Releases, Weddings, and Life

Whew. I just finished another product release at work. Friday, I leave for a friend's wedding in Philadelphia, and then on to Indiana for the rest of next week. Hopefully I'll have some adventures in Amish country while I'm there. The Amish can cook like nobody's business. Pray for me! Pray also for all married couples and for those discerning married life.

We like to talk about the crisis in vocations to the priesthood and religious life, but I choose not to forget the crisis in vocations to true married life, which is also a complete embrace of the fullness of life and love, particularly when it yields fruit. But that isn't something that our culture likes, in an age of shot-gun weddings, increasing divorce rates, declining birth rates, and abortion. Have you ever noticed how the television ads for the Ortho Tri-Cyclen birth control pill are identical in style to the television ads for Valtrex treatment for genital herpes? Apparently it's good marketing to appeal to potential customers by treating children as just another sexually transmitted disease that will prevent you from living a life full of joy and promise.

The Servant of God Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said something very wise about children and married life, and I'll never forget it for as long as I live:

How dull life would be if a musician were always picking up a violin and a bow, but never producing a melody; or a sculptor were always picking up a chisel, applying it to marble, but never creating a statue; or a poet were putting pen to paper, but never wrote a thoughtful line. Would not the farmer go mad if, each spring after he had planted the seed, he immediately dug it up, went on repeating the silly process, and never waited for fruits and harvests? What would happen to the mind and heart of a woman who, just as soon as the buds began to appear in her garden, cut each of them off, so that she never fondled a rose. Love, by its very nature, wants to bear some fruit; thus is saves itself from a duality that is death... Love is then discovered to be, not like the serpent that crawls on the same level, but rather like a bird that has an ascension of love and begins to taste its sweetest moments in the higher summits of flight.

Pray for us, Uncle Fultie.