Thoughts of a New Mom
A month ago today, God blessed my husband and me with a beautiful, healthy baby girl. She is a tiny, wonderful miracle and we adore her. It is hard to describe how I feel about her—this bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh—perhaps other parents will understand the special ache of love that comes when I think of her. She is almost always in my arms: nursing, snuggling, sleeping, or looking up at me with those deep blue eyes, and, just in the last few days, beginning to smile.
What a beautiful time it is for me to contemplate our Lord’s incarnation, to imagine Him as a vulnerable little baby clinging to our Lady, and resting in her loving arms. It has been said that each baby is a living icon of Christ, and as I hold my daughter in my arms, I am struck by the wonder of His humility and love in becoming human for our sake. By taking on our flesh, Christ sanctifi ed it and raised it to partake in His divinity; by His death and resurrection He purchased our eternal life. How wonderful that our Catholic faith affirms that we will all share in our Lord’s resurrection at end of time, for God did not create our bodies merely to be destroyed after a brief time but to live with Him forever as tabernacles of the Holy Spirit. With body and soul—fully human— will we greet our God on that joyous last day, as the Blessed Mother did long ago when she was assumed into heaven. I am so glad that our Lord has such great plans for my little snuggly one and that her precious little body will share in the glory of life everlasting.
In light of this divine vocation, all human beings should be treated with the utmost dignity and respect. Since as human beings we are a unique composite of body and soul, this respect should include the way we treat our bodies. Th is is why as Christians we are concerned by the drug addiction and sexual abuse we see wounding the women working the street. Having sought happiness in drugs, the girls have instead become enslaved to and devoured by them, and forced to sell their often emaciated bodies to feed their habit, in turn feeding the habit of troubled men who are also seeking their happiness in ways that enslave. We cannot, like the dualists, say that it does not matter what we do with our bodies, for we know that sinful actions affect the entire person: a child who suffers physical abuse will also suffer emotional trauma, and a grown woman is no different, even if she gives her “consent” to the abuse. Some things are innately damaging, consent or no consent, and reducing one’s personhood to another person’s sex toy for money is one of them.
Therefore let us spare no effort to help free our sisters from the hellish chains of addiction and abuse which destroy both body and soul. Remember that they too were once beautiful little babies—tiny sweet daughters safe in their mothers’ loving arms—and for the sake of those poor mothers let us help the girls to feel real love again. Let’s share the beautiful truths of our faith with them, for “the truth will set you free.” The women are precious—body and soul—and deserve to be treated as such. Like all of us, they are meant for heavenly glory, for eternal rejoicing with the Holy Trinity. Let us try to help lead them there, that their souls, purified by grace, may come to rest in God, and that their weary, afflicted bodies may one day too know the consolation of heaven. “By His wounds we are healed...” may the girls, so often wounded and abused, be healed and sanctified by the sacrificial love of our Lord, and when they reach heaven, may they again know the sweetness of the maternal embrace in the loving arms of our Lady, Queen of heaven and Mother of us all.
~ Anna, a volunteer
