Symphony Of Faith, The

by Ruth Hayes-Barba

"Without doubt, Humanae Vitae is certainly the most misunderstood papal intervention of this century, becoming the spark, which led to three decades of doubt and dissent among many Catholics, especially in developed countries"¹ It is no secret that it was dismissed before it was promulgated, and rejected out of hand without even being read by many theologians and laity alike.² There was already a cultural mindset in place that predisposed persons to repudiate its teachings. The 1960's were turbulent times in which authority was rejected, and the individual paramount. The sexual revolution was upon us, and technology burst upon the scene in heretofore-untold ways. Man and woman were finally truly free, or so it would seem.³

Issues of privacy, autonomy, and control, born of the 60's, continue to inform public policy and ecclesial debate particularly in areas of sexual mores. Increasingly now this is also true regarding issues of aging. Yet within the life of the Church, Humanae Vitae and end-of-life issues form bookends to the harmonious interrelationship of all the elements of our faith in the lived experience. The faith is an organic whole, a seamless garment. Pope John Paul II exhorts us to recover its sense of wholeness and interior logic, what he calls the "symphony" of faith.⁴ Of necessity, therefore, one must view Humanae Vitae and any theology of aging as one piece. Indeed, any theology of aging begins with Humanae Vitae.

To understand this integral relationship, we must first of all begin by reading Humanae Vitae on the level of principle. Humanae Vitae is not an encyclical exclusively about birth control, or even very much about birth control for that matter. Humanae Vitae, as its name suggests, is about human life, the whole of human life. It is about the essential value of being sexual persons, about the deeper meaning and mystery of marriage, and about the capacity to be partners with God in creating new life. While it is true that those who are sacramentally married give concrete witness on the genital level to its truth, the message of the encyclical is universal. Persons in every state of life are called to live according to its truths.⁵ One must, therefore, reject a narrow reading — its principles are for all peoples everywhere at all times.⁶

What are those principles and how do they relate to a theology of aging? For the purpose of this reflection, I have identified five core principles of Humanae Vitae, which extend through the life cycle and provide a foundation for a theology of aging.

Humanae Vitae Establishes The Person As An Integral Relationship (7).

Humanae Vitae speaks unequivocally to the reality that the person is a unified whole. "Body and soul are not separate entities. A human person does not possess a body, rather from the moment of conception, each is expressed bodily, so that no one can be distinguished from his/her body."⁷ "The human body in all its parts and in all its cells, including ova and sperm cells, is a revelation of the person's being within his being. The whole being of the person is present in each part of his body."⁸ The body cannot be internally separated in its functions or split off from psychological motivations. It is all of one piece. By affirming the inseparable connection between the unitive and generative dimensions of the conjugal act, Paul VI expresses the profound reality of both the body's essential oneness and the person's integral connection to his body. These realities are subsequently expanded in both depth and development in the theology of John Paul II: the body reveals the person; we are what we do; and we create ourselves through our acts.

These themes are also radically present in the aging process and in old age. Aging is about becoming more of what you already are; we are, therefore, a composite of our decisions and acts and relationships. A common experience in aging is also a growing awareness of one's body and having more of one's life circumscribed by the condition of one's body. There may be loss of capacity or functioning and there may be physical decline. For some, the body can seem an enemy waiting to betray us with yet another ache or pain or disability. Pain nails us to the body, so that our whole person is transfixed. In a very real sense we are our body. There is no escape.

The vision of Humanae Vitae restates and affirms the harmony between the body and spirit. Fertility is not an evil to be suppressed, nor a disease to be treated. It is a gift by which we have the capacity to share with the Creator in generative activity, to image His essential life-giving being. For the sacramentally married, conception regulation, for just reasons, through observance of cycles and periodic continence respects the integrity of the body as well as one's spouse and the marital covenant. "It must be clearly stated that one basic method underlies all natural methods of regulating fertility: the 'method' of virtue (love and continence)."⁹ It also makes of the body a partner and friend essentially united to one's deepest longings and aspirations. Natural Family Planning opens persons to the rhythmic nature of all life, that there is "a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing" (Qo 3:5). We cannot have everything, all at once, all the time. Our bodies and our relationships do not exist in a vacuum but are always grounded in the reality of the Incarnation. Jesus is the one who in turn both fasts and feasts, prays in desert and darkness, celebrates at a wedding, weeps over Lazarus, eats on the seashore, and sleeps in a boat. He breaks bread to give His body and ascends the Cross to pour out His lifeblood. He also descends into the tomb and netherworld before being raised up. There is nothing in the human condition and bodily experience that has not been penetrated by Him. In conforming to the truth of our nature we more deeply appropriate the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Sacramental marriage is the consecration of conjugal love and human generativity. The marriage bed has a meaning beyond itself for it holds a particular witness on the genital level of how God intimately interacts with and enters into humanity. The "mystery of two in one flesh," the marital embrace is a holy thing done in a holy way. In offering bodies open to new creation spouses participate in the consecration to freedom, to body readiness, to being totally for another and at the disposal of the Holy Spirit. The prayer for a receptive heart and mind open to God's will, expressed in every aspect of life, is sealed by the witness of the body. What I pray for in my heart I also speak with my body. Fiat mihi.

For those who witness to Humanae Vitae as single, religious, priest, or married person beyond child-bearing years the message remains the same. "In the internal unity of the human person, the laws of nature are subsumed within, humanized and personalized by, the natural law."¹⁰ What Paul VI describes as "laws inscribed in being" (HV 12) are the template for joyful living according to our nature, a nature fully integrated with a body. The aging process is the natural outcome of this integration and has an organic development that is indispensable to human growth. Aging is, therefore, an integral part of the journey each person makes with and in Christ who lived in time, grew, matured, aged, suffered, died and rose from the dead. Aging affords one the opportunity to become "fully grown in Christ" (Eph 4:7,15). Even as the body changes through the life cycle it is still "me," still the expression of my being as a unity. According to Mary Rosera Joyce "The human body IS the human spirit, expressed in a physical way; the human body, while being physical is much more than physical; it is primarily metaphysical. The unity of the person in his spirit and in the metaphysical dimension of his body survives even death. The final resurrection would then be a re-expression of man's being in physical dimensions":

This exquisitely profound unity of the person's being that survives even the radical trauma of death is certainly meant to survive the most challenging of moral situations in space-time life. The human person is called to live the unity of his being in abiding affirmation; each failure is a kind of moral death. Anyone who truly loves himself will receive as deeply as possible the unity of his being into his everyday life, and will accept this unity of being as the most basic law of the good life.¹¹

Love Is Fertile, It Is Not Exhausted But Destined To Continue (9).

Aging is not an event that occurs at a certain point in time. Rather, aging is a process through the life cycle, which begins at conception and ends with death. Aging speaks to continuity, to the ongoing capacity to give oneself and to the ongoing capacity to generate, to co-create something beyond oneself. "Generative power can be activated only together with another person; it is specifically an interpersonal power.¹² There are three main developmental tasks of adulthood: "Adults must find intimate partners, find a way to leave something of themselves behind for future generations, and resolve ambivalent feelings toward mortality."¹³ All of this forms the context for generativity. Erik Erikson's groundbreaking work in life-cycle theory identifies stages with central tensions or psychological challenges which must be resolved for developmental maturity.¹⁴ He identifies generativity as the principal task of adulthood with stagnation and self-absorption as its polar opposite. In his schemata "conflict and tension are viewed as sources of growth, strength, and commitment." The stage of generativity claims the longest stretch of time . . . thirty years or more, during which one establishes a working commitment and perhaps begins a new family, devoting time and energy to furthering its healthy and productive life.¹⁵

Generativity encompasses procreativity, productivity, and creativity, and thus the generation of new beings as well as of new products and new ideas. Care is the new virtue emerging from this antithesis, a widening commitment to take care of the persons, the products, and the ideas one has learned to care for . . . the strengths arising from earlier developments . . . now prove on closer study to be essential for the generational task of cultivating strength in the next generation. For this is, indeed, the "store" of human life.¹⁶

Erikson identifies a threefold "mission," if you will, of the adult stating that it is the responsibility of each generation of adults to bear, nurture, and guide those people who will succeed them as adults. Parenting is a unique experience of adulthood. But generativity is not restricted to early adult and middle adult years only. The experiences of caring, nurturing, and maintaining — which are the essence of generativity — make the states of life a life cycle, re-creating the beginnings of the cycle in each newborn:

These same experiences make of the sequence of life cycles a generational cycle, irrevocably binding each generation to those that gave it life and to those for whose life it is responsible. Thus, reconciling lifelong generativity and stagnation involves the elder in a review of his or her own years of active responsibility for nurturing the next generations, and also in an integration of earlier-life experiences of caring and of self-concern in relation to previous generations.¹⁷

While the generative stage precedes old age, "after" for Erikson only means a later version of a previous reality, not a loss of it. Indeed, "old people can and need to maintain, a grand generative function."¹⁸ While the nature of caretaking may change with advancing years, it should never cease. Stagnation occurs when nothing demands our attention, needs our care, or benefits from our nurturance for "if one should withdraw altogether from generativity, from creativity, from caring for and with others entirely, that would be worse than death."¹⁹ One has only to go to the closest long term care facility to see the effects on those for whom no more is required or needed, whose contribution and generative "gift" in both their being and their service, is no longer cherished. By contrast, there is a body of evidence, which supports that, even infirm and disabled elders who are responsible for another person, animal, plant, project or task live healthier and happier lives than their contemporaries who have no focus of care. The vital strength of care is the widening concern for what has been generated by love, necessity, or accident; it overcomes the ambivalence arising with irreversible obligation. It is the vitality of an order of care much like the Hindu expression "maintenance of the world."²⁰ The aging process provides an ever-expanding radius of relationships, where the nuclear family gives way to intergenerational and communal engagement and investment. The circle of caring, giving, and receiving should be enlarging with age, not diminishing. This is the increase possible in aging persons, of which the psalmist speaks: "Still bearing fruit when they are old, still full of sap, still green" (Ps. 92).

Aging persons and the elderly also continue to be sexual beings. Just as generativity is not confined to biological production of children or relegated to "child-bearing" years, so sexuality as an embodied expression of being persists as long as the body persists. According to Francis Martin:

Aging persons are not asexual: If the body may properly be described as the revelation of the totality of the person and thus a sacrament, and if the body as sexually differentiated may be called nuptial, insofar as masculinity and femininity pertain to the interior uniqueness and originality of the person, it follows that sexuality is intrinsic or essential to the human person.²¹

Sister Mary Timothy Prokes describes sexuality as an enduring bodily vocation for life and love.

Sexuality is an enduring capacity of the whole person . . . This means that sexuality is not encapsulated in the reproductive organs nor is it relegated to the period of life between puberty and the diminishment of genital activity . . . Everyone — married couples, those consecrated in celibacy, aged and infirm persons, as well as children — are constituted sexual persons, with the vocation to be bodily love-giving, life-giving in countless ways.²²

Contraception Is Intrinsically Evil (14).

Sexuality is a whole person reality. It is our human capacity as whole persons to enter into love-giving, life-giving union in and through the body in ways that are appropriate and reverent. "Sexuality enables us bodily to be person-gift."²³ "Contraception may be defined as the internal separation of the coital act from its generative power."²⁴ Contraception is a violation of the integrity of the person and falsifies the gift of self. "Whatever its mode or variety, it (contraception) substitutes something alien for the symbol of love:

. . . it embodies an exclusion, a withholding, a negation of the most basic effect of sexual power . . . The psychological and moral power of this barricaded and obstructed union works gradually, slowly, inperceptively, because of its intrinsic meaning and symbolic significance, on their subconscious and eventually on their conscious minds to generate that cold and self-centered hostility to new life known as the 'contraceptive mentality.'"²⁵

Contraception is not just a biological reality. Like sexuality, it is a whole person reality. Contraception is an attitude, a way of life, a pervasive disposition. It is a stance so basic and foundational that it permeates all other relationships and is with us through the life cycle. There are two essential dispositions in life: "I will not serve" or "Let it be done unto me." One either lives in a way that is open to the transmission of life, in whatever one's state of life, or whatever one's phase of life, or one does not. "The word of coition speaks not children but the openness of both husband and wife to the creative activity of God. It is a religious act, a submitting of human choices and desires to God."²⁶ Human conception is always procreation; for God alone creates. Procreation is something quite beyond a mere byproduct of genitality, it is active partnership with God. There is no human situation or relationship that does not call for openness to the creative activity of God. Participation in this dynamic requires that we enter into all relationships with a disposition that God is the ultimate arbitrator and infuser of life through us and beyond us.

Our culture is preoccupied with genital activity and sexual frustration. But generative frustration, consistent with the dominant technological ethos of birth control, is apt to remain unrecognized, according to Joan Erikson. She believes that some exaggerated concern with the "self" as observed in today's patients may be ascribed in some to a repression of the wish for procreation and the denial of the resulting sense of loss.²⁷ The contraceptive mentality has so penetrated our culture that even sincere persons are generally unaware of how shut down and closed off they have been rendered by this mindset and its consequent behaviors. For instance, in my own clinical practice there is ample and consistent evidence of the deep correlation between contraception and the incidence of depression, particularly in women. While there is a biological basis for this in hormonal changes and radical physical interventions to woman's body, there is even deeper foundation, I believe, in the psychological and spiritual realm. How long can we live in frustration of our nature and not be affected? How many times can we participate in duplicitous acts and not ourselves feel somehow cheated? How often can we close off the life force intended for interpersonal communion before feeling dead? The body speaks its own truth and remains a touchstone for psyche and spirit.

Even sincere love, if contracepted, is "a love that is somehow disjointed . . . the terrible weight upon the conscience and the dull aching of heart that are the spiritual results of twisting the body's actions out of joint from their true meaning."²⁸ This disjunction and twisting takes its toll over the life cycle. Contraception always represents an obstruction of truth: the truth of one's being, the truth of self-gift, the truth of relationship. Besides the literal act of contraception, contraception can occur in many spheres. Paul Quay describes the deliberate withholding of mortal sin in the confessional or receiving Communion in a state of known mortal sin as examples in the sacramental realm. In each there is a barrier placed to the revelation and gift of one's self that blocks the effect of the sacrament and adds further sin.²⁹ There is also a spirit of contraception in our culture which can take many forms. As a clinician I have been struck by how often older persons' life review is around this issue of openness to generativity, both literal and figurative: the child they refused to receive, the relationship they failed to nurture, the choice of pleasure over caring. Often the areas of deepest regret are the choices made for self-interest rather than a capacity to be for others:

"In particular, people focus on breaches of generativity in the service of self that they wish they had been wise enough to avoid . . . the aged often recognize injuries they inflicted as a by-product of self-directed goals that, at the time, seemed to overshadow everything else. For many people, the importance of these other goals has long since diminished, in the face of a final reconsideration of the value of lifelong relationships. Their having harmed others in the service of self-interest can no longer be overlooked or justified, as perhaps it could in earlier years. Experiencing painful regret for past offenses, the aged still have the opportunity to demonstrate real caring in the present."³⁰

Man Does Not Have Unlimited Dominion Over His Body In General (13).

Autonomy is undoubtedly the buzz word of our era. Not unlike arguments about "a woman's right to choose," in Oregon autonomy became the battle cry for the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. Certainly few things confront us with both the vulnerability of the body and the lack of control over outside forces as much as the aging process. Limitation and discouragement can become daily fare, for aging represents a progression whose inevitable end is bodily death. The more we travel this path, the more aware we become of how little control we truly have over what might happen to us. While aging is not a choice, how we age always remains a choice. We daily create our old age. In the profession we have a saying, "Old age is a marathon, start training now." How a person integrates the demands, trials, and setbacks as well as the joys and rewards of living along the way will determine who they are at the end. The only thing in life we can control is our response to persons and events. The one capacity we never lose is the capacity for self-gift. According to the Holy Father, man is precisely a person because he is master of himself and has self-control. Indeed, insofar as he is master of himself he can give himself to the other. It is this dimension of freedom of the gift that becomes essential and decisive for that language of the body.³¹

There is profound truth in "start training now:" "Practice" self-gift throughout your life and you will be whole at the end. Be open to the transmission of life throughout the life cycle and you will find yourself in a network of relationships of healthy inter-dependence, the real mystery of the Body of Christ. "Surely, our one hope for the future of humankind is in the recognition and acceptance of this interdependence as our only survival course for the planet."³² It is in actuality that we live and move and share the earth with one another. Without contact there is no growth; in fact without contact life is not possible. Independence is a fallacy.³³

Our sense of well being at every life stage is very much linked to whether we look forward to a fulfilling later life. If the later years hold no purpose, all earlier states are tainted with a sense of desperation. It is this desperation, which currently characterizes our culture. Much of the feeling around old age parallels pro choice arguments which view life as inconvenient and as a burden, that the tedium of struggle makes it not worth living, and outright resentment over survival. Yet divine law reveals and protects the integral meaning of love, and impels it toward a truly human fulfillment (GS 50).³⁴ Aging is intended to attain that completion and fulfillment.

Dying a natural death is the final act of living in conformity with the creative intention of God (HV 10). It is a conscious choice that mirrors and culminates all previous choices of openness to life. There is much in the dying process that parallels conception and birth in surrendering to a process that follows its own momentum.³⁵ It can proceed by fits and starts and sound false alarms. There are changes in breathing, increased fatigue and discomfort, and decreased appetite much like pregnancy. It can also seem to take forever. Yet it is a threshold experience. It is the last integrated act of spirit and body in this life, the labor, which births one into Eternal Life. "When a child is born, the entire universe has to shift and make room" writes Ina Gaskin.³⁶ One can extend this analogy to the Communion of Saints patiently waiting to make room for this new life. Those of us who work with the dying can attest unequivocally to the remarkable growth and grace that occurs during this time. It is a process that cannot be rushed or short-circuited. There are no short cuts. It takes as long as it takes. Our culture has "lost respect for the innate rhythms and the mysterious meaning of 'fullness of time.'"³⁷ That is why euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, along with abortion and contraception, stand as consummate examples of an attitude that embodies, I will not serve.

Self-Mastery (21) And Education In Chastity (22).

Sexuality concerns the innermost being of the human person. The Catechism describes chastity as the "school of the gift of the person" and that self-mastery is ordered to the gift of self.³⁸ Chastity represents the internal integration of sexual powers in the service of love and expressed in relationship. According to St. Augustine "it is through chastity that we are gathered together and led back to the unity from which we were fragmented into multiplicity."³⁹

It is integration that Erickson identifies as the core struggle of old age with despair as its antithesis.⁴⁰ "Beginning with the first cry at birth, the human psyche yearns for integration."⁴¹ Integrity, a "capacity to hold together" has the function of promoting contact with the world, with things, and above all, with people. It is a tactile and tangible way to live.⁴² Education in chastity is a lifelong endeavor that signifies not repression or disinterest but focused energy for interpersonal communion. True chastity is never a shutting down but always an opening up. One of the strongest tendencies as people age is to turn inward and become self-absorbed. Balanced against this must be a truly contemplative spirit, which while being more attuned to an interior life simultaneously displays an ever-increasing ability to be in relationship and for others.

Traditional views of aging see the diminishment of "passion" in later years as a positive value. In some cases, bodily decline in aging was positively valued since it was thought to free the aged from those things (usually the passions), which inhibit the workings of the spirit. As St. Jerome says:

Youth, as such, has to cope with the assaults of passion, and amid the allurements of vice and the tinglings of the flesh is stifled like a fire among green boughs, and cannot develop its proper brightness. But . . . they learn with the lapse of time, fresh experience and wisdom comes as the years go by, and so from the pursuits of the past their old age reaps a harvest of delight.⁴³

I submit that fire is needed in old age, just as in the ages preceding it, and that true passion is essential to real chastity. Sense experience and emotion are important, and the capacity for feeling is integral to love. With aging sexual differences become more internally integrated:

With aging, men and women in many ways become less differentiated in their masculine and feminine predilections. This in no way suggests a loss of sexual drive and interest between the sexes. Men, it seems, become more capable of accepting the interdependence that women have more easily practiced. Many elder women today, in their turn, become more vigorously active and involved in those affairs that have been the dominant province of men.⁴⁴

Human sexuality always retains as its goal a deeper participation in Trinitarian love and is ordered toward building up the Body of Christ. As we age we need to continue to burn for the things of Christ. "It is the duty of the church to instill older people with a deep awareness of the task they too have of transmitting the Gospel of Christ to the world and revealing to everyone the mystery of his abiding presence in history . . . They are responsible as privileged witnesses to the tradition of faith, who can testify to God's fidelity."⁴⁵ "Wisdom not only persists, it conveys the integrity of experience to others, despite the decline of physical and mental functions."⁴⁶ Transmission of the Gospel, through one's lived experiences, constitutes an ongoing openness to the transmission of Life.

More and more persons are single, widowed, or living apart due to care needs as they age. Thus aging persons can provide a consistent witness to chastity through the life cycle as marital status changes and they cope with the newness and loneliness of the single life. One of the greatest challenges of living in our society is being old and alone. The temptations against chastity are less in misdeeds (though certainly real) than in omission. One is never outside the call to "fan into flame the gift of power, love, and self control" (II Tim 1:6), the fire and energy for interpersonal communion. The capacity for love-giving, life-giving relationships never ceases. Prayer and sacramental life remain the indispensable means for maintaining and enlarging this capacity throughout life. It is pre-eminently in the Eucharist that the person's self-gift is most profoundly and continually "caught up" in divine life and love through the One who is Self-gift. The sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood speaks to the dynamic of incorporation and assimilation in that we not only become what we eat, but more accurately are converted into Him whom we consume. Thus, the Eucharist is, more than any other sacrament, the sacrament of the aging process for it refashions and transforms the entire body-person throughout the life span. Day by day one grows ever more "fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself" (Eph. 4:13) and can more authentically say, "This is my body given for you" in every aspect of life.

It is in the last stage of life that aging persons are increasingly in need of care and outside assistance. Dependency constitutes probably the greatest struggle and fear for people in our society. In Oregon, disdain of dependency became the tandem argument in favor of physician-assisted suicide. Far beyond the fear of pain and depleting financial resources is the terror people feel in the face of needing help to go to the bathroom.

I choose to discuss dependency as an issue of chastity. In the tender vulnerability of needing personal care a person is stripped back and laid bare to their roots in a particularly intense bodily dimension. Daily people of all ages report to me that they would sooner die than have to be cared for, particularly in intimate ways. Some would actively hasten or cause their death to avoid needing care. Yet allowing oneself to be cared for and receiving the ministrations of others constitutes an extremely sacramental encounter. It is an active decision and a conscious gift to expose the vulnerability of the body and receive care. It is about being strong enough to admit need, loving enough to receive help. We have a powerful example in Jesus who came as a baby with all His attendant dependency and throughout His life was cared for in every human way. He was fed, had His feet washed, cried out in thirst, and was laid in His mother's arms at the beginning and end of His life. Receiving care is the final gift to family and friends and a tangible way of helping our loved ones resolve their own grief and loss.⁴⁷ The final freedom comes when one is integrated enough, chaste enough, to know beyond a doubt that one's embodied personhood is not defined by frailty, or disease, or bowel and bladder control. The final "handing over" comes in this last surrender of human choices and desires to the creative activity of God. I can only echo with Archbishop Chaput that our resistance to the principles of Humanae Vitae or dying a natural death is not a crisis of sexuality or autonomy, but is a question of faith: Do we really believe in God's goodness?⁴⁸

The way we receive care teaches the next generation how to care.

As a complement to caring for others, the elder is also challenged to accept from others that caring which is required, and to do so in a way that is itself caring. In the context of the generational cycle, it is incumbent upon the aged to enhance feelings of generativity in their caregivers from the younger generations. ⁴⁹

In old age the elder is challenged to draw on a life cycle that is far more nearly completed than yet to be lived, to consolidate a sense of wisdom with which to live out the future, to place him or herself in perspective among those generations now living, and to accept his or her place in an infinite historical progression.⁵⁰ Looking at the life span, James Fowler offers stages of faith that are predominantly cognitive in nature.⁵¹ More recently, Harry Moody has proposed the five stages of soul as a cyclic model of faith life in the aging process.⁵² The Catholic vision of the person, grounded in revelation, is body-based from beginning to end and possesses an internal and external coherence. There is never a time when the body does not count; there is never a circumstance in which how we use the body does not matter; there is never an instance when how we treat the body is irrelevant. Whether in the marriage bed or on our deathbed the body continues to speak. And it can speak either truth or lie. As so extraordinarily and poignantly developed by John Paul II's theology and the nuptial meaning of the body: the most essential meaning of the body is self-gift. Against cries of "not wanting the Pope in the bedroom" one can only muse "Are not all of my actions open to the scrutiny of the Holy Spirit?" Is not the Holy Spirit the silent witness to every thought, word and deed? It is the Holy Spirit who is in the bedroom. Is it not his presence and activity that I want to cultivate beyond all else?

Humanae Vitae contains powerful truths and tools for living which resonate and remain relevant throughout the life cycle. May we attend to them and embody them from conception to the grave as we "advance in joyful hope and await the final redemption of our bodies" (Rom. 8:24) in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Ruth Hayes-Barba holds a Master of Social Work from Wayne State University, Detroit, and is a licensed clinical social worker with the State of Oregon. She is also a geriatric mental health specialist and currently directs Ministry to the Aging for the Archdiocese of Portland. Ruth is a candidate for a Master of Theological Studies degree from the University of Dallas IRPS program. She and her husband, Gerald, have two grown sons.

End Notes

1 Chaput, Charles J. On Human Life. Pastoral Letter to the People of God of Northern Colorado on the Truth and Meaning of Married Love. July 22, 1998, #1.

2 "The Church's teaching against contraception seems to be the Church teaching most difficult for lay people to accept and the one theologians are most reluctant to defend" Smith, Janet. Humanae Vitae at Twenty. New Insights into an Old Debate. Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader. Ed. Janet Smith. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993) p. 509.

3 "Even while we are told we are free at last, we know that we are helpless; we give our children condoms and are silent about chastity; we feel heartbroken, not knowing why." Lasseter, Ruth D. Sensible Sex. Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader. Ed. Janet Smith. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993) p. 477.

4 Ad limina visit, American bishops, March, 1993.

5 In my own case, I was awakened to the truth of HV by consecrated women religious long before I was married.

6 This is no way denies HV's practical import concerning the regulation of births. However, HV has so often been relegated exclusively to this. I feel this relegation has contributed to its rejection.

7 Prokes, Mary Timothy. Toward a Theology of the Body. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), p. 36.

8 Joyce, Mary R. The Meaning of Contraception. (New York: Alba House, 1970) p. 49.

9 Wojtyla, Karol (John Paul II). Love and Responsibility. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981) p. 282. Originally published 1960.

10 "Laws of nature" and "natural law" are really distinct, though not separate, in meaning. Laws of nature are cosmological and biological laws, and belong to the dimension of nature that is subject to human interference. But the natural law is the law of a very special kind of nature; it is the law of a person's nature. Everything in man belongs to person-nature: bodily organs, thoughts and feelings. In the person-nature of a human being, the laws of nature are assimilated within and transformed by the natural law. Joyce p. 12.

11 Joyce, p.56.

12 Joyce, p. 5.

13 Whitbourne, Susan Krauss. The Aging Individual, Physical and Psychological Perspectives. (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1996) p. 8.

14 Erikson's work is a organismic model and stresses an active rather than passive organism. Development proceeds in stages, and at each new stage, some new characteristic that was not previously present emerges.

15 Erikson, Joan M. The Life Cycle Completed. Extended Version with New Chapters on the Ninth Stage of Development. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997) p. 106, 111.

16 Erikson, Joan, p. 67.

17 Erikson, Erik H., Erickson, Joan M., Kivnick, Helen Q. Vital Involvement in Old Age. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986) p. 73.

18 Erikson, Joan p. 63.

19 Erikson, Joan p. 112.

20 Erik tells this wonderful story of a dying man. As he lay there with his eyes closed, his wife whispered to him, naming every member of the family who was there to wish him shalom. "And who," he suddenly asked, sitting up abruptly, "who is minding the store?" This expresses the spirit of adulthood which the Hindus call "the maintenance of the world" Erikson, Joan p. 66.

21 Prokes, p. 22 quoting Francis Martin, The Feminist Question, p.393.

22 "Since we are constituted sexual persons, this capacity is not simply an optional feature of humanness, or a faculty understood only in genitally-related sense. As constituitive of the person, it participates in what Pope John Paul has termed the 'nuptial meaning of the body.' The entire body person is destined for life-giving, love-union in and through the body in ways that are appropriate to one's age, one's state of life and commitments." Prokes, p. 95-96.

23 Prokes, p.96.

24 Joyce, p.1.

25 Quay, Paul. The Christian Meaning of Human Sexuality. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985) p. 70-71.

26 Quay, Paul. Contraception and Conjugal Love. Why Humanae Vitae was Right: A Reader. Ed. Janet Smith. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993) p. 41.

27 Erikson, Joan, p. 68, 53.

28 Quay, Christian Meaning, p. 71.

29 Quay, Christian Meaning, p. 81.

30 Erikson, Erik, p. 104.

31 John Paul II. The Theology of the Body. (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997) p. 398.

32 Erikson, Erik, p. 329.

33 Erikson, Joan, p. 8.

34 Vatican II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents. Pastoral Constitution on the Church (Gaudium et Spes). Ed. Austin Flannery. (New York: Costello Publishing Company, 1996 # 22.

35 This in no way obviates the proactive use of palliative care and aggressive pain control. In fact, these things facilitate a truly natural death. Managing pain both helps the body relax and embark upon a more natural mode of dying as well as freeing up energy to attend to the true psychological and spiritual "work" of dying. "Pain can always be alleviated . . . The requisite knowledge, medicines, techniques and technology exist; they are simply not being applied." Ira Byock, MD. See Dying Well, the Prospect for Growth at the End of Life. (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).

36 Bernard, Jan Selliken and Schneider, Miriam. The True Work of Dying. (New York: Avon Books, 1996) p. 64 quoting Ina Gaskin in Spiritual Midwifery.

37 Prokes, p.155.

38 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2346.

39 St. Augustine, Conf. 10, 29, 40: PL 32, 796.

40 Victor Frankl describes despair as "suffering without meaning." Frankl, Victor. Facing the Transitoriness of Human Existence. Generations, Fall 1990 p. 8. As the elder seeks to consolidate a sense of lifelong wisdom and perspective, he or she endeavors, ideally, not to exclude legitimate feelings of cynicism and hopelessness, but to admit them in dynamic balance with feelings of human wholeness. Later life brings many, quite realistic reasons for experiencing despair: aspects of a past we fervently wish had been different; aspects of a present that cause unremitting pain; aspects of a future which is both wholly certain and wholly unknowable, Erik Erikson p.72.

41 McFadden, Susan H. and Robert R. Gerl. Spirituality in the Second Half of Life. Generations, Fall 1990, p. 35.

42 Erikson, Joan, p. 8.

43 Lyon, K. Brynolf. Toward a Practical Theology of Aging. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) p. 43.

44 Erikson, Erik, p. 334. Moody, Harry R. and David Carroll. The Five Stages of Soul. (New York: Doubleday, 1997) p. 107. Gumann, David. Reclaimed Powers, Men and Women in Later Life. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994).

45 Stafford, Cardinal Francis J. The Dignity of Older People and Their Mission in the Church and in the World. Origins Vol. 28 # 40, March 25,1999, # 4-5.

46 Blazer, Dan. Emotional Problems in Later Life. (New York: Springer Publisher Company, 1998) p. 245.

47 The reader is referred to Dying Well by Ira Byock for a superb treatment of dependency issues in the dying and the attendant gift of healing in caregivers.

48 Chaput, # 15.

49 Erikson, Erik, p. 74

50 Erikson, Erik, p. 55-56.

51 Fowler's stage theory represents increasingly complex cognitive structures for reasoning about and symbolizing ultimate reality. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that higher stages represent higher values. Also because Fowler's assessment of faith development is so dependent upon verbal ability, this approach cannot reveal anything about processes of spiritual integration for elders with speech or cognitive impairments (see McFadden p.36). Fowler, James W. Stages of Faith. (San Francisco: Harper, 1995).

52 Moody explores spiritual passages through the aging process: the Call, the Search, the Struggle, the Breakthrough, and the Return.

© Ignatius Press 2000.

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