Overdue at the library
Schilling, Timothy P.
OVERDUE AT THE LIBRARY Timothy P. Schilling I still remember clearly when I first noted the interesting relationship between our primary definitions of the word "conception." I was in my second...
...I anticipate writing, after our child is born, a letter titled "I Have Joined Your Ranks: Retractions Forthcoming...
...Now that is a serious coming together of words and flesh...
...Commonweal 3 1 December 17,1999...
...Was this way of loving the right one for me...
...In theory, I have all this down...
...In the meantime, I take delight in our plan for our child to be born here at home, in the very room where I am "birthing" my dissertation...
...In some ways, as a male, I will always be removed from the fullest experience of this wondrous process...
...Full incarnation is really the coming to a sanctity each of us is called to, a condition in which love lives in the whole of our flesh...
...Whereas my wife is unavoidably aware of the child who is growing within her, sometimes I have to remind myself that any of this is happening at all, especially when I am away from her at work...
...This is our first child, and nothing could be more mysterious and intriguing to me than watching our child arise who previously did not exist...
...It was during this time that I first heard, really heard, the stories of the barren women in the Bible...
...I take pleasure in repeating the phrase "the fruit of thy womb," and frequently my prayer leads me into speculations about how Mary in her womb contains the Word through whom all things were made...
...Persons are not fully realized in the womb, or at birth, or even upon reaching adulthood...
...Each week I send home a parent letter with information and a "helpful" reflection...
...Four years later I married...
...As I suggest with this list, our incarnational responsibility is the work ("the labor") of a lifetime...
...And I suppose there is something comical, if not mildly contradictory, in the disposition of one who would spend four years of his life writing a dissertation in the field of practical theology...
...The crux of my struggle was a common one among seminarians: I felt a longing for physical intimacy that put me in tension with my celibate commitment...
...I love that our ideas and our experiences, our minds and our bodies, go together—and that the Spirit finds realization in the flesh...
...But finally, I love the revelatory promise of a belief system grounded in the Word made flesh...
...But living out these conceptions is more challenging...
...They had the idea of bearing a child but not the flesh of it...
...I have made it a point to pray the rosary for them as a way of staying in touch when we are apart...
...The baby, God willing, will be surrounded immediately by all my theology books...
...Timothy P. Schilling writes from Seattle, Washington...
...Over the past seven months, I have recalled that earlier period of my life many times, as I have watched my wife grow in her pregnancy...
...I was in my second year in the seminary and I was struggling with a decision about continuing to ordination...
...From a Catholic perspective, conception is a crossing over to incarnation— the Spirit enlivening the body—and each of us needs to find a way of "bringing to term" this love dwelling within us...
...In particular, it is the great gap that gets me: between the wispy "conception"—the idea of having a child, the fleeting procreative moment, the small beginning of someone—and the present living, squirming, incarnate being...
...These women, though "conceiving," could not conceive...
...Would I have the wherewithal and trust and creativity that the celibate life requires...
...I identified with them because more than anything I desired the enfleshment of love—not just in the form of sexual intimacy, though that was surely central, but in the whole range of physical intimacy that is appropriate to family life...
...They could imagine it, but could not experience the physical fulfillment...
...During the school year, I direct a parish catechetical program for children...
...This reflection was critical to my decision, finally, to leave the seminary...
...In a sense, Mary bears all of creation within her...
...Parenthood is only one way of embodying love, but it is a symbol of what all of us are called to do—imagine, create, raise up, provide for, teach, pray, persist, let go...
...She finds my airy reflections about the earthy business at hand to be somewhat fanciful...
...Ironically, it is mindfulness that brings me back to the physical blossoming of my wife and child...
...He and Janke de Groot are the proud parents of Annegien Helen Schilling, illustrated left, born on October 18...
...My wife, who is a physical therapist, is still on the job at this late stage of her pregnancy...
Vol. 126 • December 1999 • No. 22
