Following God’s design for how he created us as male and female brings great peace, harmony and unity to marriage, family and our world. I can remember vividly feeling as though I was a bystander with each of the seven cesarean sections that Mindy endured. “Lord Jesus,” I would pray, “help me to be a supportive husband and please, Heavenly Father, give me your grace to be a worthy father.” Witnessing the gift that my wife made of herself in childbearing and beyond gives me the desire to lay down my life as Christ does for his bride, the Church. It is always amazing how God created women to be the “Garden Enclosed” — the paradise where new life begins. With each daughter and son, I can recall the lump in my throat, filled with deep emotion, some trepidation and lots of gratitude that God would entrust us with these precious children.
For certain, God is generous — now our oldest, who married her husband in late July, is carrying their first precious child due in late May, our first grandchild. What joy and anticipation we have, although the thought of being “Grandpa” makes me feel seasoned. When they went to their first doctor’s appointment to have an ultrasound and determine the due date of the baby, their OB/GYN introduced herself along with some small talk and then turned to Josh, her husband, and said, “We are now going to talk about some female issues that might make you uncomfortable.” Josh then said, “I learned in marriage prep how to chart Karlie’s fertility symptoms and temperature through Natural Family Planning and all of this fascinates me.” The physician was pleasantly shocked and put at ease by Josh’s passion and concern for his ‘bride’ and mother-to-be. Father Brendan Rolling, the Benedictine priest who witnessed their marriage, said, “Josh is a scholar of the Catholic faith disguised as a football player.”
After the good news was confirmed at their doctor’s office, they let others know, along with posting the news on social media. Not everyone had a positive response. “So soon?”; “Don’t they want to have time for themselves?” And some even had their suspicion: “Were they pregnant before they were married?” Comments rolled off peoples’ tongues. As parents and grandparents, we were taken off guard as to how to respond. Then it came to me: “There is a nursery rhyme that we learned as kids which has deep theological meaning.” One person responded, “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many children she didn’t know what to do.” I responded, “God knows what to do.” However, the one that came to me was, “Karlie and Josh were sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.”
Pope St. John Paul II put it this way, in Familiaris Consortio (“On the Family”), Article 28. With the heading, “Cooperators in the love of God the Creator,” he wrote: “Thus the fundamental task of the family is to serve life, to actualize in history the original blessing of the creator – that of transmitting by procreation the divine image from person to person. … Sexuality is not just something biological but concerns the ‘innermost being of the human person’ (Familiaris Consortio, 11). This narrative of God’s love for each of us is far more important than any guarantee of wealth or fame — but possibility… in a word – hope. Why hope? JPII gives us the answer: “The fruitfulness of conjugal love is not restricted solely to procreation of children … It is enlarged and enriched by all those fruits of moral, spiritual and supernatural life which the father and mother are called to hand on to their children, and through the children to the church and to the world.”
There is no other glorious blessing for parents, now grandparents, to be caught up into the experience of our own children cooperating with the Lord and giver of life, the Holy Spirit. It makes real and visible the reality of the eternal exchange of the life-giving love of the blessed Trinity that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit long for each of us to participate in.
