I never thought I'd be doing this...

... quoting from "The Message" Bible translation of all things,

but last night on our back porch my just under thirty-year-old married nephew (the one who's a foot taller than everybody ((who, I heard later, got this text from my just under twenty-year-old niece who's a foot shorter than everybody)) ;)  said, "Oh, you gotta hear this."

Then he began to read 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, which, as the members of our local church know, has long been our congregation's touchstone definitive chapter and verse, according to our pastor.
But I'd never heard it said quite like this before. You've got to imagine it being read in a serious "contemporary youth pastor style" voice -

"Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. 

I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, 

not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose 

men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, 

chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? 

That makes it quite clear that  none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. 

Everything that we have— right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—

comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, 

“If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”

( 1 Cor. 1:26-31, from The Message translation) 

So, um, you're not really getting the feeling that we're the brightest and the best, high society group, etc.?  Yeah, me neither.  Just nobodies. Good.

Anyone else out there?

Why Have Children?

I came across a great article in World Magazine the other night.  It is called Metaphysically Deceived, by Mindy Belz.  In it she quotes a small passage from a wonderful 1993 essay by theologian and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender called "The Meaning of the Presence of Children," which I then found and read in its entirety, and I'm so glad I did.  (For some reason I cannot create a link to it because it was a PDF download, but you can type the article name into Google and download the PDF for yourself if you're interested), and I think it is well worth reading.
It is so good that I just have to put up this (rather lengthy) excerpt:

 The Meaning of the Presence of Children, by Gilbert Meilaender -

 There is, I claimed at the outset, a certain pathos in the question, Why have children? 

It suggests a loss of spontaneous confidence in life and an impoverishment of spirit. This does not mean that such a question is unreasonable, particularly for those whose circumstances make hope difficult, though we may doubt whether they are the ones always most likely to raise the question. In any case, I do not seek to judge the difficulties facing any particular married couple or their special circumstances; rather, I seek to reflect upon the social significance of our attitude toward the presence of children. 

The formation of a family is most truly human, a sign of health, when it springs from what Gabriel Marcel called “an experience of plenitude.” To conceive, bear, and rear a child ought to be an affirmation and a recognition: affirmation of the good of life that we ourselves were given; recognition that this life bears its own creative power to which we should be faithful....

The desire to have children is an expression of a deeply humanistic impulse to be faithful to the creative power of the life that is mysteriously ours....

 But granting all such provisos, there is still a sense in which planning alone cannot capture the “experience of plenitude” from which procreation, as its best, springs. There is, after all, no necessity that human beings exist—or that we ourselves be. That something rather than nothing exists is a mystery that lies buried in the heart of God, whose creative power and plenitude of being are the ground of our life. That life should have come into existence is in no way our doing. Within this life we can exercise a modest degree of control, but we deceive ourselves if we forget the mystery of creation that grounds our being.  To form a family cannot, therefore, be only an act of planning and control—unless we are metaphysically deceived. It must also be an act of faith and hope, what Marcel termed “the exercise of a fundamental generosity.” 

To the extent that we moderns have understood the family as a problem to be mastered, and not a mystery to be explored faithfully, we have quite naturally come to adopt a certain attitude toward our children. They have been produced, not out of any spontaneous confidence in life, but as the result of our own planning. We are, therefore, tempted to suppose that we must— and can—become their protectors, the guarantors of their future. Paradoxically, having lost the metaphysical underpinnings of procreation as a participation in the Creator’s own gracious self- spending, having lost much of the real significance of the family, we make of it more than it is.

In love a man and a woman turn from themselves toward each other. They might, however, miss the call of creative fidelity to life and be forever content to turn toward each other alone, to turn out from themselves no more than that. But in the child, their union, as a union, quite naturally turns outward. They are not permitted to think of themselves as individuals who come together only for their own fulfillment. In the child they are given a task. Their union plays its role in a larger history, and it becomes part of their vocation to contribute to the ongoing life of a people....

In many respects this is the most fundamental task of parents: transmission of a way of life. When the son of the ancient Israelite asked, “‘What does this mean?,” his father told again the story of the mighty acts of God, the story of their common life as a people....  Parenthood is not just biological begetting. It is also history—a vocation to nurture the next generation, to initiate it into the human inheritance of knowledge and obligation....

And until we rediscover the inner meaning of the venture of parenthood as a mystery to be lived rather than a problem to be controlled, we will be ill equipped to deal with the ills we confront."

The Lost Virtue of Steadfastness

 
I read this article in the latest Touchstone magazine and I found it comforting, especially in terms of motherhood. 

God's Place and Ours: On Mutability and the Lost Virtue of Steadfastness   

by Anthony Esolen

Here are a few excerpts:

"Something of [the] longing for what is not here, this joy of the pilgrimage, has set deep roots in the soul of Western man.  But it has become detached from an end to the pilgrimage.
We thus lose a sense of home, both the eternal and the temporal....

We are under compulsion of perpetual mobility precisely because, without God, to settle means to acknowledge defeat, and to rest means to die within.  The metaphysical condition of such a life is divorce. We change towns, we change schools, we change houses, we change husbands and wives, we change churches, we change faiths.  We go off into the distance, as we set at a distance those nearby things we still pretend to cherish, as, for instance, our children.  We look down upon women who "stay at home," thinking of them rather as creatures who are stuck in mud.  We almost treat as pious heroes those who are determined to leave their homes and never return, yet who still claim some tenuous and sentimental attachment to what they have abandoned.  We invert the wisdom of St. Paul.  We discard all things as if we discarded them not."

"We are not angels, we are not disembodied wills.  Jesus never instructs us to love "humanity."
He instructs us to love the all-too-physical neighbor."

"The metaphysical condition of the faithful Christian is not divorce, but marriage, not mobility and mutability but steadfastness.  'Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?' asks the Lord. 'Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee' (Is. 49:15).
Consider the image.  The child longs for the mother, for her breast; he feeds from her very substance.  It is that intimacy of place and person that expresses, in more than a metaphor, the steadfast love of God for his people.  For the Lord 'hateth putting away,' says the prophet (Mal. 2:16).  On what grounds may a man divorce his wife?  Jesus dismisses the motive behind divorce entirely.  A man moves from his father and mother so that he may 'cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh' (Matt. 19:5).  The young man who has squandered his inheritance in that ever-seductive 'far country,' when he comes to his senses, did not say, 'I must leave this pigsty and follow my fortune elsewhere.' He said, 'I will arise and go to my father' (Luke 15:18).  The Lord is the Good Shepherd who seeks the one sheep gone astray.  'Jerusalem, my happy home,' sings the poet, 'when shall I come to thee?'"

"There is a difference between being in a location, and dwelling; between remaining, with its sense of being left behind by the more adventurous, and abiding, with its sense of devotion and full-hearted peace.  'How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!'"

"It is doubtful whether, without steadfastness, without devotion to this place, this work, this spouse, this land, we can enjoy even a decent human life.  A tumbleweed is not only rootless.  It is directionless.  It is blown about by the chance of the wind, quitting here, divorcing there, forgetting here, abandoning there.  In following our own purposes, regardless of the claims of steadfastness upon us, we lose our purpose, and turn with every turn of the fickle heart."

"We are not all monks.  But we are parents, and children, and neighbors, and citizens.  God has given us one another, and our homes, as worthy objects of our steadfast love, and as the grounds for preparing ourselves for the eternal home, the city of everlasting foundations.  That Jerusalem is illuminated neither by the turning sun or moon, not by the electric static of the news, such as it always is, but by the eternal glory of God, and the Lamb."