Reframing Openness to Life
By Rebecca Corgan,
Once upon a time, before I got married, I’d go to Mass and look at all of the happy young families around me and thrill—internally—at the idea that someday I’d join them.
My prospective husband and I would meet, write our own love story, get married, and then populate our own pew. We’d become fast friends with the other young families about our age. Our children would be friends for life—perfect, right?
As I attended Mass, I’d pick up toys dropped near my feet by tiny church-goers; I’d chuckle, along with the rest of the congregation, when an infant shrieked during the homily or the Eucharistic rites. I’d also look around at the young couples sitting without children and wonder: What were they waiting for? Aren’t they being open to life? What gives?
Fast forward through a wedding, a scary health diagnosis, and several years of infertility and, now, I get it. Life throws you curveballs. Those people were doing the best they could. Most people are—and you definitely can’t tell what’s going on in someone else’s marriage by performing a ring-check and wondering where the kids are.
Over the years since we got married, we’ve had to learn this the hard way. When our second anniversary rolled around our friends and family started (with the best of intentions!) dropping hints about babies, and this only continued in the following years. My husband would post something innocuous on social media and I’d get fifteen texts asking when the baby was due. As a young, healthy-looking woman, I got more and more self-conscious about showing up at Mass and standing among our young, perpetually-growing congregation, feeling that we weren’t doing our part. I saw people glancing at us and glancing away—and I realized just how ironic it is when things come full circle.
Expanding ‘Openness to Life’ Outside of Children
The thing is, the Church doesn’t require much—certainly not the impossible—in order for us to be welcome at the table. When my husband and I got married, we swore to be open to life, and we have been. We haven’t been able to have kids, but we’ve still been open to life.
That juxtaposition got me wondering.
For years, I’d had a very narrow––and incorrect––definition of what ‘openness to life’ looks like. (The cliff notes? Don’t use contraception; have a lot of kids.) These are great (and even essential) starting points––but openness to life means more than simply avoiding contraception and having children. This oversimplification limits the beauty and breadth of what we can do to be open to life and God’s plans for us.
For the single woman, for the infertile woman, for the waiting woman, for the woman between kids, for the young or the old or the confused or the depressed or the healing, or for those of us who want to do more for life regardless of our fertility—for all of us, it might be time to expand our idea of openness to life and how we can engage with this calling.
Being Open to Life in our Dailies: How We Can All Be a Little More Life-Giving
Jen Fulwiler, a Catholic writer, notes that a one-sentence description of the Catholic teaching on openness to life is actually pretty simple: “Both the pleasurable and procreative aspects of the sexual act are good; to intentionally sever either aspect is bad.” If you’re not able or are choosing not to have kids for licit reasons, that’s not to say that you’re not being open to life.
According to Tom Hoopes at the Gregorian Institute at Benedictine College, we can interpret ‘openness to life’ a lot more imaginatively, should we choose to do so. Hoopes writes that it seems the Church chose the phrase very carefully; after all, the Church could have spared us a lot of frustration and just told us exactly what to do. Instead we get this wonderfully-confusing phrase: Be open to life. Hoopes posits that this could mean many things—an openness to adventure, an openness to new possibilities in our lives, or openness to sacrifices in order to create life. Being open to life could mean being open to God’s plan or “being open to no plan, sometimes, when your plan fails.”
Suddenly, being open to life takes on a new hue. It could mean a lot of things. For instance:
Being open to unexpected, unplanned pleasures.
Being open to our friends and our family.
Being open to uncertainty or resolutions that aren’t really resolutions.
Being open to our neighbors, even those that we don’t really get along with.
Being open to not knowing what tomorrow will hold.
Being open to not having to prove ourselves.
Being open to ideas that might be uncomfortable.
Being open to people who might live or do things differently than we do.
Being open to having zero idea what’s going on, but knowing God is there, anyway.
Excellent; but, being the practical person I am, I still wanted to figure out concrete things that my little family could do to be open to life even now, when kids aren’t in our immediate future. Here’s what we’ve come up with:
Learn about other modes of life
In order to be open to as much of life as possible, we wanted to learn about the different walks of life, particularly ones that differed strongly from ours. This included a renewed focus on (really) working on our (my) tendency to assume what’s going on in other people’s lives. Being open to life means being open to the idea that we don’t know what other people are going through, and it’s a good idea to extend them the grace of the benefit of the doubt. This could range from introducing yourself to people at Mass (or other places you routinely go) to exploring your city, sitting down and really listening when a friend or family member talks about their struggles, or even just watching a documentary. Opening our minds and our hearts is a form of openness to life, one that each of us can pursue.Support human life and other peoples’ journey towards parenthood
This includes supporting quality of life, life expectancy, and access to crucial life resources often improved through donations, volunteering, and other tiny steps of advocacy each of us can take. To support those journeying towards parenthood, see if you can donate to your local women’s shelter. Recently, we started bringing diapers over to ours and sent over a stroller that I’d gotten as part of a writing assignment; eventually, I’m hoping to volunteer there as well. Anything you can do to give even a pack of hygiene products or baby toys will be so, so appreciated––contact your local shelter to see what they specifically need.
Think outside the box in terms of what it would take to grow your family
As we got to know the staff at our local women’s shelter, we started to learn about their foster and adoption services. This got the wheels turning—and, while we’re not doing the paperwork yet––our chances for having our own family in the future grew. There’s a whole world of ways to grow your family if you’re having health issues or need to think creatively; for example, foster care is a beautiful, life-giving, incredibly loving way to give a child even a temporary home. Being present, welcoming, and generous towards nieces and nephews is an excellent way to support your family as well, as is reaching out to friends who are new moms and dads (who are definitely in need of a night out). Offering a night of childcare to people who need it, researching foster care, or thinking about adoption are all excellent avenues to consider!Embrace the beauty of your family, however it looks
We’ve had to focus on expanding our home and our hearts to include those who need a little love. My husband and I don’t need to procreate to become a family; we already are one. If we adopt or foster a child, we’ll open ourselves to give them what they need. In the meantime, we can work on our ability to love in the way we’re called to right now, with the people we’re given to care for right now. These relationships may not literally be life-giving in the same way that a marriage is, but they can make our lives more full, more vibrant, and give energy to all involved. We don’t have to wait to love; that’s the beauty of being open to life, life as it is, our lives right now.
Grow in trust
Life involves a certain amount of uncertainty, which is part of what makes it fun—and completely frustrating, and wildly paranoia-inducing. I’m a type-A kid, and the fact that I’ve had to revise my five year plan so many times has hurt. However, we’re learning that being open to life may mean realizing that plans are only plans. Remember that God’s got a story unfolding for you that you cannot yet see.
There’s clearly room for families of all kinds within our faith, and it’s each of our jobs to do the very best with what we’ve been given. It can also be very difficult to tell what’s in someone else’s heart from the outside. Severe illnesses don’t always leave an external mark. Financial insecurity often isn’t apparent from the outside. There are many of us who want with every fiber of our being to have children—but perhaps we haven’t found the right guy yet or there’s something else outside of our control that we need to get a handle on, first.
The wait can seem interminable, but maybe in choosing to expand our notion of what openness to life means, all of us might be more able to joyfully participate in the weird, unique, and wonderful plans that life has for us.
