13. Generation

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If our eyes could see into nature deeply, we would see in it a reflection of spiritual and eternal verities. As an echo is not the original sound but its distant reverberation, so all the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and the like are feeble echoes and dim reflections of Divine Truth. Long before Newton lived, St. Thomas spoke of the Law of Gravitation, not in the mathematical language of an object and its distance from the earth, but in terms of the increased motion as a body approaches the end of purpose for which it was made. He saw in this a reflection of spiritual gravitation, by which a soul increases its virtue as it gets closer to God.

One of the great joys of eternity will be seeing the correlation between all branches of knowledge, arts and sciences and the Word and Wisdom of God. But even now the dim glimpses we catch of that order make us see all human generation as the reflection of the eternal generation of the Word in the bosom of the Father. Our entire outlook on life, conception, and birth changes once these things are seen not as an evolution from slime, but as a gift from the Divine. Human generation is not a push upwards from the beast, but rather a gift downwards from the Trinity. The begetting of children is not an imitation of the beasts of the field, but a feeble reflection of the eternal generation of the second Person in the bosom of the Father.

God made the universe fecund. The understanding of this mystery will throw a new light on the family. It is the very nature of life to be enthusiastic, for all life tends to diffuse and communicate itself and even to overflow its perfections in order that others may share its joy of living. The Greeks and Scholastic Philosophers used to express this truth in the principle: "Everything that is good tends to diffuse itself." In biological language, this truth is expressed in these words: "All life is fecund."

The fountainhead of all generation, the source of all artistic creation, the prototype of the birth of children, the archetype of every mind that generates a thought, if carried back to its ultimate source is the Goodness of God, Who diffuses Himself internally by the eternal generation of the Son, and externally in creation. Whether we think of the earth's first family, when the Father sent the Spirit to a maiden as a Spouse, begetting in her soul-garden and "flesh-girt Paradise" the Son of Man, Who is the Son of God, or whether we think of the last birth in the world, here is the pattern of all generation: the Triune God in whom self-giving is self-receiving.

This brings us to the first law of Love: All love ends in an Incarnation, even God's. Love would not be love if it did not escape the limitations of individual existence by perpetuating itself, nor if it did-not achieve a kind of immortality in progeny, wherein death is defeated by life. Behind the urge to procreate is the hidden desire of every human to participate in the eternal. Since man cannot do this in himself, he compensates for it by continuing life in another. Our inability to externalize ourselves is overcome by giving, with God's help, something immortal to the human race. As St. Thomas tells us: "The intention of nature is directed toward that which is always and perpetual. Since in corruptible things, there is nothing which is always and perpetual except the species, the good of the species belongs to the chief intention of nature and natural generation is directed to the conservation of species."

Human generation is related in a special way to eternity. Sex love is not meant for death: rather, Eros is for Bios; love is for life. But once the Divine Source of Love is denied, then Eros becomes death. The denial of the immortality of the soul, and the parents' attempt to deliberately frustrate new life, go together. If the soul has no relation to eternity, then why should the body seek to overcome death by begetting new life? Eros does lead to death. As Rom Landau put it: "If the ultimate aim of sex is not new life, what else can it be? There is one alternative and one alone: Death. Sexual life that has become chaotic implies both spiritually and physically a nationwide waste (killing) of the procreative potential (which means unborn children). Such a waste is identical with death."

The cell division of the amoeba, the generation of plants and animals, and the begetting of human kind are the mirrorings of a Generation in the heart of God. The fecundity of God is the source of all fecundity on earth. St. Thomas, speaking of generation, writes: "Those things which in carnal generation belong separately to a father and mother are all attributed in Holy Scripture to God the Father in the generation of the Word, for the Father is said to give life to His Son, to conceive Him and give Him birth." Not only does the child reflect the Eternal Generation of the Word but, from another point of view, it faintly echoes the Incarnation. All love tends to become like the one loved. God loved man and He freely became man and appeared as Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. Man loves woman and woman loves man, and their loves, too, tend to an incarnation of love in the flesh of their offspring. With perfect justice, then, did the Word, Who was made flesh through the Spirit of Love, call all children who were born of love unto Himself: "Let the children come to me, he said, do not keep them back; the kingdom of God belongs to such as these." (Mark 10:14)

Thus is physical desire transmuted into something nobler than the instinct that moves the animal world, as parents see themselves called to be co-creators with God Himself. Such was the meaning of marriage that the angel gave to Tobias: "Take the maid to thyself with the fear of the Lord upon thee, moved rather by the hope of begetting children than by any lust of thine. So, in the true line of Abraham, thou shalt have joy of thy fatherhood." (Tobias 6:22) "We come of holy stock, you and I, and God has life waiting for us if we will but keep faith with Him." (Tobias 2:18) It was this same insight into the eternal purposes of God that caused a woman in the crowd, on seeing Our Blessed Lord, to exclaim: "Blessed is the womb that bore thee, the breast which thou hast sucked." (Luke 11:27)

"Two in one flesh" which is the condition of producing offspring is to be seen as the poorly lighted symbol of the union of two natures, the Divine and the human, in the Person of the Word of God. The yearning of lovers to be one in marriage is born of a oneness in soul, which is translated into oneness of body. Souls fall in love first, and then they are united in mind, and then there is a union in flesh. It was said of the Blessed Mother that "she had already conceived in her heart that which the Spirit now conceived in her womb." This means she was already so identified with God through love, and she so possessed God through grace, spiritually, that the physical presence was a corollary through a distinct act of God's Omnipotence. But in a lesser degree, the "being in love" naturally tends to unity and therefore "two in one flesh." As Browning expressed it:

Because of our souls' yearning that we meet

And mix in soul through flesh, which yours and mine

Wear and impress, and make their visible selves,

--All which means, for the love of you and me,

Let us become one flesh, being one soul.

The act of generation, when seen as the gift of God and performed in the state of grace or love of God, merits for husband and wife further graces and helps them to save their souls. As St. Thomas puts it: "If one is led to perform the marriage act either by virtue of justice, in order to render the debt to the partner, or by virtue of religion, that children may be pro-created for the worship of God, the act is meritorious."

Every Catholic mother whose increase of grace is rewarded with increase of life sees herself as feebly imitating Mary, who for nine months bore within herself her Guest, Who was destined to become the Host of the Word. As the priest in the Mass offers bread and wine which has been harvested and rescued from an unredeemed nature, so the wheat that Mary ate, the wine that Mary drank, the light that entered into her chaste body, the images her eyes saw, and the song of the birds her ears heard, all became her Offertory to Him Who was to be the Body and Blood of Christ. Motherhood is sacred because Jesus had a mother. Birth is sacred because Mary threw open the portals of her flesh to the "First-born of all creation."

Maternity is a natural Eucharist. To every child at her breast, the mother says: "Take ye and eat; this is my body; this is my blood. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you shall not have life in you." Our Divine Lord said: "As I live because of the Father, the living Father who has sent me, so he who eats me will live, in his turn, because of me." (John 6:58) The mother says to her child: "As I live because of Christ, so you will live because of me." As under the species of bread, day by day, Christ nourishes the Christian, so drop by drop, the mother nourishes the child. As the Divine Eucharist gives immortality ("The man who eats this bread will live eternally." John 6:59), so this human eucharist of motherhood is the guarantee of temporal life. The angel that once stood at the gates of Paradise to prevent man from eating the tree of life now sheathes the sword, as life communes both at an altar rail and at a breast. That which in motherhood was first a nourishment of a body, with the passage of time becomes the nourishment of the mind and soul, as now not drop by drop, but word by word, the child is brought closer to the Word, his Savior, and Love.

The creative act of God is necessary to the human act of generation. Just as two men in business, or two artists in co-operation, produce results beyond the sum of their individual contribution or inspiration, so does the touch of the finger of God upon man and woman awaken something to immortal life. Neither mother or father really know what strength they have until the child comes to prove it. Two animals can unite and out of their parental powers form an animal soul, because the animal soul has no operations apart from the biological and chemical constituents of its organism. But the human soul has two operations independent of matter, such as thinking and loving. Because the greater cannot come from the less, because we cannot gather figs from thistles, it follows that the human soul must, in Aristotle's language, "come from without"; or in our language, be created by God.

Nothing is more binding than a child, who is the symbol of the survival of man, the pledge of the resurrection of the body. As God took a rib from Adam and gave him a helpmate so, in marriage, the husband again loses something to gain a richer inheritance, as the farmer who sows his seed reaps his harvest. Nothing is more religious in nature than procreation; it is the sign both of unity and continuity. The disjointed, separated, and egotistical have no use for the child. The men and women who think of their lives as bounded by the time limits of a cow cannot wait for the future; the craving for immediate pleasure and repose kills the willingness to plant a flower and wait for its maturity. Only those who have immortality in their hearts really yearn to prolong that immortality through the child. An impoverished he art has nothing to contribute to another but its emptiness and, therefore, nothing to transmit to posterity. No one can transmit what he has not got. The will not to prolong life is a confession that one lacks life. When the spirit has become sterile, then even human life seems worthless. And if one cannot bear the ennui and boredom of his own life, there is no urge to give life to others. The denial of the offspring is a sign of the deadening of the spirit.

But the begetting of new life is a sign that the heart is so full of happiness and love that it will die unless it overflows. The choked and dammed river collects scum and dirt, but the quick mountain streams that hurry over sacrificial rocks are purified in their flight to bedew newer and richer fields. Man is not made for isolation, neither is he made for collectivity; but he is made for the living group, the family, the community, the nation, and the Church. To live in it, however, he must contribute to it: husband and wife by physical birth, the priest by spiritual birth or conversion. For body and soul, therefore, generation is the condition of wholeness, sanity, and order. The priest who begets no new life in Christ, either through his preaching, his sacrifices, his mortifications, or his actual conversions, is condemning himself to the same penalties of sterility as do the husband and wife who rebel against the law of life.

The human body has little or no power of renewal. The old cannot, like a crab, go backwards, nor can an aged Faust ever return to youth outside of legend. But the soul can be renewed. Dead to Divine life, it can be reborn. The soul may be described as the faculty for both enjoyment and renewal: to just the extent that the spirit or soul is recognized in marriage, do the partners feel an urge for renewal in procreation. As humans lose the consciousness of the Divine Image within them, and as the body becomes the sole existent, the instinct for renewal is lost. The consciousness of the soul and the desire for procreation go hand in hand, as do materialism and sterility.

The boredom written on the faces of humans who deny the soul is the harbinger announcing death. Their agony is that they have no mystery. Lacking the secret of eternity, they have no passion to tell it to other generations. They who bear the mystery of eternity in their hearts cannot bear the thought of time killing that mystery. As the power of keys is passed on from Peter to Peter "until the consummation of the world," so the mystery of generation that God has given to espoused lovers is whispered from generation to generation. No wonder, then, that the Woman who was conscious of her fecundity through the Spirit should exclaim in her song, the Magnificat: "All generations shall call me blessed." The secret of God's goodness is too good to keep!

There is no disgust in a life that is fecund, because there is a mystery. As time goes on, the river of rapture of husband and wife broadens. The eddies of passion may remain in the shallows, but their current never stops flowing. The companionship that began in ecstasies of flesh now widens into the sharing of bread, the communion of mind, and heart, and will, as they taste the sweet delirium of simply being together. Love is soon discovered to be oneness, more than the mere assimilation at which new lovers strain. The glamour passes, but the mystery deepens until they are made one through the deep sharing of life's meaning in the Mystery of an Eternal Love that gave only to receive.

Every dawning motherhood has received the sweet visit of the Holy Spirit. The Fiat of the Annunciation is repeated by every woman accepting in herself the incarnation of love. The veneration surrounding motherhood is due to the fact that a woman becomes the mother not only of a body but of a soul. The majesty of the Creator descends upon her marriage, as she becomes the guardian and priestess of a life given by God. Something of the imperfect priestly character of the Mother of God is given to each woman as she brings down to earth a soul by her consent, and as she offers it to God, as the Mother of God offered up her Son. Each new child with baptism becomes a brother by adoption of Christ, co-heir of heaven.

As the whole of the Divinity abides within each Divine Person in the Trinity, so the Blessed Trinity abides, through the quality of grace, within the spotless soul of the newly baptized child. In the baptized child, the Father is well pleased and sees Himself as in a mirror untarnished by sin, unhampered in His action by a perverted will. In Him dwells the Holy Ghost, and in Him also the soul of Christ offers Himself to His Father in adoration.

God gives to each man the divine life of grace, if he desires it. But He also wants man to be the channel of that Divine Life. If man refuses to give human life, God cannot give Divine Life. But whereas man can refuse to give human life, and therefore limits the creation of more souls, God Himself can never refuse to give the body of a child a soul. God obeys man and woman in their union, just as He obeys the priest at the moment of consecration. Even though the priest who consecrates be unworthy, God nevertheless descends onto the altar. However unworthy and illegal the union of man and woman, God does not refuse to give to the fruit of this union an immortal soul.

In the marriages where the fruit of love is deliberately refused, not only is the incarnation of love denied but love itself is killed. There happens then in that trinity of human love a rupture, caused by the rejection of the living seal to their love. The love they now may profess to have for each other, is only love of self in the other, a self-centered, self-feeding, self-destroying, and death-giving love, which is worse than hatred. Both partners in crime are cut off from each other through the death of love. In their separation, they become two isolated beings, a duality instead of a trinity.

The more a marriage union is based on the Divine, the more the husband and wife are in harmony with God, the more they find in each other that eternal fascination and satisfaction which transcends earthly frailties and disappointments. Such love reaches to the soul itself, invisible and immaterial, whose beauty can only augment with age, even while the beauty of the body fades. Love is then the love of the Spirit itself, powerful as only spiritual love can be. These bodies later on will win immortality in the Resurrection, for nothing that has been found worthy of housing the Incarnate Word will perish. Resurrection will come to the bodies of the adopted brothers of Christ, even as it comes to the Body of Christ Himself. Lovers always speak of the immortality of their love, and cynics scoff at them, but the lovers are right. Their love can become immortal. It is sufficient to steep it in God, and it becomes impervious to time and space. God is unending Life and Eternal Love, and the lovers united to Him are caught up in the ceaseless current of love which flows between the persons of the Blessed Trinity. Poor indeed would love be if it were only two flames within closed lanterns! Nowhere on earth is the satisfaction for the yearning for eternity to be found. Not here is the last veil lifted for the final revelation of love, not here the paradise of love without satiety, but beyond the "pillars of death, the corridors of the grave," where finally the companionship of days and years will be summed up, not in an hour of ecstasy where words and looks fail, but where the consummation of love is lost in the ecstasy of eternal union with the Heart Beat of God's Everlasting Love!

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