Two memories are lingering in my mind tonight:
1) A friend and I discussing authority, the various levels of respect for authority. I told him that I generally don’t take authority seriously, probably because my parents were lousy authorities, and so I learned that authorities were not to be inherently respected, just tolerated until I could get away from them and do my own thing, according to my own inner compass.
2) Talking with my RCIA director about why I wanted to become Catholic, and his telling me that above all, Catholicism tests your relationship with authority.
It’s ironic that someone who doesn’t think much of authority went and became a Catholic. I think for a long time I just kind of set my disagreements and doubts aside, but lately I’ve been struggling lately with the authority of the Church.
I’m sure this was set in motion because we did IVF to get pregnant last year, and while we were in the middle of it, the Pope said publicly that IVF was a sin against God. It still hurts me in my heart and my gut to think of those words, how cruel they are. I will say outright that I disagree with most of the Church’s teachings around sex and reproduction. I believe I understand what their reasoning is, but I believe that reasoning is faulty. However, since I am not gay or single or divorced, it didn’t affect me directly, so I could just keep my disagreement distant and abstract. Now, the Pope, whom I love so much, is telling me that my efforts to have a child are a sin against God. Now that’s personal. That hurts.
The reason why I never had kids before was because I was born into a family environment that left me emotionally and mentally traumatized, with few life skills, and utterly devoid of the basic skills of human relating. If I am a capable and competent person, if I now find myself in a healthy, loving relationship, with a good job and a happy life, that is 100% due to my efforts and that of my husband and other kind people along the way. Other than giving me my great genetic health and my basic gift of high intelligence and sensitivity, their actions have done more to impede from achieving those things than assist me. Because of this, it took me until I was already nearly 40 until I felt like I had worked through the trauma of my childhood and young adulthood to be feel like I was capable of taking care of someone other than myself. And by then, guess what? It was too late. My eggs are now too old.
I struggled with whether we should have children or not – for a long time I didn’t want to, precisely because I felt like I could barely be functional in life, let alone being responsible for another one. Then I was afraid I would be a neglectful mother, like my mother was. But becoming Catholic helped me with that – the fact that I both loved and resisted the image of Mary led me deeper into my own psyche, into the idea of the mother, the idea of me as mother. After years of seeing my body as something that existed for the use of others, then something to be hated, then something to be avoided and ignored, I finally was able to perceive my body as something warm and loving, something that could grow and nurture and give birth to and feed a child.
I prayed and prayed, and asked God if it was His will that we should try to have a baby. Was it right? Should we? Then one day I was in church, with my husband beside me, and I said to God: “Is it your will that we keep doing this, that we keep trying to have this baby? Because if it’s not your will, you’re doing a lousy job of letting me know. Put your answer in my heart, so I can know.” And guess what? The answer came, and it said, “Isn’t my message already in your heart? In your heart you want the baby. That’s your answer.”
So, God puts me with a crappy family who stunts my growth as a person for decades, then puts the desire in my heart for a child after I’m already too old to have a child without assistance – then his spokesperson tells me that to get assistance in having a child is a sin against God? Please ‘splain, Lucy, because this makes no sense at all, unless God enjoys putting his devoted servants into rooms full of funhouse mirrors and toying with them.
It can’t be that God really is against IVF, and that’s why we lost the baby, since I personally know Catholics who have successfully had babies through IVF. Does God find those innocent babies to be a sin against Him?
So I think the question here is – what do you do when God’s will and the Church’s teachings are in conflict? Am I supposed to bow my head and my heart in obedience to the Church and ignore God? I think the answer is, you’re supposed to follow your conscience, your well-discerned conscience. Okay, but it makes me sad, because why should God be against life? Is God such a jealous God that He can’t stand us to use our God-given rational knowledge and science to further life, to help life come along? We aren’t replacing God – we can put the sperm and the egg together, but we can’t control whether they fertilize or what happens to the embryo after that. Why and when these things happen is still a mystery – it’s still absolutely up to God, no matter what. We have no control over that. And why would God put someone in a specific situation, plant a burning desire in someone, and then tell them they are wrong to pursue it? It seems wrong, all wrong to me. I don’t believe our God is a petty, jealous, fearful God. I don’t think God makes mistakes. And I think the Church needs to trust that human variation is a part of God’s plan, and we – the infertile, the gay, the transgender – we are not mistakes. We are the way God made us, and we deserve to live full lives, not partial ones. And the Church needs to rethink its view that God made us all wonderful, unique individuals in every other way, but like little cookie cutter robots when it comes to sexuality and reproduction. I’ll have more to say about this later.
On Becoming Catholic 