Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Refugees from Russia, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary

I trained in NY in the 1980's.  I was in a Jewish neighborhood, in a Jewish hospital.  Many of the patients we saw were new Russian immigrants.  Glasnost had allowed them to leave Russia, because they were ethnically Jewish, but most of them had not learned anything about their faith or Jewish culture, and some were glad to be given an opportunity to study scripture with a rabbi, and learn Hebrew and cooking from an interested Jewish lay-person.  We also had a few Jewish Russian doctors, who had managed also to be allowed to emigrate.  From one of them I learned that there was no family planning in the country, there were a few IUDs in the desks of the heads of medical schools, as a curio and a teaching tool.  There was no private industry--- the entire apparatus of the state was aimed at building weapons and doing heavy industry for the military-industrial effort, and something as frivolous as birth control was not on the priority list.  So, many of the  women patients I saw were ethnically Jewish but culturally ignorant, and many of them had had 10 or more abortions, because the only family planning method available in Russia was abortion.  I had enough of a relationship with some of them to ask them what they felt about this.  Most of them had felt it was necessary because it is freezing cold in winter in Russia, and they needed to stay in the small apartments of their parents, as being newly married couples meant you got to be on a waiting list for an apartment, and the time to get it was usually around 10 years.  The cramped space in the winter, the many generations living together in these small cramped spaces in big industrial-sized apartment houses, meant that space was the biggest luxury, and even finding privacy to make love occasionally was very hard, especially in the winter.   When they got to America and could have their own apartment, they were very joyful to finally be able to carry a pregnancy and have a family.  Most of them did fine with pregnancy, there was no complication from all these abortions, in terms of fertility or childbearing, so some of the rhetoric we were told about what a "scar" the abortion might leave in you was not completely true, at least on an anecdotal level.
Recently I was given a book about the miracle of Fatima, which occurred in Portugal in 1917.  The girl Lucia lived to adulthood, while the other two children died, probably of tuberculosis.  Lucia became a nun, and was very very saintly, and had other visits from Our Lady, the mother of Jesus, in her cloistered life.  One of the most insistent messages of Our Lady of Fatima was to pray for the conversion of Russia, through her immaculate heart.  As a Catholic child in the 1950s, this message was so routinely told us that we became numb to its meaning.  The church of my childhood was a place of mothers and children on their knees at the nights of Novena, with occasional dads there also.   We knew the many names for Jesus in the chant at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, (Blessed be the name of Jesus;  blessed be his most sacred heart;  Blessed be his most precious blood...) I have heard a priest say that the worldview of coherent meaning, or "the Cosmic Egg" cracked in the 1960s, and that one can pinpoint it to 1968.  Suddenly, the actions and fervent prayers of our childhood seemed old-fashioned and irrelevant to a great many of our classmates, and the general American culture around us.   Grappling with the meaning of "sacred heart" in the new profane secular culture, with psychedelic bands playing very loud music, and people all over the place seeming to have lost their minds as well as their faith, was a part of the cultural milieu of my high school and college years.  And there was the very difficult problem of trying to reconcile "Immaculate Heart of Mary" with people who didn't even respect Jesus, much less his mother;  and could not believe that a human could be somehow set apart from the general condition of Original Sin, (something most people did not believe in any more), in order to be the Theotokos-- the bearer of the Child of God.   But still, there was a faithful remnant, saying the rosary, decades and decades of it, to honor Mary, to supplicate for all our sufferings in "this vale of tears"; and to try to ward off evil from ourselves and our loved ones, as the evil one "wanders through the world seeking the ruin of souls".  And many of these devout prayer warriors also prayed for the conversion of Russia, because our Lady of Fatima had urged us to pray for this, as the WAY to world peace.
In gynecology and obstetrics, we tend to hear the cries of the poor;  we see the problems of moms who are overburdened with the problems of a large family with many children.  It is not a theoretical concern to such moms, that another pregnancy might happen, and bring another mouth to feed.   As the decades of my life went by, most American women started to get out of the home, be able to get a job and have a salary.  Many moms worked diligently to get their daughters through college, so that the girls would have "something to fall back on" if they ended up with a husband out of work, dead, or ill, or divorced;  many of the moms I knew had lost their own dads to illness when they were children, and had watched the hardships their moms bore with such long-suffering courage, as they were growing up.  These women understood that a stay-at-home mom was a luxury of a well-employed husband, and they were afraid to put their daughters at the risk of the vagaries of fate that can happen to change the paycheck or fortune of men.
Therefore, women like me, well-educated, and with professional status, were glad to try to assist other women to get on a firmer footing, to help the families be stable financially, and to help both boys and girls get the chance to "be all you can be".   The goal was to get educated, to be able to afford to take care of our children.
30 years later,  we see the newer social problem--- although most women are better educated, it is still hard to find a committed partner for marriage, and marriages are getting more and more delayed, as people try to get financially stable first. The cost of housing has risen, the needs of middle class families are more complex, and women are trying to "ride two horses" to get the financial means and also to maintain the family and the home, to help their own children get into the middle class and become successful at family life.  Everyone is harried and driven.  We pray and pray, for "the ability to make ends meet" emotionally, socially, financially, politically and spiritually.
So, back to the question of praying for Russia.  I started thinking about the "Heart of the Mother".  What does it mean to have an immaculate heart?  The first thing that comes to mind is courage.  Courage is what inspires us, when life is uncertain, to attempt what is not a foregone conclusion.  And what does a mother have, that another woman might not have?  The mother has the love for her own individual child.  This child is not a "member of the masses" to her.  The unique love of a person starts with the love the mother has for the child, which calls it to grow, to expand, to become the fullest human being he or she  can become.  We can see that men also have this heart, it is not just the mothers who have it;  but it especially comes to mothers, because the child is her own, the child of her body, "bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh".   If a mother has the fierce and protective love of her child, she will help protect and shelter and feed and clothe that child, to help to get the child to independent existence.  It is a biological drive.  And if we say that a heart is immaculate, is it because there is no doubt, no driving self-interest which interferes with the desire of the mother for getting her child to the stage of adulthood?  We all know fierce moms, tiger moms;  and most healthy moms are able to love each of their children with a special and full love,  so that each child is given what it most needs, existentially, to grow up.  In a healthy family, the love expands with each child, so that the love is immense, and fills the home.  But what happens when this love is stunted or blocked?  What happens when the dad doesn't get the love he needs as a husband and father?  What becomes of children who are emotionally abandoned? This is the problem I think we need to pray for.  Children whose mothers are not fiercely loving, devoted in an existential way, in a faithful, courageous way, to the children, will not be able to reach their adult potential without enormous remedial help, if at all.  We see social workers, teachers, librarians, doctors and nurses, all kinds of people, trying to help fill the holes where the mother-love was missing.  And this is where the pedophiles find their opportunity to twist and maim the souls of children.   We need to pray with dedication and fortitude and stamina, for the strength and resilience and courage of the mothers.  We need to really pray that the mothers have HOPE for their children, because the future is terrible if one is full of despair and cynicism.  Life is hard.  Things happen which are so difficult we can only carry them when we have a whole community together to hold the grief, the loss, the fatigue of failure.   We also need to do our very best to help moms get the support they need, to maintain the homes, nurture the family, and have enough economic stability to do the very very tough job of "bringing up" a family.
And what about Russia?  Russia is full of terrible corruption, and we need to pray for it to be made better, holier, more attuned to justice;  and I think that to pray for the mothers in Russia is a good way to do this.  When you are loved, your own ethical awareness is naturally higher than if you had to lie, cheat and steal to stay alive.  You have an axis which helps keep you from becoming so twisted and crooked.  When a whole community is full of love, which naturally brings with it hope, and faith and willingness to try to build community, peace and well-being, compassion and cooperation are the fruits of the spirit.  We need to pray for Russia.  



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