After Pride: Pouring Out

‘Freedom consists not in doing what we like but in having the right to do what we ought.’ -St. John Paul II

After a couple weeks of heightened (grand)parenting, Annette admitted, ‘I’ve never been more happily exhausted.’

She’s ‘poured out.’ Yet like every good enough marriage, that well-spring will replenish itself and spill over to another day with toddlers or an early evening with kids of all ages and at least three big dogs underfoot. God made us to well up. We’re well-trained fountains.

We became one so we could pour out for our kids. We gave them a fighting chance for true moral freedom. It may take them time to realize that freedom. But a good-enough marriage gives them a ballast that helps set them aright in the fullness of grace and time.

Unwittingly, persons who LGBTQ+-identify forfeit that freedom and the fruitfulness that could be theirs!

Attempts to transition to the other sex always sabotages a person’s capacity to reproduce new life. In the excellent book Sexual Identity, Dr. Patrick Lappert writes: ‘Transgender surgery is based on the principle that it is legitimate to destroy the human capacity to reproduce in order to produce a counterfeit structure to satisfy a subjective desire.’

And every ‘gay’ couple forfeits the freedom to bring forth new life together. Rainbow culture undermines the purpose of our sexual humanity, which is as much about uniting lives as it is creating new ones.

Call me old-fashioned but I’m sticking to the old story that the body and its commitment to another body must proceed beyond itself. That means opening to the life that our bodies create together. And the joy and discipline of tending to that life!

Training in love together supersedes a romantic, emotional or erotic high. It’s about reaching beyond our comfort zone for the other’s good. ‘It’s the nature of the passions to be guided by reason’ (Thomas Aquinas). I can know the good and do it! That frees us to act better than we are, to see beyond the cracked mirror of adolescence without end.

We preached one more time at St. Aidan’s where Annette closed with this parenting quote from Joanie Gulliksen: ‘We have the privilege and opportunity to have our children climb up on our shoulders to help them see farther than we can, that they might be blessed beyond measure in His Kingdom of love.’