Separation Anxiety...

I just finished reading a book called Good News About Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions About Catholic Teaching by Christopher West.  Mine was not the revised edition the link goes to.

As a convert this book was helpful.  It went into greater depth on many subjects than hubby could, and it answered my questions - some of which I didn't even know I had.  More than that, the book solidified my theory that there is a great divide between society and Christian morals.  I know that's like pointing to the sky and saying, "look! It's blue!" but the separation is more noticeable to me now.

Before I had even thought about converting, in 2006(ish), I was living with my first boyfriend.  I had been neglecting my religious life except to attend a church camp during high school ('06 was my graduation year) but I still held firm to waiting until marriage...until pushover me happened.  I was devastated, and I should have known right then and there to leave and put myself back together, but the stubborn me decided I could make things right if only I married this boy.  I was 18, and being 18 I was pretty dumb.  Maybe not dumb, but certainly clueless. 
At any rate, I would come across the Christian teaching of sex and marriage in various ways and I would willfully ignore it.  I chose not to acknowledge it because it made me uncomfortable.  I wouldn't even take the time to really think about why it made me uncomfortable, I'd just forget about it and go about my merry way.  Because if I didn't pretend it didn't exist (via making fun of it with all of my other liberal friends) I had to look my mistake square in the eyes and completely reorder my life.  I knew I was wrong, and I knew I wasn't happy, but I wasn't willing to face the amount of change that needed to happen to make things right.  It wasn't until I was completely miserable that I decided to make a change, but even then it was a pathetic change, and I didn't learn anything. 
I didn't learn anything because according to society I had nothing to learn, I just had to find myself a better boy.
So I went on toeing around the Christian teaching, making absurd excuses like, "everybody else does it," to bandage the wound I had so covertly inflicted upon myself.  I say covertly because I didn't even realize what I was doing when it happened, all I knew was that I was hurting.  I spent a few years playing the blame game and pointing fingers to things that had nothing to do with my pain.  But it always came back, and each time it was a little more acute.  I was bandaging the wound, but not cleaning it so that it could truly heal.

Then I met my husband.

We had a lot of conversations while riding around the city in his car.  A very large portion of them was me posing theoretical situations to him regarding Christian teaching.  Eventually I decided to go to midnight mass, and then I made the commitment to convert.  It took me a long time to level with my past decisions, and I still haven't found peace from them, but I'm getting there: it's hard to say, "yeah, I messed up," instead of making excuses.

But now I understand the way things are meant to be.  I understand that society has degraded and is degrading sex in such a way that is laying the foundation for social turmoil.  The separation that has occurred regarding sexuality is quietly destructive.  Women complain that they can't find a decent man, but they don't understand that a huge part of the reason for this is because of what society is teaching.  A lot of people seem to miss the real importance of the contraceptive debate for this reason.  More is at stake here than people realize, and those that don't see are (more often than not) blinded by the intentional divorce of sex and children.

Huffery-snuffery Heathen Chinese.

I have come to the conclusion that there is a language barrier present between pro-life and pro-choice people.  I think that this is intentional: when someone says that abortion is killing babies - which when you come right down to it, that's what it actually is - someone else is very quick to respond that abortion is, in fact, only killing fetuses.  Why?  Because if abortion kills fetuses rather than babies it's okay.  It's a form of denial that a lot of people (including myself) sort of cling to; if you use a different word, somehow the act has become less brutal.

I'm not going to bother explaining exactly how an abortion works.  Mainly because I don't particularly feel like upsetting myself right this second.  Lets just say that it makes calling our society "civilized" a stretch.

To say that you are pro-choice because a woman shouldn't have to experience the "negative" consequences of her actions (barring incest and rape, as those are not the fault of the woman) is to say that murder is an acceptable response to the normal product of sex.
Maybe that was harsh, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it.

Here is where the language barrier springs up again: sex.
Society has taken sex and removed children from it.  What was largely stressed during sex ed when I was in school was to wear protection to avoid sexually transmitted infections.  There wasn't much about children or abstinence.  Sure, it was mentioned, but with the assumption that we were going to engage in sexual activity anyway so we should be taught how to do it safely.  There's nothing wrong with that because people do need that information, however, I think it would benefit everyone involved if it was stressed that the main byproduct of being sexually active is the chance of creating life.
We have created a dichotomy where there should be unison.

So when you say to someone who is pro-choice that instead of abortion being legal people should be more responsible with their bodies the point is missed.  Not only is it not very fun to be more responsible with your body, it's somehow become an attack on women's rights.  Because we have stripped the meaning from sex.  Now, I'm not saying that sex is limited to the production of children.  Far from it; sex is a wonderful bonding experience, not to mention it's lots of fun.  What I am saying is the idea of sexual responsibility is lost because we've removed part of the meaning of sex.

I suppose another thing this issue broaches is our society's view (fear) of childbirth and being pregnant in general.  Maybe not society as a whole but media for sure, which I think says something about society.
If birth was not demonized the way mainstream media tends to demonize it, maybe being pregnant wouldn't seem so terrible as to warrant killing the growing baby.  But it's not viewed as killing the growing baby because most women are not informed about exactly how a baby grows.  Abortion terminology is very clinical and removed; I would argue intentionally.  We don't want to know the truth.

~~~

Here's a point to ponder, though: if the pro-choice slogan is, "my body, my choice" are all pro-choice people then against circumcision or piercing a baby girl's ears?
If the answer to that question is "no," I wonder if they're aware of exactly how much doublethink is happening in their mind.

Image found here.

"Hindsight is 20/20"

One of the most interesting things about converting to Catholicism (and thus gaining a new perspective of the world) is looking back on the weird things I used to do. 
 For instance, when I lived by myself, I would bake in my bikini top during the summer.  This made perfect sense to me at the time since I was doing a lot of baking for work and it was so hot.  There was one time while I had roommates - and there were people visiting - that I did this without thinking twice about it.  This caused some trouble that I wasn't made aware of until later; it hadn't even occurred to me that others would find this offensive, but I should have known better.

I used to think that hanging out with guys was okay, even if I wasn't single.  Now I understand why it's not.  What's more, I understand that the reason I felt this way was because I tend to not get along with other women very well.  The main reason is that I'm kinda nerdy and most girls my age are not.  I'm not interested in The Bachelor, or anything on television, really.  I prefer Doctor Who, Downton Abbey, and Sherlock.  I don't find very many girls that share this set of interests, so I rationalized being friends with boys.
I had a friend that would come over and do chain mail at my apartment.  He taught me how to weave, actually.  The idea was he needed someone to help him produce enough chain mail dice bags to put in a nerd shop for sale.  I did not see anything wrong with this for the longest time; long after I stopped doing it because it made my boyfriend (now hubby) uncomfortable.  It just hit me one day while we were having lunch with the priest who was my instructor.
Being married has driven the point further.

Being on birth control is a whole other can of worms.  Part of it was being uneducated and the other part was laziness.  Now I refuse to go back on the pill, or any other form of synthetic contraceptive for two reasons: I don't believe that messing with your body's natural hormones is healthy, and intentionally removing children from the equation completely strips sex of it's sacred and emotional values.
Besides, I really am a huge fan of knowing my cycles the way symtpo-thermal charting allows me to.  Sure, I'll end up with a kid every now and then, but that's not so bad, and I don't yet perceive that to be the fault of the method as much as the fault of the practitioner(s).


I guess my whole point is that, having found the wonderful world of Christ, I look back and wonder why I did the things I did.  I was seeking happiness, but I wandered down the wrong path.
Something about being sort of gullible.

Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven

Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church.
written by Uta Ranke-Heinemann.

I did not read the whole book.

On page three (the first page of the first chapter) the author states "...that Jesus was a thoroughly "lust-free," i.e. joyless Redeemer."
Now that we have established that lust is the only way to joy:

...connects sexual pleasure so closely with the concept of "sin" that one more legal point should be clear: Sexual pleasure is not a good thing...the old Catholic view that there can be no sexual pleasure without sin.  (p. 4)

 These two points are in discussion of a session held in 1981 in the District Court of Hamburg.  The court is the one doing the connecting of sexual pleasure with sin, while the author is the one doing the connecting of all sexual pleasure to lust.  Presumably for the purpose of this book.
On page eleven it is stated that "...marriage was a permit to indulge in lust for those who found lust indispensable..." in reference to the Stoic view of marriage/sex.
Now that we have established that all sex is lust:

Like many neurotics he radically separates love and sexuality.  (p. 76)

This reminds me of my philosophy class in college.  When defining the term "love" in the first week the professor asked if there could be a difference between making love and having sex.  With no hesitation a girl in the front row said, "no."  This was rather disturbing to me as there is most certainly a difference between making love and having sex.  The contrast is quite stark, to me, and should not be overlooked.  But it is being overlooked by many, including the author.

So.  We have established the following:
Lust equates to joy.
Sex equates to lust.
Sex equates to love.

The implications are, to me, that one cannot find joy without lust and one cannot have love without sex.
I'm not following this line of thought.  It is apparent that you can find joy without lust, as there are many things that bring joy other than lusting or sexing whomever you please.  Sex with no love is the purest form of lust, and this does not make a good majority of women happy, yet this is what the author seems to find as the ideal (as the quote from p. 76 seems to show).  Further adding to my suspicion that this is her stance the author writes the following:

The philosophers of the Stoa condemned all extramarital sex and demanded conjugal fidelity from both spouses.  (p. 10)

The above is put in a negative context.  Apparently being faithful to your spouse is a bad thing.

So, with these in mind we move to Augustine.  The book had a lot to say on Augustine (and a fair bit on Aquinas as well) such as, "And since at bottom Augustine loathed pleasure more than he liked procreation, Catholic tradition has been preserved..." (p.280).  This is in reference to pope John Paul II allowing periodic continence as a form of birth control, basically saying that since periodic continence restricts sex, the pleasure-hating continues in accordance to Augustine.
Augustine is, apparently, the source of all Catholic teaching.
Also on page 280, "...the continual stress on children as the first purpose of marriage is really aimed at...keeping married couples away from sex."  I seem to have forgotten exactly what the natural product of sex was.  Isn't it something about creating more of the species.  What do you call it?  Oh, children.
This brings me to the final quote I wrote down:

Strictly speaking, it is an insoluble problem, because where there is no moral difference, none can be found."  (p. 281)

This is concerning the difference between contraception and what the author calls the rhythm method.  Never-mind that the author is completely uneducated about said method calling two separate methods (one bound to fail for it's incorrect assumptions, the other being following the natural cycle of the woman) the same.  I suppose that being a practitioner of NFP/FAM I'd know the difference a bit more readily than someone who is not acquainted with either.  Still...
At any rate, the difference is pretty distinct in my opinion.  What the author calls the rhythm method does not disturb the natural cycle of things.  Contraception, largely, does.  That is the difference between the two.
Not only that, but with the "rhythm" method you strengthen your self-control, the relationship between your partner, and your family (if you have one).  There are other benefits to it as well.

Like I said earlier, I didn't read the whole book.  I sometimes skipped entire chapters because they weren't about anything that interested me (namely oppression of women) and I skipped large sections of chapters for redundancy, or things like relating antiquated scientific views.
There was not a large part in this book about the direct oppression of women.  There was a whole chapter, maybe two devoted to it, but one of these was about how terribly hateful celibate men were to women.
The whole book put sex and lust on such a pedestal that I started to kind of feel sorry for the author.  If sex was that important to her, she might have been kind of miserable.

To sum all of this up:
I got the impression that the book attributed more import to sex than I think is due, and from the very get-go I could not agree with the author's view of lust as joy (being as I see lust as loveless sex, and loving sex brings far more joy) and so there were a lot of other associations I had trouble understanding.
This was the first book in a long while that I found I had to stop, reread the paragraph I had just read (sometimes twice), and then occasionally the paragraph before to follow what the author was saying.
It was a nice challenge, but I don't particularly find it relevant (although it did once site the Roman Catechism regarding marital sex).  The majority of the text was spent harping on how terribly in hate with all sex Christians are, and thus women must also be hated.  There was too much quoting of saints and not enough direct teaching of the church.

What I learned:
A lot of men who followed the Catholic faith also hated women.

As a small note, this book is dedicated to the author's husband.  I can't figure out if that means she liked being married, or hated it.

FAQ and Miscellanious Musings.

Random story:
This morning, while opening the shop, I grabbed the airpot full of warm water to brew coffee and set it in the sink as usual - I brew a pot of water before leaving to keep the pot warm, thus keeping the coffee hotter for longer during the day.  I measured the grounds into the filter, loading them into the brewer and proceeded to empty the airpot into the sink.  Today there was some sort of spider, about the size of a dollar coin, in the sink.  I watched him as he struggled to avoid the flood, which he did successfully all the way up until the very end when he seemed to just give up.  He curled into a ball and followed the last trickling stream down the drain.
I wanted to save him, but I'm afraid of spiders.
I was so sad that he went down the drain.  I even said, "I'm sorry spider."  I felt bad that I had potentially killed him for almost an hour, and even recounting the story just now I still feel bad.
And that's my random story.

Some of these questions are off topic; I just decided I wanted to write about what it is I get asked the most as a blogger and as a barista.

More on HHS and Contraceptives.

I am back.  The convention went fairly good.  I do wish I had been able to garden this weekend, or get some semblance of housework done.  Guess what I'm doing this whole week!

Just in case:
The following post is based upon arguments I have read and heard.  It is not, in any way, intended to refer to every single person and their views about the issue.

Further regarding HHS:
I read two articles in last Sunday's Perspective section in the Post about it.  Both opposing the religious side in favor of "women's health."  One was written by a woman and one was written by a man.  Both brought up valid points in favor of birth control, the latter bringing up the point that the government indeed forces others to pay for things they are opposed to.  The author cited four to six things (I can't remember now) that peoples of other faiths pay for via taxes that they oppose.
The religious argument is not a new one.
I suppose the question now is what makes the Christian/Catholic argument any better than the others?
Upon thinking on the things the author cited (vegans paying for subsidized grazing land for livestock we eat) I've realized that the difference is that birth control is not something that is needed by the majority.  It is not a necessity that people be able to have sex without facing the consequences of a child.  There is a percentage of women (I think the first article mentioned said something around 14%) that need birth control as hormone therapy for treating certain disorders (PCOS) however, these women are most likely not going to die without it.
In a further discussion with my roommate she argued that freedom of religion is acceptable until your religion is hurting someone else.  The example she gave was as such: what if she worked for a Christian Science company and for some reason went to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.  At the hospital she dies on the operating table and needs to be resuscitated.  Now, because Christian Scientists do not believe in medical care they refuse to pay the particular part of the medical bill (after insurance) that is regarding the resuscitation and she is left with the resulting enormous bill.
That's valid, but I don't think a Christian Science company would even offer health insurance to begin with.
I can say, that having been in a situation where I was uninsured and "needed" birth control, it is not difficult to get.  All I did was go to a Planned Parenthood, told them I needed a prescription for this pill, and they gave it to me.  The cost was double what I was paying with insurance but even then it amounted to an extra $10 a month.  I understand that this is hard to come by sometimes, but it's not like I had a high paying job.  I was pretty much below the poverty line according to my income totals at the end of that year, but I made due.  It's all about budgeting, which is a skill Americans seem to notoriously lack.  In any case, I haven't found an insurance provider that covers contraceptives fully (albeit I haven't been really looking for one either).
So my point is that those who argue that it's OK to force someone to pay for something they morally oppose argue that those who are morally opposed are in some way physically harming someone else.  At least that's the way it seems on the HHS issue.
The issue is silly because it isn't like birth control is hard to get.  If someone opposes it and therefore will not pay for it, pay for it yourself.  You're already working, so use $20 of that money every month to buy a pack of pills.

The whole thing frustrates me.  I have a problem with people who expect others to just pony up for their stuff.  The group of people who are entitled to everything regardless.  The same people who will buy a shiny new car when they know damn well they can't afford it and then are surprised (sometimes even enraged) when it gets taken from them because they can't pay.
Yes, there are people who legitimately need the help, and help should come to them in some form or another.
But there are also those people who are perfectly capable of supporting themselves if only they didn't live outside of their means.  I feel like these are the people that make up the majority in this case.

But it could be that I'm just being a cynic.

Contraceptives: a "Good" Idea...

Today I suppose I'll write about birth control.  Since it seems that everyone is writing about it (and for good reason I should say).

Having been on oral contraceptives on and off since 2006 or so, I'll start with the reasons women take them.  At least in my case.  And, to clarify, I've been off for over a year and a half now (ha, it sounds like I'm talking about some kind of addictive substance).

The largest reason that I took them was because I was involved with "progressive" douche-bags who encouraged it, and I thought it seemed like a good idea.  This is not to say every man I've dated to the point of meeting my fiance was a jerk, but a good percentage of them were (I'll touch on why I think that was later).  And I mean that in the nicest way possible; I'm not trying to say they were bad people, just misguided perhaps.
The second largest reason I took them was because I was uninformed.  I simply didn't think about it.  Yeah, when I was eighteen my doctor gave me the information packet with the pills and said, "read this," but I was eighteen; I wasn't going to read it.  At least not all of it.  The way my logic process functioned at this point in my life was as such: I read through the first quarter of the packet (just enough to read a couple of the potential side-effects) and got put-off, the side-effects were scary, so I stopped reading, but continued to take the pill.  Under what seemed to be the assumption that what I didn't know wouldn't hurt me.
This continued until I started being really serious about converting to Catholicism.
I had talked with my fiance (boyfriend at the time) about it on several occasions and that was when I really started to see what I had been blinding myself to.  It came very, very gradually, and it's still happening - to some extent - today.
A minor reason I took them was because prior to starting my periods were hell.  Debilitating cramps that made it hard to do anything but curl up and try to will the pain to pass, and I perceived my periods to be irregular (because my cycles are longer than 28 days).  It was nice to be able to predict when I was going to have my period, and while I was on them the cramps were less than half as bad, and my period was half as long.