The power to beget people

Commentary

I remember a get-together with some friends and their families. Several groups have formed. Some children play in the corner of the garden. A mixed group of husbands and wives tend the grill, sharing the culinary spotlight for better or worse. I was sitting with a couple of friends wrapped up in laziness, you might understand. The conversation drifts to certain news in the paper. Repetitive, dramatic, contumacious. It is about the abandonment of small children, abortions and infanticides, brutal maltreatment, sexual abuse of minors, different types of hell where so many children and women are born and have to survive. One solemnly adds: “It has always been like this in history. I can’t remember a time when atrocities have not been committed….” I am overwhelmed to hear him. He is right.

The text of Pope Francis, which I quote above, comes to mind, but I remain silent. God gives his trust to human beings, man and woman. He entrusted them with the power to beget persons; His own children. He did not do so with any other power, neither political nor religious. Nor to man and woman separately, with their backs turned to each other, as alien and indifferent towards one another, or as adversaries and enemies. He entrusted it to their union of love. Why? Because each human being, each child, is an unrepeatable and unique person, with absolute and definitive value, who deserves to be born from love because God himself created each one of us out of love. How have we responded – I was meditating – to that profound trust? Worse than beasts, I answered myself, overwhelmed by the present and past brutalities our children have faced.

I was about to get depressed when a particular inspiration illuminated that ordinary scene of our barbecue. Good heavens! I said to myself; I have the answer right under my nose! Our families, our children, our women. In history, there were and will be many types of hell. However, in each family, we have loved our children; we have welcomed them, protected them, cared for them with great affection. We have not mistreated them. We love them. As parents and spouses, we are full of defects, limitations, and poverty, but we love each other without giving up.

Suddenly, a flash of lightning: God had taken the risk of entrusting the procreation of people, children, to the freedom and love of fathers and mothers…, even knowing that atrocities and cruelties without measure would be committed. Why take such a known risk? For another certainty: our modest and anonymous families. Those who that afternoon played in the garden and prepared their barbecue. And like ours, so many thousands throughout the ages.

So, I said to myself, You, my God, have trusted in our freedom and love, in my wife and myself, and you expect us to reciprocate your trust. With a surprising and intensely tender gaze, I contemplated the barbecue, our children, and our families. An enormous impulse warmed my heart: “we will not let you down, my God – I said to myself – even if we run ourselves dry, we will love our boys and girls, we will take care of them like royalty, we will honor the trust you placed in us….”

In the meantime, the sky had clouded over, and heavy rain began to pour. The children, soaked, attempted to continue playing. Parents, scolding them, tried to dry their heads and legs. The barbecue grill with the meat was now a puddle. One of my friends said to me: “Are you laughing at the mess…? I knew why I was openly laughing. How could I explain it to him? I felt happy and immensely responsible. What enormous jewels they were, within history and hell, our modest but loving families! What a colossal humanizing role we were playing! For our families, so anonymous and so ordinary, God had accepted the risk of freedom and entrusted procreation to human love. In the meantime, it was pouring. Well – I thought – amid so many disastrous floods, our modest but loving families are Noah´s Arks.