Die Buchwalds

Tomorrow, the first Sunday of Lent, Mr. B & I will travel to the cathedral in Erie for the Rite of Election. He/we’ll participate in this rite with the rest of the RCIA class, but the rest of the journey to Easter Vigil will be celebrated at the parish where we were married because we spend our Sunday mornings there. Even though this is only the second major rite, it feels good to finally be in the home stretch on this section of our journey together.

Please remember everyone who has a hand in the RCIA process tomorrow as the journey towards Easter Vigil continues.

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Elena at My Domestic Church gives us an outline of a talk she and her husband are preparing to give at a Pre-Cana session. Give it a read, if only for the fact that she & Mr. Pete were married exactly one day before my parents.

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I want large quantities of fried dough tonight… and I even found a recipe but we don’t have all the ingredients here & by the time we’d go shopping, well, yeah, anyway we’re not going to make our own fried dough this year. There were a lot of commas in that last sentence.
So, instead of fried dough tonight, I get pork for dinner at home followed by fried cheese and grilled stickies at Eat’N’Park.
We might also do taxes tonight. It’s sort of a pre-Lent resolution to get at least the federal return done and in the mail. State and local taxes are going to be a huge burden, so I’m willing to save them for Lent.

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Ales Rarus is looking for posts about lent so send them to Funky!

What does this have to do with NFP? The comment box discussion turned to NFP and the conversation interested me but that post isn’t about NFP so I thought I’d write about it here so as not to clutter the comments box.

Steve, who regularly contributes and comments over at Ales Rarus, says that he has a hard time with the Church’s teachings about contraception/NFP/etc and wrote the following:

…contraception is (by my understanding) a grave sin. The problem is that NFP (its allowance in principle) makes it (i.e., contraception) a very difficult sin to detect, since NFP can be used for contraception and that would be a sin. The church’s teaching (by my understanding) is to have as many children as you can rightly raise and afford. NFP is supposed to be practiced ONLY (this is my understanding) for “natural spacing” of children or for cases of serious medical conditions or for serious poverty. This is just too open ended. Either the faithful are “free to choose” (gawd, that phrase grates on me somef’n bad…) when and how many children they should have (with obviously a strong bias in favor of many… say 3 or more) or they aren’t.

and then goes on to say

And, this is really the point, even if I WAS willing and did do so (i.e., practice NFP), I’d have no assurance, according to RCC teaching, that I was doing so for the “right reasons” and might very well be sinning anyway…

I very respectfully disagree with Steve’s reasoning. True, there is a lot of gray when it comes to the whys and hows of postponing pregnancy while using NFP. Mr. B. and I struggle with it monthly. Right now, we feel that it is in our family’s best interest to postpone having a child until Mr. B. can find work using his degree, but every month we discuss it and pray about it. So far, for us, his lack of employment has been a grave enough reason for waiting. We may at some point change our minds about it. This is a space where the Church really emphasizes “talk, pray, follow your heart/conscience.” Grave reason for postponing can be different for every couple and we have no place to judge… only God can do that. Which makes it hard, sometimes, to know for ourselves if our reasons really are “serious enough.” Steve is right that we might very well be sinning, whether intentionally or unintentionally. If unintentionally, we are only held accountable for sins we knowingly and willfully commit… If we sin intentionally and later realize the error of our ways and are truly sorry and want to try to not make the same mistake again, then we have the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the assurance of God’s forgiveness and love.
The thing that separates using NFP from using artificial contraception (whether chemical or barrier) is that using artificial contraception is always a sin because it takes away from at least one, if not both, of God’s intended purposes for intercourse.

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I’m being sucked into posting about Lent. I once lent this thing to this person and they had the nerve to not bring it back! Of course I’m not talking about that lent. Because that’d be silly and boring. And my wife just kissed me. That’s not terribly relevant, but it was nice.

I haven’t really thought much about what Lent means to me since I haven’t really [fully] experienced it. Amy’s making me participate this year, which is only right, what with me going through RCIA and pushing forth through the murky depths of confusion and into the light of Catholicism. How’s that for a metaphor? (What’s a metaphor, you ask? Why it’s for sheep to graze in! *ba-dum-ching*)

I have this idea that part of this Lenten experience will be me giving up eating pretzels during the forty days. This may seem minor to you, and hardly any form of suffering as penance or what not, but you’d not be understanding what pretzels mean to me. Pretzels are my staple food (I feed them to my staples). I eat pretzels very very often. Giving up pretzels would be a huge sacrifice for me. I have this other idea that another part of it will be exploring just want Lent means, and so I’ll have to let you know once I make that discovery.

Maybe sometime during Lent I’ll make a few Lenten comics for Fodi (Not for children).

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