How does that apply to infertile couples?
Yours in His Service,
~Bella
How does that apply to infertile couples?
Yours in His Service,
~Bella
This is not hard to answer.
Generally speaking, the couple enters the marriage with the intention and readiness to bear and raise children. They will only find out about infertility after trying, for a long time. Their intent is irreproachable. That they cannot is not their fault.
Even if they know in advance about infertility, the willingness to have children justifies it. The things impossible with men are possible with God. Abraham and Sarah. So there is no evil in being infertile.
An advance unwillingness to have children IS reproachable. (“I’ve got my life, but I won’t (by my own will) make it possible for others”.
CS Lewis illustrates how this is so in his Space Trilogy. Here’s an excerpt from a discussion on the meaning of deliberately avoiding children:
DISCUSSION
Marriage and Sexuality
“Everything in this chapter, save one page in section 2, is from the viewpoint of the company at St Anne’s, so Jane plays in here quite a bit. We also get Merlin’s view on some things, a decidedly pre-modern view.
While Merlin and Ransom are testing each other there is a series of three questions. The first regards the identity and implications of “Sulva.”
Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would he be who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place. (271)
...
"Sir," said Merlin, " know well that she (Jane) has done in Logres a thing of which no less sorrow shall come than came of the stroke that Balinus struck. For, sir, it was the purpose of God that she and her lord should between them have begotten a child by whom the enemies should have been put out of Logres for a thousand years."
"She is but lately married," said Ransom. "The child may yet be born."
"Sir," said Merlin, " be assured that the child will never be born, for the hour of its begetting is passed. Of their own will they are barren: I did not know till now that the usages of Sulva were so common among you. For a hundred generations in two lines the begetting of this child was prepared; and unless God should rip up the work of time, such seed, and such an hour, in such a land, shall never be again."
There’s a lot in this paragraph. I wouldn’t get it all if I tried. So I will just hit an overview and a couple of points. Medieval cosmology is key here. Under the medieval world view, earth is fallen and has “our curse.” They understood the other planets to orbit the earth, the closest being the Moon (which actually does orbit the earth). The Moon lay on the border of the curse. The side facing us was dead, marked by our curse. The opposite side, which faced what we call “space” or what is above called “Deep Heaven” – and at other times in the Ransom cosmology is called the Fields of Arbol. So the Moon is split – half good and half bad. (Filostrato has previously mentioned this dual-natured moon (173) though his understanding is a little bit twisted.)
So Ransom is describing the Moon and the effects of the curse within our “sphere.” The moon’s orbit is the border of our sphere. The second half – beginning “On this side…” – describes people on earth, our fallen or cursed people. We are focused on self, worried about equality and such. We don’t give ourselves to each other – even in marriage. This is THE relationship – when two become one flesh. This should be where love is most manifest and instead is where selfishness is most manifest. The marriage relationship is the place for sexuality to be lived out in its fullest expression – in fruitfulness. But alas. We hate fruitfulness. What God called good and told us to do – be fruitful and multiply – we have decided is bad.
We still want sex, yes, but we want to use it for self-satisfying eroticism instead of for producing the fruit that God intended. Our marriages are cold because we only care about ourselves. Our wombs – our marriages – are barren, fruitless. We embrace a form of the sex that God gave us but not sexuality in all its beautiful fruitfulness. We are “dainty” or delicate in our sex. We don’t want the real thing in all its fruitfulness; we only want to feeling. For some it is the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]. For some it is the closeness. Wanting only the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] seems more crass, and may be less noble, than wanting the closeness, the “oneness” that sexuality can produce. But why reject the fruit?
Lewis, at the time of writing THS, was “pre-pill.” Oral birth control wasn’t invented until the early ’50s. He saw the future, the “liberation” of women from the fruitfulness of sex. He saw the hatred of that fruitfulness. Lewis was wading into the edge of this and we are swimming in it. (Now I don’t want to condemn oral birth control pills categorically. They have place – and that is assuming they aren’t abortifacient. I guess that remains to be seen. Its grey enough that I wouldn’t recommend it, but also grey enough that I wouldn’t categorically reject it. And there are a lot of uses for the same medicines to do things beside preventing the birth of children.) The “pill” has come to represent the eroticism of sex without the fruitfulness, which is a very hurtful understanding of it. The pill itself is not evil. If it disappeared tomorrow we would still have the sin.
This passage is calling us back to the fruitfulness of sex, calling us to love the fruitfulness, to see fruitfulness as a gift. The whole world is fruitful. Life is fruitful. Without reproduction of organic life, all life loses its meaning. Look at other visions, other contemplations of this in literature. Consider PD James’s Children of Men where mankind completely ceases to be fruitful. Consider the fallout from the end of the fruitfulness of the plant kingdom in McCarthy’s The Road. All life is fruitful. God made it that way. We ought not turn against it.”
