This year at The Fruitful Hollow, our theme is "fruitfulness in your home and marriage". We will be exploring ways we can exercise fruitfulness in our domestic church, physical home, hobbies, relationships and wider family, even in times of darkness. To launch our "Year of Fruitfulness in your Home and Marriage", Ann is sharing her insight on how true love is always fertile.
(Trigger warning: miscarriage)
In many ways, the word “motherhood” has garnered a sort of stigma. It’s a stigma that is mangled up with the feminine. After all, our feminine gift is bound in the maternal — a concept that often feels loaded.
Not on my terms
Back in 2020, I married my best friend. A little more than a month later, we found out we were expecting. We could hardly wait to be parents, and I will never forget the overwhelming glee I had in announcing to my husband that God had heard our prayers: I was carrying our child! But a few weeks later, I awoke to awful pains. I knew something was off, but my entire being willed it not to be so. Despite my determination, I could not prevent my body from bleeding. I could not save that little life inside. All I could do was accept the harsh reality that our child had died.
Motherhood doesn’t happen on our terms. Children are not something I can demand. They’re gifts, and the thing about gifts is that they are unmerited. Gifts are not based on a success scale. It’s not because I was more “feminine” or I was “extra good” this year. They’re not prizes that prove my value. Likewise, gifts that we see others receive do not take away or compete with the abundant love God is pouring out to us. Yet, all the same, the painful road of physical motherhood can create a chasm in our hearts.
Woefully, studies indicate a rising number of people experiencing infertility; it is estimated that by 2025, close to 10 million couples will have picked up the cross of infertility. Since, COVID, miscarriage rates have also spiked. These harsh realities can make our feminine jargon — especially words like “maternal” — feel like a knife to the heart. But the maternal role isn’t bound to the physical. The feminine, like life itself, is a gift freely given to us — to you — by God. As women, we are created in love to receive love. It is in that receptivity, that we can then give back to God in love.
True love is always fertile
The feminine genius is found in imitating our Lady and her “yes” to God in all things. Even when her heart was pierced, even when her vocation took her to the foot of the cross, she lived out her femininity; through her ability to love, she revealed God’s tenderness. That is femininity. It is tender and loving at all times, even in the midst of bitter trials. In doing so, we can become, as St. Edith Stein writes, “shelters in which other souls may unfold”.
Our femininity is a healing balm that transcends the physical world. In its radiant love it orients man back to the Divine. In the words of Elisabeth Leseur: “A soul which is lifted up, lifts up the world.” The transcendent quality of our femininity can lift up the world.
True love makes us conduits of grace
Love centered on Christ is always fruitful. It is transformed in Christ. Dietrich von Hildebrand explains that “the love of the beloved lifts the lover himself to the heights.” Femininity is not a burden, nor something reserved for only a certain kind of woman. It is a gift given to all women. It is given to you, so that in following Christ, you can lift up others and shelter them with His love.
Comments