Sunday, July 20, 2014

The cure for selfishness? How about NFP?

          My first real "hitting" attempt at preaching on a moral issue.  I think that I did pretty well in clearly making my point while also emphasizing the Good News.  I wish I could have said more, because I know that I pretty much caricature-ized everyone who uses contraception, but I felt like God was moving me to speak about this rather frankly.  Hopefully you all will take the week to learn more about NFP and its benefits for promoting strong families and faithful discipleship of our Lord, Jesus!

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Homily: 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle A
          I remember back when I was a kid that during the summer, and after I was old enough to be trusted to cross Theodore Street, which was a busy street close to the house in which I grew up, my mother would send me over to my grandmother’s house to help her with little projects around her house.  Grandma Lucy always had vegetables growing in her gardens and so one of my regular jobs at her house was to weed the gardens.  I was always glad to help out my grandma, but this was one of the more unpleasant jobs for me as a 13 year old.  As many of you know, I’m sure, it is a very tedious job and for a teenage boy it can be very difficult to maintain the concentration necessary to do that job well.
          One of the difficulties that I encountered in the job was making sure that I only pulled out the weeds and not the sprouts of grandma’s vegetable plants.  I often learned the distinction the hard way: when grandma would come out to check on me and find one of her tomato plants uprooted.  Now, I love my grandma Lucy, but she was pretty rough around the edges, so when I screwed up like that, I heard about it from her.  She never gave up on me, though, because she always let me back into her garden to go after those weeds.
          Sometimes, in the years that followed, when I would hear today’s Gospel reading, I would think back to those summer hours spent weeding grandma Lucy’s garden and I would think to myself: “Man, I wish grandma would have paid more attention at Mass; because it sure would have saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches if she would have just let those weeds grow!”  My guess, however, is that she did pay attention and that she knew that Jesus’ parable means slightly different things depending on which level you apply it.
          Taken as it is, Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the weeds applies to a pretty grand scale: the kingdom of heaven.  Applied at that level, the parable speaks very generically and the people he speaks of are “caricatures”, that is, identified by a major characteristic: in this case, whether they are good or wicked.  Now, parables are, essentially, metaphors; and a metaphor does two things: it both highlights certain things and hides others.  For example: to say that “time is money” highlights that time is something valuable and that it can be spent.  What it hides, however, is that time cannot be saved: it just keeps ticking on no matter what we do.  Thus, in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus highlights that on the earth there will always be wickedness mixed in with the good; but that’s ok, because at the final harvest the good will be separated out from the wicked.  What it hides, however, is that people can change, while wheat can never be anything more than wheat and weeds never anything more than weeds.  Thus, the wicked (that is, the weeds) are not doomed to always be wicked, nor are the good (that is, the wheat) predestined to remain good; for they, too, can fall into wickedness.  And so the scale that Jesus is working in is important for our interpretation.
          Speaking at the level of the kingdom of heaven, the interpretation means exactly what we’ve said: that always there will be the wicked mixed in with the good and that the good will be preserved from the fire at the final harvest.  Brought down to the individual, however, the interpretation will have to change a bit.  At this level, Jesus would certainly speak of rooting out the weeds as soon as they appear, because, as we heard last week, the good seed that falls among thorns is quickly choked and produces no fruit.  In other words, there is no room for both wheat and weeds in the individual heart of a person.
          We can also apply an interpretation of this parable to the level of small groups, such as a family.  There we’ll find a mixture of the grand, kingdom-of-heaven scale interpretation with the small, individual scale interpretation.  Here we see that wickedness can, indeed, be sown among the good seeds of the members of a family.  Yet, as on the individual level, it is important to root out wickedness at the first sign of its growth, for wickedness sown in the midst of the family can destroy the entire family altogether.
          One of the most destructive weeds that can be sown in the midst of a family is selfishness.  In a family—more so even than on the level of a neighborhood or a town—the individual members are dependent on one another.  When selfishness takes root in a family it begins to separate members one from another as each seeks to satisfy his or her own wants and desires often at the expense of the others, thus stripping the family of the good fruit it could produce.  Dare I say that one of the most sinister seeds of selfishness in a family is the use of artificial means of contraception?  Sinister, because it appears to be something benign, that is, completely harmless, while it quietly destroys the rich harvest a family might produce.
          Contraception is the seed of selfishness in a family because it cuts God out of the parents’ relationship.  In effect, it says “God, you can’t be trusted to direct this part of our lives, so we are going to decide for ourselves when we’ll have children.”  For many, what it also says is “We want to have sex without consequences, that is, without responsibility”, which is nothing more than saying “Sex is about satisfying my desires; it has nothing to do with my family (that is, unless I want it to).”  That sounds pretty selfish, doesn’t it?  When that kind of selfishness grows up in a family, it’s like poison that ruins the whole harvest.
          “But Father, we can’t afford to have an unlimited amount of children.”  Yes, I know.  And God knows that, too.  That’s why he designed our bodies—particularly the female body—with a discernible fertility cycle that can be cooperated with to space out pregnancies: in other words, a natural way to prevent a pregnancy when it’s not feasible to support another child that nonetheless acknowledges God’s control over life instead of selfishly taking control for one’s self.  The various methods for discerning and utilizing this cycle are called “Natural Family Planning” (or NFP, for short) and they are like a natural herbicide that destroys selfishness at its roots and fertilizes the individual members of the family so that together they produce a rich harvest.
          NFP forces couples to be attentive to one another so as to “listen” to the female body’s natural signals indicating when it is fertile for conceiving a child.  Thus, in order to space pregnancies, couples have to periodically abstain from sex during these fertile periods, causing them to restrain their passions (and, thus, their selfishness) and to find other ways to express their intimate love for each other, which teaches them greater self-giving and often causes them to grow more intimate with one another.  Now, is there anybody here that doesn’t want more intimacy—that is, deep, meaningful connections with others, especially their spouses—in their lives?
          This week the Church is sponsoring “NFP Awareness Week” and so I invite all couples, young and not-so-young, married and engaged to be married, and anyone who thinks they might be married in the future, to explore the benefits of NFP for their family.  (You can start by reading the “extra page” of our bulletin this week.  Additional resources can be found on the US Bishop’s website: www.usccb.org.)  Talk to your friends about it.  Find someone who is using NFP and ask them what it has done for them personally and for their family.  Pray about it and ask God for the courage to trust him and his plan for you and your family.  Most of all, try it.  Test its claims for benefits and let it test you.  Perhaps you’ll find some weeds within you that you didn’t realize were there.  NFP may help you to root them out.
          My brothers and sisters, spilling seed lifelessly is like sowing weeds of selfishness among the wheat of your family.  With NFP, however, one lays down a strong defense against those weeds; for he or she acknowledges that God is in control; and that that is a good thing!  With NFP trust in God and trust in his power to overcome evil, even as it grows up around us, grows and we flourish.  Thus, at the final harvest, we will be gathered together among the wheat and welcomed into the barn that is eternal happiness—that is, the satisfaction of all of our desires—in heaven.  Strengthened by this Eucharist, let us take courage to choose this life of happiness today.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – July 20th, 2014

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