capers in my case), anchovies, thyme, and bay.  Cover and place in oven for 2.5 to 3 hours.

    Discard salt pork, thyme [sprigs] and bay leaves.  Add tomatoes, the rest of the olives [or capers], and warm.  Cover pot and allow stew to settle, 5 min.  Skim excess fat off the top.  Stir in parsley and serve.

    A few comments:

    • I served the stew over wide "egg-noodle" type noodles, whole wheat ones.
    • The stew was great the first day, exceptionally great the second day as leftovers.  The sauce was perfect, just perfect, after a night in the fridge.
    • The meat cost $13.  That’s not so bad if you stretch it with noodles and salad, and plan to eat it two days.  Believe me, there is no trouble getting anyone to eat the leftovers.
    • I only substituted the capers because Mark detests olives.  But they were very nice.
    • If I make this again (if?!?!? Ha!) I will decrease the orange zest.  The citrus note in the stew was pleasing, but a little too strong — it needed balance.
    • They aren’t kidding when they tell you to skim off the fat.  This dish produces a thick film of oil on top.  Perhaps it should be made a day ahead, especially if you are planning to eat it all in one go — then you can remove hardened fat from the top (easier than skimming), and you get the "exceptionally great leftovers" effect.
    • Even if you don’t make it a day ahead, it’s really convenient, because once it’s in the oven you do not need to touch it — not even to stir — for three whole hours.

    Try it!

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  • SAHMs and the Church. Part 4.

    (Part 1.  Part 2.  Part 3.)

    It is hard to figure out what God wants from us mothers, these days, when it comes to career choices.

    I know from experience that there is a great temptation to say, "He wouldn’t have given me this interest if he didn’t want to call me to this career path," or "He wouldn’t have given me the opportunity to have such a great education if he didn’t want me to use it."  It is a compelling argument, or at least it seems to be.  And there is certainly some truth, because surely God sometimes calls us with an inspiration, a fascination.  Surely God sometimes knocks with an unbelievable opportunity. 

    But everything, for a Christian, has to be laid at the foot of the Cross.  Here is the life I thought I was going to have.  Take it, Lord, and give me the life You want me to have.

    We don’t know, until we lay it at His feet, what He wants us to do with that interest.  Make money?  Maybe.  Or maybe it is meant for us to be a pleasing avocation to distract our minds from what will be our daily work. 

    Maybe the expertise we have gained through our education will drive a brilliant career.  Or maybe it will enable us to serve others instead.  Maybe it will lie dormant for many years, to flower later in an unexpected way.

    We don’t know, until we lay it at his feet.

    I am afraid that a lot of us, especially women, who choose to lay down the life we planned, will pick up a life that is very different.  I certainly have.  Trained as an academic engineer, I am instead a homeschooling homemaker.  I have no idea whether my doctorate will ever gather anything but dust.  I don’t know if it was a mistake to finish it instead of dropping out and devoting myself sooner to caring for my kids, who were both born when I was in school.  Occasionally I lie awake at night and feel just a little touch of misery at my vanished credentials.

    But I do have  a certain peace about where I am now.  I know that I am giving more of myself to my vocation this way than I would be if I worked.  And — let’s be frank — what did I like most about my life as a student?  Eating lunch in restaurants, doing work in coffee shops, being around other people, concentrating hard on something.  I can still do all those things, maybe not as much as I once did, but often enough to feel refreshed.   (Oh, and the other people I’m around these days?  I enjoy their company, which I chose for myself, a lot more than the company of most folks I worked with.  Nothing wrong with them as people, of course, but… now I’m among friends.)

    For me, this choice was a no-brainer, as soon as I had the courage to face turning it over to Christ.  Oh, it was so hard, but from this side looking back, it seems as if it were easy.

    Let’s make a deal, Gentle Reader.  You try to imagine yourself turning your life over as if it were easy, and I’ll try to remember how hard it was before it was done.

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  • Helping the stranger.

    A few days ago, I was waiting for a gap in traffic to make a right turn when a woman I didn’t know walked up to my car, waving.  She looked distressed.

    I cracked my window open two inches, letting in a blast of icy air, and turned down the radio.  My car won’t start and I need to get to work, she began.  I almost immediately stopped listening to her story as I began thinking about whether I would give her any money when she inevitably asked for ten dollars for gas.

    She didn’t ask for money.  She asked for a ride to work at the Walgreens on Lake Street.  I know exactly where that is.  It’s about twelve blocks away, a walk of about two miles, which is not really all that far if it’s not freezing cold and you’re not late for work. 

    I had my two kids in the car.  I looked at her.  She was clearly distressed.  She had no hat, no gloves.  She was clutching a day planner.  She did not look dangerous in any way whatsoever.

    I said, I’m sorry.  I can’t take someone in my car when I have my kids in the car.

    She said, I know, I understand, I have a twelve-year-old son.  I have a picture — she started to open her planner — let me show you —

    I said, I can’t take anyone I don’t know in my car.  I’m sorry.  I wish I could help.  There’s a police car on the next block.  I saw it back there.

    She was near tears.  Do you know where I could find a phone to call a cab?

    I remembered I had a cell phone.  Can I call you a cab?

    Do you have a cell phone?   She told me a telephone number, not needing to pause to look it up. I dug my phone out of my pocket and called the number. 

    "Hello, Red Cab taxi service."  She knew the taxi phone number from memory?  I sure don’t know any taxi cab numbers from memory. I don’t have to.  I told the dispatcher that a woman was stranded at a particular street corner.  The dispatcher told me to tell her to walk a block south to a particular convenience store parking lot and the cab could pick her up there.   So I did, and she thanked me, and she started walking, and I closed my window and turned right and drove past her as she hurried down the sidewalk.

    Gentle Reader, you know what is bothering me:  shouldn’t I have given her the ride? 

    In retrospect, I’m nearly certain that she was not misrepresenting herself. 

    In retrospect, I could have asked to see her I.D. and used my cell phone to call my husband, or a friend, and report:  I am giving a woman a lift.  This is her name, this is her address.  I will call you back in ten minutes, after I have dropped her off at the Walgreens on Lake Street.

    As I recount this incident, I am struck especially by the I have a twelve-year-old son.   What I hear in that now is one mother, appealing to another for help, in the name of motherhood.  Gavin de Becker writes in his excellent book about personal safety, The Gift of Fear,

    I encourage women to ask other women for help when they need it, and it’s likewise safer to accept an offer from a woman than from a man.  (Unfortunately, women rarely make such offers to other women, and I wish more would.)

    Although I did assist her, I could have gone much farther, and I did not — not actually because I feared that if I took her into my car, she might harm meor my children, but rather because conventional rules of safety dictate that I do not pick up strangers. 

    Did I in that moment fail to serve Christ?

    Anyone?

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  • SAHMs and the Church, part 3.

    (Part 1.   Part 2.)

    Even though there is no mandate in the teaching of the Universal Church that mothers avoid work that separates them from their children, there are two strong forces in Church teaching that encourage what we in the U. S. would call "stay-at-home mothering."

    —-   The first is the nature of a vocation.  There are two broad categories of vocation:  vowed matrimony and vowed celibacy.   Vowed celibacy can be expressed in a variety of vocations:  to the priesthood (for men), to a contemplative order of nuns or monks, to an active order, in consecrated virginity (for women).   In all of these, we are called to make a free gift of our whole selves to the service of our vocation.  Why? All vocations are nuptial, like a marriage, because all of them point to the final union of the Church with Christ who is called the "Bridegroom."

    I have seen some claim that there is a "vocation to the single life," but this is an error; to my knowledge all vocations call you to a vowed life.  Making a free gift of your whole self to the service of your vocation requires a vow.  There is no vow involved in "the single life," ergo it cannot be called a "vocation."  Singleness is a period of discernment of vocation, not a vocation of itself. 

    (Is that fair?  After all, many people remain single and unvowed through no fault of their own.  True.  Some people are called to marriage yet find no suitable mate, and some are called to priesthood yet cannot qualify, and some are called to religious life yet aren’t accepted to any order.  I  suspect this is a sad effect of original sin.)

    Speaking specifically of the vocation to marriage:  Giving your whole self to that vocation means that different people give different gifts, but in each case it’s all that you are.   Once we are married, everything we do (after the things we do for God alone) is supposed to be, directly or indirectly, in service to the family.  If we work, we work in order to serve our family.   If we spend time relaxing, we do so in order to refresh ourselves to better serve our family. There is no room for mere self-fulfillment here.  Certainly, there’s space to enjoy your own pursuits, but it can never be done at the expense of the family.  Self-improvement must be done always with an eye to how it helps the family as a whole.   This isn’t a self-immolation, incidentally.    When you serve the family, that doesn’t mean "serve everyone’s interests except your own."  The self is part of the family, after all, and activities that benefit the self — in its proper order within the family — serve the vocation of marriage.

    This understanding of vocation prompts us to consider our balance of work in terms of what best serves the family.  The primary purpose of marriage — the begetting and education of children — prompts a certain prejudice in favor of what best ensures the proper raising of the children.   

    Without question, children are best raised by someone who loves them, who cares about their success, who wants them to grow up to be saints, who is committed to forming their moral character.  In most cases, that’s their family.   Mother, father, perhaps grandparents or other extended family members; maybe godparents, or exceptionally close friends who are "like family." 

    Economics matter, too.  Maybe, after crunching the numbers and carefully considering the day care options available to them, a parent or parents will regretfully decide that they have to resort to some kind of extrafamilial or institutional day care.   But if they are committed to their vocation, to giving their whole self to the vocation, they do it because they believe it is giving all of what they have at the time; they’ll compensate for what is lacking as best they can; and they’ll strive to escape to better circumstances. 

    — The second area of Church teaching that impacts stay-at-home mothering is the theology of the body.    You may have noticed that the above argument from vocations concludes that family should care for children.  It doesn’t conclude that women should care for their children; it suggests that the dad should stay home, or the mom should stay home, or the dad and mom should take turns, or the parents should choose a loving and moral caregiver of either gender from among their closest family and friends. 

    The theology of the body (which is much larger than just this issue) proclaims forcefully that the differences between men and women that are written in our biology, in our bodies, are important.  That men and women are not interchangeable.  That we have a certain "vocation" expressed in our bodies, a vocation to manhood or to womanhood.  Manhood intersects with marriage, and the intersection is different from the intersection of womanhood and marriage.  Manhood intersects with celibacy, too, differently from womanhood’s intersection. 

    Look at women’s bodies:  we are called by our design, if we have children, to nourish them when they are babies.  A more studied look at the biology of motherhood and babyhood reveals that we and our babies are so closely linked by design as to be one only "organism"  — not just during pregnancy, but for the first few years of life.  Sure, we can snip that thread anytime we choose by forcibly weaning and forcibly separating, but that’s not the way our bodies are designed to be, and it’s a lot nicer for both mother and baby to go with nature’s flow.

    (And recall always that work outside the home must still serve the vocation of marriage by supporting the family.  It should not be excessive, and should allow for adequate time with the family, because fatherhood is more than just cash production, too.)

    There is a presumption inherent in the vocations of womanhood and of marriage that the mother gives herself primarily to caring for her babies.    Again, that’s a presumption, not a hard line.   There surely are circumstances in which both parents giving their whole self to the vocation of marriage means that Dad is caring for babies and Mom is off doing something else, if not all of the time then some of the time.   But it has to be done in those cases in service to the family.  Dare I say, too, striving for better circumstances?  "Better" being circumstances in which Mom cares for the babies?  It’s kind of hard to write that!  But if vocation is to mean anything, and if the body is to express our vocation, then we have to strive always to live out our vocation more and more perfectly.

    That’s babies.  What about older children?  My children are still very young, so I don’t know from experience if the inherent mother-child biological connection remains in some form after children are grown past babyhood.   It’s possible that there’s no presumption that mothers should be the ones primarily charged with older kids.    I lean towards the idea that, past babyhood, children begin to be formed in their own vocations.  Fathers play an enormous role in forming kids for their vocations, because they make a bridge between the family and the outside world where the vocation is to be found.   This is a good reason to be terribly critical of an economic system that separates the family during the "workday."  (Another reason, of course, is that it leads to this situation where women agonize about whether to "stay home or to work!")

    UPDATE.  The conclusion is here, in Part 4.

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  • Unhappy side effect #7 of being a Catholic who went to engineering school.

    Every year, when it comes time to get out the Advent wreath, I waste precious brain cells trying to devise the least wasteful candle-burning algorithm.  Ideally one that makes all the candles appear to burn at the same rate.

    If only I had never bought the wreath that takes spherical candles.

    And every year, late in the evening on the last Saturday in Ordinary Time, I hope that I put new candles in the box before I put it away last year.  Every year I open the box and wonder why I left one candle in there melted down to a stub.  And every year I vow to burn the candles more evenly, so that all four of them will be re-useable the following year.   And yet I have never managed to do so.

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  • SAHMs and the Church, part 2. Why doesn’t the Church just tell us what to do?

    Yesterday I wrote that the Church hasn’t (to my knowledge) issued a universal teaching on the morality of women’s staying home with their kids.   I gave one reason why I think that’s so; today I’ll write another.

    No, the answer to who will care for the children? appears to have been left up to us — to the family.  In part this is, I believe, because of the high esteem the Church holds for the family.  It is not that the question of who will care for the children  may be made lightly, that one answer is as good as another.  It is certainly a moral question.    But it is a highly individualized question.   The "right" answer depends heavily on circumstance.  And no one knows a household’s circumstance more intimately than the family who lives there. 

    This isn’t relativism.  The moral principles involved do not vary from household to household.  But the balance of tensions between them can vary, and so the application can, too.  In her wisdom the Church has not dictated the application of the principles (to my knowledge), so that the individual family, the domestic Church, can weigh them and decide.  The Church has not set a strict duty on us; but she has not limited that duty either.  Some Catholics probably wish there was a clear teaching.  It would certainly make the decision easier. 

    There’s an analogy here to another area:  family size and spacing of children.  The Church tells us in Humanae Vitae that natural family planning may be used if there are "well-grounded" or "serious" reasons, including reasons that "aris[e] from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances."  But the Church has never specified exactly what kinds of reasons are "well-grounded" and "serious."   

    This confuses some Catholics who sincerely wish to follow Church teaching.  I moderate an NFP e-mail list; every so often we get a question from someone who wants us to please tell him or her what is an acceptable reason to space children. We don’t have health insurance right now or my youngest is only three months old and my periods have already returned  or I just feel like I really need a break or We just got married and we aren’t adjusted to living together yet  or I’m taking antidepressants or….

    What they are looking for is a "yes" or a "no" — any answer will do, it seems, as long as it’s clear.  And that’s exactly the kind of answer the Church doesn’t give.  She cautions us that our reasons must be good, implying that some reasons are not.  She arms the family with calls to borth "prudence" and "generosity."   And then she allows the family to work out what that means in their own circumstance.

    I think the question of who will care for the children? is that kind of question.  It has great moral weight, and yet the individual family has the responsibility of weighing it in a correct understanding of their circumstance, according to a well-formed conscience, and in harmony with Christian principles.

    More in a subsequent post about those principles.

    UPDATE:  Here’s Part 3.

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