Do you have children?” For most 30-somethings, this harmless question is the opening volley of a round of acceptable chit-chat. Colleagues at the office fill silences with news of recent pregnancies, first Communions and athletic milestones in their children’s lives.
For my wife and me, however, a question about our brood never offers an escape route from awkward social interactions, but is rather the prelude to uncomfortable conversations with strangers and confidants alike. “No children,” we say, our voices revealing our discomfort with the question. How can you say to a complete stranger, a trusted teacher, a friendly cleric, a college classmate: “We’re infertile”?
The Diagnosis and Aftermath
My wife and I met before our senior year at the University of Notre Dame and became engaged a little over a year after we began to date. Like so many Notre Dame couples before us, our nuptials took place at the university’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where the priest prayed over us: “Bless them with children and help them to be good parents. May they live to see their children’s children.” In our first year of marriage in Boston, we decided it was time to begin a family. Month one passed. Month two. Month three. Six months later, our home became the anti-Nazareth as we awaited an annunciation that never came. The hope-filled decision to conceive a child became a bitter task of disheartened waiting. After a year, we began to see infertility specialists, who concluded that we should be able to have a child. No low sperm counts. No problems with either of our reproductive systems. The verdict: inexplicable infertility.
The aftermath of the diagnosis was painful for both of us. It affected not simply our friendships and our own relationship, but also our spiritual lives. Our infertility gradually seeped into our life of prayer. Every morning, I rise and ask God for a child. I encounter the chilly silence of a seemingly absent God. Early on I found consolation in the language of the psalms, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” (Ps 22:2). Like the psalmist, I had my “enemies”: the friendly priest, who, upon learning that Kara and I do not have children, made it a point to say each time he saw me, “No children, right?”; the Facebook feed filled with announcements of pregnancies and births, a constant reminder of our empty nest. Even God became my nemesis: Why have you duped me, O Lord? Why us? We have given our lives to you, and our reward is pain and suffering.
A School of Prayer
How did I escape this hell? First, I learned to give myself over to a reality beyond my control. Life is filled with any number of things that happen to us. We are diagnosed with illnesses. Our family, despite our love, falls apart because of fighting among siblings over how to handle the remaining years of a parent’s life. We die. The beginning of true Christian faith is in trusting that even in such moments, God abides with us. This God invites us to offer our sorrow, our very woundedness, as an act of love.
Praying the psalms again was the beginning of my own conversion toward the good. I learned that in uttering these words from a wounded heart, my voice became Christ’s. My suffering, my sorrow has been whispered into the ear of the Father for all time. The echo of my words in an empty room called my heart back to authentic prayer. Whenever I was tempted to enter into self-pity, I used short phrases from the psalms to bring myself back toward the Father. The psalms became the grammar of my broken speech to God.
Second, I began to meditate upon the crucifix whenever I entered a church. Gazing at the crucifix for long periods, I discovered how God’s silence in my prayer was stretching me toward more authentic love. In contemplating the silence of the cross, the image of Christ stretched out in love, I could feel my own will stretched out gradually to exist in harmony with the Father’s, to accept the cup that we have been given. I found new capacities for love available to me. I became especially attentive to the suffering of the widow, the immigrant, the lonely and all those who come to Mass with a wounded heart.
Third, in my formation into prayer through infertility, I have grown to appreciate the silence and half-sentences of God. Often, words still hurt too much for me to utter. In such sorrow, I have no energy in prayer. All I have left is an imitation of the very silence I hear in response to my petitions. Through entering into God’s own silence, I find my own bitterness transformed into trust and hope, a kind of infused knowledge of God’s love that I have come to savor. At times, albeit rarely, this silence results in a gift of exhilarating bliss—as if for a moment, I am totally united to God. Most often, it is a restful silence in which I hear no words. I savor such moments because only here do I receive the balm for the sorrow that often floods my soul throughout the day.
Fourth, our infertility has slowly led me to a deeper appreciation of the eucharistic quality of the Christian life. For years, I talked with far too much ease about the “sacrifice of the Mass”—how all of our lives must become an offering, a gift to the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In fact, true self-gift is hard. It is hard to give yourself away to a God who does not seem to listen to your prayers. It is hard to wait for a child who may never come. It is hard to love your spouse when you are distracted by the phantasms of sorrow that have become your dearest friend. It is hard to muster a smile when your friends announce that they will be having another child. It is just hard.
At such moments, I do not know what else to do but to seek union with Christ himself; to enter more deeply into the eucharistic logic of the church, where self-preservation is transformed into self-gift. The Eucharist continues to teach me that I cannot do it myself. I cannot climb out of the sorrow, the sadness, the misery. But I can give it away. I can slowly enter into the eucharistic life of the church, to become vulnerable, self-giving love even in the midst of sorrow. Knowing, of course, that in the Resurrection, such love has conquered death.
Sometimes I allow myself to daydream about having a child. I recognize now that such a moment may never come, that nothing in human life is sure. That is why learning to pray through infertility has been a reformation of my vision of grace as gift, not guarantee. If grace were guaranteed, would such moments be grace, a gift beyond what we could imagine? So we stand waiting for Gabriel, learning to hear the angel’s voice in new ways: in time spent with our godchildren, in signing up to serve as foster parents, in delighting in each other’s presence. And the more I enter into the grace of prayer, the more I see that Gabriel has already come in these moments: Let it be done to me according to your word.
I attended Mass and Sunday School every week because “that’s just what Catholics do”, yet I never really understood why. I said prayers, sang hymns, and listened to the teachings of the Church with a blind and child-like faith simply because I didn’t know any different. As I became older, I began to search for more answers. I wanted to know what made Catholics stand apart and why we believed what we believe. So I took to the internet searching for answers and in my search I found that I only knew a fraction of the vast enormity of our faith. I began learning about novenas and feast days, Saints and their stories, scapulars and miraculous medals, and vocations and discernment. But my heart expanded the most when I learned even more about the Eucharist.
I had always known that the Eucharist was the true body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, but never knew how. When I discovered that the Transubstantiation is not just a representation of the Last Supper but the actual thing itself and that the priest becomes Christ I was completely blown away! The understanding that Jesus is physically there at every mass made me understand even more the importance of it. This teaching is hard for many to accept which is why so many fall away from the Catholic Church, but if we only use our child-like faith to help us comprehend then we will be able to see the beauty of such a thing. I believe because this is the Church that Jesus himself gave to us, and knowing that he is with us at every mass brings me peace that I couldn’t find anywhere else.
TIMOTHY P. O’MALLEY is director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, Institute for Church Life, at the University of Notre Dame.
Originally published October 22, 2012. All rights reserved. For subscription information, call 1-800-627-9533 or visit www.americamagazine.org
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Pascal Deloche/Godong/Corbisoin our