One of my favorite new (for me) blogs is Life With a German Shepherd and today Fr. Denis Lemieux posts in a series he is doing on The Lord’s Prayer.
But it got me thinking about, of all things, St. Augustine and some of his (in)famous writings about babies. A lot of our cultural affection for babies comes out of Christianity. He, a convert and a saint, came from a different culture, and babies were not, for him, cute or sweet. They were selfish little brutes with no control over their emotions and imperiously demanding in their needs. He does not have a trace of sentimentality in his view of them.
Reading his thoughts on this matter is either amusing or irritating for us moderns. But… you know, he is kind of right. And I think the point he makes is not that ‘babies are jerks’, which would be a bit petty and silly of him, but rather that none of us start off from a position of great virtue. The starting point of human beings is, in fact, selfishness and that constant clamor of desire and will. The point is not what babies are like, but what we all are like… until the Father forgives us and begins to fashion his kingdom in our hearts.
How much has Christianity shaped our attitudes towards babies and children? And how much are we losing that attitude in our present post-Christian social climate?
Isn’t it rather chilling that babies born alive might have been left in a basin to die alongside medical waste? Or worse, suffocated or killed after birth?
It is also appalling that U.S. President Obama voted three times against a bill that would have ensured babies born as the result of botched abortions received medical care.
Someone who was at the recent National March for Life in Washington, D.C. told me about 50 survivors of abortion gathered on the stage there. Did any of my readers witness that?
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Human beings who think babies are cute and appealing are generally also drawn to kittens, puppies, etc. I don’t think that Christianity comes into the mix. The Romantic movement, sub-Christian at best, was very keen on babies and children as exemplifying innocence uncorrupted by society’s artificial rules and divisions, and one sees a residuum of this attitude in a certain style of permissive parenting which thinks it is cute when children can “be themselves” even in a formal setting like church. Sentimentality is not a Christian quality.