Be fruitful and multiply, Part Six

At the Easter Vigil this past weekend, the very first reading was Chapter 1 of Genesis, the creation story, which has served as the leading inspirational Scripture for this series of posts.   It is appropriate to begin, this, our final reflection in this series, with a quote from that reading:

Then God said:
"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
the birds of the air, and the cattle,
and over all the wild animals
and all the creatures that crawl on the ground."
God created man in his image;
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them, saying:
"Be fertile and multiply;
fill the earth and subdue it.
Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air,
and all the living things that move on the earth."
God also said:
"See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth
and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food;
and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air,
and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground,
I give all the green plants for food."
And so it happened.
God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.
Evening came, and morning followed—the sixth day.

How appropriate that we begin the most solemn ceremony of the entire liturgical year with this reading.   We begin our celebration of Easter by recalling this great act of God, in creating the world, creating nature, and creating man and woman as the pinnacle of that creation, and then immediately telling man to “be fertile and multiply”.   This command did not come years, months, days, or even hours after we were created. No, it came moments, or even seconds, after our creation. “Be fertile and multiply”. 

This command has been with us since the beginning of time.   It will be with us until the end of time. There is no time in our history where that command has not been imposed on us by God.  This command came before the Ten Commandments.  It came before the Beatitudes, and other teachings of Jesus.  Without this command, no other command of God makes sense.  Without this command, there can be no life.  Without life, there can be no other good.   If we ignore this command, we cannot do much else.

All signs, at least here in this country and in many other of the traditional industrialized, or world powers, unfortunately, sadly show that we are not doing this.  We are shrinking as a population.  We are being told reason upon reason why we should not be growing.   There is not enough food, they say.   The environment cannot sustain us, they say.   There is not enough room for everybody, they say.   Overpopulation is a drain on the economy, they say.

Well, here are some facts, courtesy of the website overpopulationisamyth.com

1)      Every family in the world could have a house and a yard and fit in the state of Texas.

2)      The fact that so many people are delaying having children or not having children at all is causing many countries birthrate to fall below replacement rate.  This causes economies to collapse or at least be terribly strained when there are not enough working people to support the elderly of the population.

3)      There is enough food in the world for everyone to live a healthy life.   Modern farming methods allow us to grow food in places we could never before, like parts of Africa.   Lack of infrastructure, and war, contribute much more to the problem of famine in some areas than does overpopulation.

4)      Poverty is not caused by overpopulation.  Communities allow us to divide tasks, share resources, and come up with creative solutions to problems.   Our average standard of living has grown as the population has grown.   The percentage of poor people goes down as the population has grown.   People are the solution to poverty, not the cause.

5)      Cities are overcrowded, but that does not mean the world is overpopulated.   They are not the same, and often we confuse the too, especially since this is the experience of many of us who live in densely populated areas.  

I would add another point here, and it has to do specifically with life in the Church.  So often when we discuss problems in the Church we hear things like people are not going to Mass and/or Confession regularly, we do not have prayer lives, we give a less than acceptable percentage of our income to the Church, and other reasons why churches are a lot emptier and more lifeless these days than they were, and these are valid reasons why things are as they are.   However, we often do not consider a more basic reason: There are not as many people out there.   There are not enough people to work, and give to the Church.  There are not enough people to fill the churches.   There are not as many opportunities to evangelize.   Now, there are indeed spiritual elements to the decline in the Church.   If more people were practicing their Faith, then yes, the churches would be fuller.  If we evangelized better than we are, more people would be joining the Church.  All this is true.   However, let us not easily dismiss the fact that there are fewer of us than there were before, and this is contributing at least somewhat to the problem.

I believe as a nation we need to turn again to God, in many areas of our life.   We need to make a commitment to live all his Commands.  We need to have a holy fear of God.  We need to love him with all our hearts and love our neighbor as ourselves.   We need to honor our mother and father, keep holy the Sabbath, not commit adultery, not covet one another, not steal, and not cheat.  We need to be prudent, just, strong, and temperate.   We need to be peaceful, meek and merciful, pure and righteous before God.   

However, before all this, we need to exist in the first place.  We need to be alive.  We need to be given the chance to live, to come into this beautiful world that God created that is so beautifully described in the Creation story.

So when we turn back to God, we need to give him our whole selves.  This includes all our being, including our sexuality.   We cannot close any part of us to God, and that includes our most private body parts.   We have to develop what Saint John Paul II called a “culture of life”.   This means we must respect all human life from conception until natural death, and we must provide the necessary means to support that life.    We need to support people having children, and we must consider it ourselves if we can.   And on the other end of the life spectrum, we must not seek to kill our elderly, but rather, we must develop a society where there are indeed enough of us to support them so they can live fruitful, peaceful lives in old age.

Controlling or limiting the population is not the answer to our problems.  It is against the will of God.   Not only will it cause issues as we have discussed here, and are available to read about elsewhere, but it may very well cause us eternal issues in the next life when we stand before the judgment seat of God. Let us never forget those beautiful words from Genesis, “Be fruitful and multiply”.   If we do, we can be assured that when our times is up, and we are standing before the judgment seat of almighty God, we will hear another set of beautiful words:

 “Well done good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Master’s house.” (Matthew 25:23).

Joseph, glory of home life, pray for us.

He made him the lord of his household.   And prince over all his possessions.