Trustful Surrender

In his NCR article about the Cost of Kids, Grondelski argues the very reason why we teach Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence as required reading in our matrimony prep classes:

Opponents of Humanae vitae often accuse the Church’s teaching of being “physicalist,” claiming the Church is only interested in preserving the external “structure” of the sexual act while ignoring its meaning and intention. One sees that in the argument that because natural family planning (NFP) and contraception both avoid conception, they are morally identical.

The paradox is that it isn’t the Church but its opponents who are the “physicalists,” the ones who reduce sexual intercourse to the physical act and separate it from the intention of the moral agent. I think the money issue helps make the difference clear.

...The cost of providing a good life for a child is something to be accounted for. But no cost can be attached to the life of a child – and that doesn’t mean the life is “valueless.” ...

The couple who uses NFP recognizes that there are values here, most importantly, the value of the dignity of human life that God has made possible through this act and, therefore, to “use” that act while denying its meaning is not “a sin because the Pope said so,” but because it represents a lack of recognizing who is God… and who I’m not. It’s no accident that modern bioethics often pretends to “play God.”

...And how do you know what will happen in your life? How do you know what your situation will be? How do you know that, when you have filled your barns to their eaves and your 529 College Funds to their max, that the Lord may not say, “you fool, tonight your life is demanded of you?” (Luke 12:20)

Why do you want to play God? What do you think you have the perspective of God?

Yes, the cost of kids is daunting. Yes, prudence and temperance are virtues. But so are faith and hope: faith that God is not going to do you wrong, hope that He will not give you a gift you do not need. And so is fortitude—the audacity to “go deep in faith,” and not to chicken out.