Why Don't People Get It?

I was reading an article of yet another crime involving pornography. It is again child pornography. This is child pornography is called "Class 4" or something similar under British law. The only worse classification is 5. The height of tragedy is that these images, concocted by Satan himself, were held by a child murderer. This child murderer was a child himself when he murdered a toddler. He was let out at age 18 and given an entirely new identity. All of this was in the interest of his safety.

A child, from a horrible background commits a horrible murder. And society believes it is too expensive to house the murderer and attempts "rehabilitation." Few people believe it is really possible, yet the attempts continue.

I am going to assert that as long as any pornography is considered "normal," then rehabilitation is impossible! As long as images of degradation of any human being are tolerated in the mainstream, these crimes will continue and escalate. It has not been proven that the murder of this child was sexually motivated, only that sexual assault was included. I really don't care about the motivation. I care about the results!

Child pornographers are "motivated" by greed. The result is pure evil. I know it can be argued, even by me, that those very pornographers were victims themselves at one point. That is where this evil comes from. It is passed from generation to generation, spreading and mutating like the horrible virus it is. The mutations are caused by each generation slacking more and more in accepting immorality.

Each of us has been there. I've seen the steamy movies and watched to the end just to know how it turned out. I have sought to balance an artistic eye, only to have it assaulted by an image I can't erase from my mind. I have had the nightmares that the evil I have allowed in my own life, has played on. I don't hold myself innocent here and instead, find that speaking out against these atrocities is a way to heal and help the images fade.

The idea that we are allowed to muck around in the mud and still come out clean is even an idea touted by many evangelical Christians. They have this image of us being "dungheaps covered in a blanket of snow" that is Christ's sacrifice for us. But that is just plain not good enough! Either God actually makes us clean, or He doesn't. This idea that we are merely "covered by Christ" is what has led many to a path of continued depravity.

The whole point to authentic Christianity is an actual uniting of ourselves with Christ on the cross! It is not a simple, "Gee thanks for dying for me Jesus, now I will try to do better because I love you so much." That is absurd, and yet it is what many churches teach, (and sadly many Catholics who are not in union with Church teaching.) Every time a crime is committed against a child we are to re-examine our own lives and nail to the Cross each crime we committed against Christ. Every time we caused a child to doubt the love of God, a "great millstone" is hung around our necks.

The only way to stop the advance of evil is to grow in holiness. The only person I can change is me. And the only Person I can truly allow to change me is Christ Himself. He lives in us all and we must recognize him at every turn and invite him to each moment in our lives.

People Are Genuinely Good.

I really believe that. People are genuinely good. I haven't blogged in awhile. My computer was broken and then I just couldn't get my spirit into it again. This is really for me, I guess, since I have about 3 regular readers (Hi there!) so thanks for reading. I suppose if I got that "follow button" going I might have more, but it just hasn't happened yet, so here I am, me and my keyboard.

I really want to get this out. I almost put it in my private journal but I wanted to type it and my last private journal got lost in the computer crash. For whatever reason, I want this out there. I want it out in cyber-space so that I could somehow find it again if I need it. I think it is one of my more important "confessions."

I selfishly want to know everyone. I believe, no matter what, that people are inherently good and I want to know them all. I say that is selfish because at the heart of it, it is. It is all about me. I, I, I. I want to know the goodness in all people. I want to experience it. And mostly I want to measure up to it and be worthy of knowing that goodness.

Like all epiphanies, this one had a catalyst. (That word means "a beginning" or "an ignitor" for one of my readers who says I use too many big words.) And epiphany, in this case means "a big new thought or revelation." The catalyst was my friend's step-dad died of cancer. (Basically closer to her than her natural father, and helped her become the woman she is.) Death often makes people mull over life and examine their conscience, so I guess I am no different.

But in this case, I am doing all of it for entirely selfish reasons. See, I didn't know him. Without having reconnected with an acquaintance from high school, he would just be another name. But that is what is getting to me. He lived this exemplary life and I didn't know him. His funeral is going to be huge, and I never heard of him until I reconnected with someone I barely knew in high school. I feel like I missed out. He was this major contributor in the life of someone who I have come to know and respect. And I never got to witness it. Somehow, it makes me feel very insignificant.

I am going to the funeral, but again, I doubt my motives. Am I going just to go? I want to "be there" for my friend, but it feels so weird. Why would I need to "be there" for her when people who knew him already are? It isn't like she or I lack friends. She has dozens and so do I. If it were a small funeral I wouldn't hesitate to add some comfort to a small number. But this was one of those genuinely good men who had a devoted wife, lots of friends, and was a giver to society. He didn't share my religious beliefs and I know little of his politics other than the two governors who will attend. So why am I going?

Because he mattered to someone who matters to me. Because I wish I had made different choices in life and had gotten the chance to meet him. Again, all about me. How selfish am I that I shed tears for "what might have been?" He was a good man, from what I hear, a great man actually, and all I can think of is, "I missed out." And on a deeper level I want to be able to support my friend because she represents the one type of friendship that I have never had. I have never had a truly close friend who is on nearly all of the same common ground as me. I don't have to explain my religious beliefs, or political stance, or parenting style, or my husband's idiosyncrasies, or my family, or anything. She just "gets it." That hasn't happened with any close friendship, ever. But I didn't know him. So we aren't on common ground.

One of the things I have come to know in my almost 39 years is that I have common ground with everyone. I have never met a stranger and I don't believe that evil is inborn. I believe we all have a natural predisposition toward evil but we are all inherently good. The Catholic Church refers to it in terms of "Original Sin," and "concupiscence," which is a tendency towards sin. We all have it and we all can overcome it. Without getting into too much theology, It is the teaching that we can all come to God even if we don't exactly know how, if we genuinely seek Goodness. My hope is to be one who fulfills the great Bishop Fulton Sheen's prophetic words, "There will be many surprised people in heaven." Surprised that I made it and surprised at who else did too.

In the end I think it all comes back to this idea of "control" that I am finally attempting to give to God. I can't save the world. I can't even really change the whole world. But I want to have at least known of as many people as possible who have touched it. I want to experience people. I want to see, first hand, joy and sorrow and distinguish the two while at the same time know that they are often two sides of the same coin. I don't make joy and sorrow, God does. Sorrow can be a very beautiful thing. What is the joy of reunion in heaven without knowing the sorrow that preceded? In heaven it is everlasting joy. What will it be to know everyone who ever was and ever will be and to fully know God? I have no words. I have no words.

Bring It On or Let It Go?

Obviously I have some differing opinions than many people I know. Yes, hello, I am Catholic, and many people I know are not.

So a cousin of mine posted a "news article" about a topic upon which we disagree. She noted that it was an "excellent article written by a conservative lawyer" supporting her point of view. I read through the article, to the end, and did my best to stay objective. I failed. I will never get those five minutes of my life back. I don't miss them terribly, but I still can't decide if I should say something or not and lose another five or ten minutes. I guess pointing out that the lawyer was "conservative" (whatever that means) was supposed to say something like, "Look a liberal (whatever that means too) likes this article!" The problem was, the article had nothing in it that actually addressed the concerns of the opposing viewpoint.

I have learned that the way to show objectivity is to actually present the opposing argument in a way that a person who holds that point of view would actually recognize as his or her own. In the film, "Listen to Me" about a group of debaters, there is a wonderful scene where their coach makes a young woman switch sides of a debate after making her opening statement. The subject? Abortion. It was an excellent movie. A really well informed debater can do it without anyone knowing where he or she stands.

This wasn't that kind of article. This was the kind of article known as a "strawman argument." It means that you build a false picture of your opponent's point of view and then proceed to knock it down. Then for the kicker, you claim victory.

I try to keep away from strawmen. I think one of the ways to do so is to actually view your opponent as an intelligent person who came to their beliefs through careful study, faith beliefs, or legitimate experience. I have often said to an opponent, "I get where you are coming from. If I had your same experiences, I would probably hold the same point of view." So my job, I believe, in getting the word out on authentic marriage and authentic sexuality is to present the side they haven't considered and then Let. It. Go. Walk away, and take my soap-box with me. I fail at it far more often than I care to mention, but that is still my job.

We all want victory. If what we hold as important really is The Truth, then victory would really mean no one actually lost. But, we are all fallible humans. We will make mistakes. We will misrepresent the Truth eventually, accidentally of course. But we still have an obligation to interact even when we are slightly misguided. We aren't on this big chunk of dirt and water alone. We have to live together. We have to communicate and not just talk around each other. We have to know when to remain silent and be thought the fool instead of opening one's mouth and removing all doubt. A huge piece of of this is knowing when to bring it on and when to let it go. As of right now, I still don't know. Please pray for me.

That Old Feelin'

Through much prayer and waiting we have discerned that God has called us to a small family. We are still leaving the door open if God has another plan for us, but everything has pointed to being called to be done having children. The reasons are many, and all are valid, some even extremely important, but it doesn't take away the hurt.

It is that old feelin'. Am I just falling back into a contraceptive mentality? I hope not. Do I just want more children on principle to prove a point? Very possible. Or am I just really having all of my maternal instincts in high gear? Most likely. It is so natural for a woman to want to have babies. But in recent decades it seems that our culture has tried to condition us out of our instincts.

Women want marriage and family and all of the trappings that come with it. For years there was a faction of people trying to convince society that women really wanted "freedom." They were right on one point. Women were enslaved in one way or another. But it wasn't our precious babies who enslaved us. It wasn't even really men, although they were the ones bore the responsibility for the outcome. No, it was and has always been we women who have kept ourselves enslaved.

I deep look at human history shows that every time women sought "sameness" with men is when men made their bad decisions. We have always been equal, since the dawn of time. What we have never been is the same. And this isn't the struggle of the civil rights movement to have to overcome "separate but equal." No. That was a certainly a battle that needed to happen, because they most certainly were not treated equally, and you cannot live anywhere on this earth and be "separate" from anyone.

No, this battle was a dog digging in his heels at the vet. This is the battle against neutering. Now I am all for neutering pets when needed. They have no self-control. But we humans do. So why don't we show it more often? Of that I have no real answer.

But this attempt at sameness was and is a battle of neutering. If women are less like women and more like men, then where does that leave men? Neutered, unless they dig in their heels and fight back. Every time in history when women stayed women, men did not fight back and our rights were maintained. We are equal simply because we are not the same. We are complementary. It is the universal yin and yang, push and pull, positive and negative. To be neutral has no power. It is through our complementarity that we have balance AND power.

Contracepting Lawnmowers

I wrote at an earlier date about a movie (unnamed here so I don't have to worry about legal issues) where the trailer begins with a young girl saying these words, "Most babies are accidents..." I was shocked down to the tip of my toes to hear that, but now it gets worse.

I saw an ad for a reality show where a couple has decided to try to conceive. So far they have been unsuccessful and are apparently seeking infertility treatment now. This woman is in her mid-30s and says a line that saddens me deeply. She says, "We spend all of our lives trying not to get pregnant and when we go to get pregnant we can't."

How upside down have we really become? Is it really so shocking to society that if you break something that it doesn't magically fix itself? Here's my thought: Let's say I have a riding lawnmower. I decide that it is fun to drive around. I can do fun little quick turns and make fancy maneuvers. But it has that pesky blade on the bottom. I can't go everywhere I want to go because I risk mowing down the daisies. I think the daisies look nice so I would like to save them for now. Maybe when they are not looking so hot I will go ahead and mow them down. But for now I want to drive right where those daisies are, and my blade is just stuck in the engaged position. I can't disengage it. Wherever I go, scattered daisies lie in my wake.

So I flip my mower over and smash the heck out of my blade with a sledgehammer. I keep bending it and smashing it until it will not mow daisies no matter where I drive it. The blade can spin and spin but will never reach the daisies. Now I can drive it wherever I want, on whomever's lawn I want and it will do nothing but make fancy maneuvers.

Then one random day I decide I want to mow. my. lawn. I want the blade to do what a blade was designed to do. I have decided that it is best to stay on my own lawn and stop driving over the daisies. I have decided this because I finally cultivated a good healthy relationship with my very own lawn. I would finally like to have a beautiful, manicured lawn of my very own. But it is too late. The blade is mangled. It will take professional intervention at great cost to straighten out the problem. I have to use precious time to fix what should have never been broken, (by me I might add,) in the first place. Can it be repaired? Well of course. It is just a silly lawnmower blade! Just rip it out and put in a new one! I can just do that so easily so I will.

So why would anyone mangle a perfectly good lawnmower blade just to be able to drive over the daisies? "What a silly analogy!" some might say. No one would do that to a perfectly good lawnmower just to go for a joyride! We see the idea of mangling a lawnmower blade as such a silly idea. So why do we treat our bodies with less respect than a lawnmower? What value have we placed on our human sexuality that we see corrupting a lawnmower as completely ridiculous, but corrupting our own bodies as perfectly reasonable? Word to the wise: Cultivate your own lawn and stop mowing over the daisies! You will be happier in the end. No mangled blade to fix.

Pro-life Surroundings

The good news is that lately, I have been surrounded by pro-life people. Even people who normally aren't pro-life have been behaving in a pro-life way. It is nearly amazing. It would be unbelievable without hope. I live every day in hope that more people will see that life matters. I look to influence everyone around me to know that without the right to life, no other rights matter, because they do not exist. The right to life trumps all other rights, for all of us.

Marriage Under Fire Yet Again

I have spent so much time trying to defend marriage that I don't have time to write about defending marriage. There are so many marriages going down in flames right now that it is hard to keep up. Most of the ones that I know of, I am not close enough to the couple to really say anything directly. It is often a mutual friend who contacts me asking, "What do I do?" It is frequently the same problems over and over: Boredom, infidelity, pornography, and just plain selfishness. Those problems have always existed, yet before contraception they didn't lead to divorce like they do now. What I find more than anything is people who constantly argue, "It isn't because of contraception!"

This statement makes me more nuts than any other. They are so sure it isn't contraception, yet they really don't know what it is otherwise. They are just sure it isn't contraception. The numbers prove otherwise, yet they don't want to hear it. They just want to continue to believe the lies. It is so frustrating.

Yet, I can see where they are coming from. Contraception masks so many things that it is hard to reveal. They complain about communication, yet they communicate a contraceptive lie with their bodies. But they never know that. They complain that their sex life is non-existent or boring, the very things they were told that contraception would cure. They have no idea that it made their problems worse not better. There is nothing more exciting than discovering that today is THE day, either because you are fertile and want to be, or infertile and want to be. As one NFP teacher says, "I never knew I could become sexually aroused looking at my wife's thermometer."

The problem with contraception is it is a silent killer. It sneaks up and destroys the marriage without ever being identified. It is a murder and the survivors never learn the weapon or date of death. All they know is that a marriage they hoped would last forever, is now cold and dead. Contraception was the unnamed killer. We have to stop it.