Feast of Mary, Mother of God: Sex, dating, marriage and children

"As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father”!  So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God." (Gal 4: 6-7)
 
Did you know that a child in the womb can recognize their mother’s voice during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy? As a result, newborns can tell the difference between their mother’s language and a foreign language within two hours of birth. To prove this, researchers used a high-tech pacifier that was connected to a computer that measured infants' reactions to sounds. The study included 80 infants who were, on average, about 30 hours old and from Tacoma, Wash., and Stockholm, Sweden. They listened to vowel sounds in their native language and a foreign tongue while sucking on the pacifier. The infants responded to the language they recognized from their mother’s womb. The language of the mother is communicated through the sounds interior to her body. The main message is that infants listen and learn from their mothers in those two to three months before birth.
 
Today, we celebrate the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. It was the first Marian feast to enter the church’s calendar. We speak of Jesus coming from the womb of Mary. Christ didn’t just come from the physical womb of Mary, he came forth from her love, her smile, her face, her voice, her caress, her memories, her faith and her habits. Everything that she was, formed who he became. Mary was the mother of Jesus Christ, human and divine. God chose one woman to be the mother of the Son. Mary was married and Mary was a mother and hat is why Mary is revered in our faith.
 
Sex, Dating and Marriage
Today, women in general and mothers in particular have a lot of challenges. As Catholics, women learn to live their ancient faith with some new questions. The challenge of sex, dating, and marriage occurs in a market shaped by the separation of sex and children, made possible by modern birth control technology and legal abortion. Today more than 40 percent of all children born annually in the United States are born outside of a marriage. Single mothers and mothers raising children in the wake of divorce and separation also presents huge challenges. Almost 50 percent of children in the United States will, at some time in their life, experience a home without a father present.
 
Love: Secular and Christian
Partly, we are to blame in the sense that we adulterate the word “love.” In our culture, love can be described as taking care of number one, sexual and emotional satisfaction and avoiding suffering. For the Christian women and man, however, true love is seeking the good of another, as other. We are looking for love that will bring genuine goodness, wholeness, happiness, and a spirit of generosity into our lives and the lives of others. It is what underlies our claim to the spiritual fatherhood of the priest and the spiritual motherhood of the religious sister as well as the husband, wife and parent.  Love allows us to be the person God meant us to be.
 
Motherhood and the Workplace
Separating sex and babies is the big disconnect men and women have from reality. Secularist feminism argues that real advancement looks only like what successful men do.  Motherhood is a waste of time, economically worthless, socially disvalued to the extent that some mothers are described as baby factories. The workplace and career for women, in some circles, is the path to self-worth, success, excitement, and real equality to men. Consequently, from the 1970s to today, birth rates have declined and abortion rates have risen and men and women put off marriage and child bearing. Neither men nor women should devalue the importance of equal opportunity in employment and career. Employment and success, however, without a discussion of family and parenting is a distorted conversation.
 
Love as the good of another as other
St. Thomas Aquinas said “Lord, in my zeal for the love of truth, never let me forget the truth about love.” For women and men, marriage sometimes requires an extra job to pay for braces or a school trip. Most importantly, marriage and children call us out of our self-absorption. We have to learn how to communicate with other people, the complexity of human life and the Christian idea of finding-oneself-in-losing-oneself as a way of life.
 
Children, like Jesus and the children of our parish, begin learning from their mother’ womb. Watching parents working outside and inside the home teaches the value of cooperation, commitment and dedication. Children in the United States begin to learn English or Spanish even before they are born. The most important things they learn from their parents, however, are man, woman, husband, wife, family, commitment, perseverance and love.