Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Discernment

This past weekend I went to yet another NFP meeting. We heard one of the established teachers present her research on the topic. She presented on the process of discerning your family size and I thought it was great, especially since it was something I needed to hear.

She used a St. Ignatius exercise to discern whether or not to try to postpone or achieve pregnancy - ultimately it is out of our hands. She didn't give a handout yet (we will receive them soon), but this is what I remember.

Step one: Don't do this while ovulating - not that we girls would ever bring up a subject like babies unless we were 100% objective ;-)
Step two: sit down and think about it logically, weigh pros and cons
Step three: simplify question into something that can be answered by a strong yes or no
Step four: quiet yourself and listen (this could take days/weeks)
Step five: check to make sure the answer is in line with Church teaching because God wouldn't go against that

I bring this up because
a) I had done something similar to this exercise the night before at adoration and got a strong response to wait and without that I might turn into the nagging wife who "knows" when to have kids and just needs to prove that to her husband.
b) Wouldn't this be a nice piece of information that priests could hand out when the topic of NFP comes up? It goes a little further than just saying the couple needs to seek God's direction and go with that. This way we don't get the extreme responses on either end as well as some concrete steps a couple can take.

5 comments:

  1. Interesting. I think that would be especially helpful once you had several children. I look forward to any other advice you glean from her handout!

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  2. I love the idea of applying Ignatian discernment to NFP!

    "I had done something similar to this exercise the night before at adoration and got a strong response to wait and without that I might turn into the nagging wife who "knows" when to have kids and just needs to prove that to her husband." Thank God for Adoration! I wonder why it is so hard for many women (including myself) to wait peacefully rather than thinking that we can somehow make these decisions ourselves and just coax our husbands along eventually! It must just be because we're so much more spiritual than our husbands, right? It couldn't have anything to do with hormones... ;-)

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  3. this was really well thought out! thanks for the prayerful pointers.
    the only "beef" i have is the words "to discern whether or not to increase the size of your family". maybe its just where I'm at right now, but sometimes I think NFP gives us the false security that we can control our fertility. all we can really identify are times of the month where babies are not likely, but NFP still won't allow us to increase the size of our family presto-chango. God decides that.
    i think its an important distinction.

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  4. i guess that's why most talk of using of NFP to postpone is in the negative, as in "only use NFP if you have serious/just reason to postpone" rather than "use NFP as default", since the converse isn't necessarily "have children now" (although for some couples it might be) but more of a "be open to the possibility of having children."

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  5. Alison, I don't think this post was as thought out as you gave me credit for and it could be taken as something to have "beef" with. I'm editing that and a couple typos that are bugging me now! You did bring up an important distinction because even when I decide with my husband that we should "start trying" that doesn't mean we will have a bigger family or that it will be biological. Anything God gives now or in the future will be a true gift.

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