Time Immortal

The Anchoress has a touching, powerful reflection up that captures the raw power of marital love just too well:

This week, in the Boston Globe, I read the story of an elderly couple named Sol and Rita Rogers. They’ve been married 61 years. They’ve raised a family and lived a long and happy life together. A few years ago, that began to change. Rita developed . And she is slipping deeper and deeper into dementia.

Several weeks ago, she was taken to a health care center, where she now has to live. The first few days, she screamed and talked incoherently. She could barely form words with her mouth. Most tragically, she could no longer recognize her husband. She had no idea who he was. This was agony for him. He would go home from visiting her, trembling with grief, overwhelmed by sadness.

One morning, he went into her room, and saw her lying there and had an idea — an idea, he said, that could only have come from God. Sol climbed into his wife’s tiny twin bed, and put his arms around her. And he just held her. He hugged her. He whispered to her. That’s all. But something happened. As he put it, “I got into bed with her and loved her and it lifted my depression.” And Rita was transformed, too. She responded to his touch. And she began to talk.

He now does it every day. Rita’s doctor says that her “old memory” recalls being in his arms, remembers how he used to hold her, and part of her is able to come back.

Now Sol spends a couple of hours of every day, just holding Rita, telling her he loves her, and she tells him she loves him. Just as they have for 61 years.

I can’t think of a more beautiful example of what married love is all about — for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. The venerable Matt Talbot said that it is constancy that God wants. Persistence. Perseverance. Sol Rogers had that — and more.

Read on… this is a powerful and masterful exposition and when I read it, it gave me goosebumps. The story of Sol’s love for his wife is astonishing and moving, but more than that this is something we really need to read and absorb. It is is a reminder that life cannot be looked at as a purely utilitarian venture — that while one lives, one is entitled to the life one has, especially if there is a person — one single person on earth - who is willing to love that life. And even if not.

We forget that at our terrible peril.

There are those who believe that nothing is ever truly done for selfless reasons, and I often lament the narrow and limited worldview that such people must possess to form such a narrow, and then cynical, view of life. Chesterton once noted that it is only on those, who continue to hold on for a while past the point at which all hope has faded, that hope begins to dawn. I think that is very much the case for Sol Rogers, who instead of giving in to what anyone would have excused as a very natural despair over his wife’s condition, instead chose to love her even more, and to act on that.

And the results? Admittedly, there is a natural explanation for the change that transpired…but then, whoever said that God did not effect miracles by natural means?

Marital love is fruitful love, and we often think of that in the somewhat limited terms of children and procreation. And indeed, for most married couples, “fruitfulness” has quite a lot to do with that. But the example of Sol and Rita Rogers is another example of fruitfulness, of a very different kind, but still very much a natural outcome of the marital sacrament. It is still life-giving, in that the very act of compassionate love becomes the bridge by which Rita Rogers is able to cross back over, for a time, from her dementia. And it images the powerful, healing, compassionate love of Christ in that way.

As married love always should.

“Chimeras” is the term some use — and I think I will join their number — to describe the human/bovine hybrid embryos that British researchers have recently created. The very idea seems, to me, repugnant, and my reservations about such experimentation are echoed (with greater eloquence) by Peter Hitchens this week.

“Steve B” derides caution about certain types of experimentation. Does he believe there are no boundaries to research? I doubt it. In which case the argument must be where those boundaries lie. The Roman Catholic position, that you do not deliberately and voluntarily destroy life to do good, is a clear unequivocal borderline, inconvenient to scientists but preventing many evils. And it has the virtue of being absolute. There are alternative methods of conducting the research, which don’t involve Dr Moreau-type outrages with monster animal-human embryos. And I think the argument that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s will somehow be cured as a result of these laboratory adventures also need to ask themselves how they can possibly be sure. Even if you accept that the end justifies the means, oughtn’t you to be sure that the end are in fact attainable by the chosen method. You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, but you can break eggs without making any omelettes.

There are severe problems with attempting to justify the means to an end by looking first at the end; I abandoned such shallow moral reasoning in about the ninth grade, more or less. And I think Hitchens nails one of the more important criticisms of “by the means” justification — until we have achieved the ends by which we might attempt to justify the means, our means are without justification. So if we cannot be certain that the ends desired will be the ends achieved (and we cannot be), our means are without justification. And at that point, we create for ourselves a real moral quandry, especially if — at the end of whatever process we are referring to when we talk of our means — we do not achieve the desired ends. If in fact these chimera embryos do not enable us to, for example, better treat Alzheimer’s, can we still say that our means were justified?

All we are left with is our intent, and intent — while important — is not sufficient to justify as moral any particular means. The means by which we achieve what ends we arrive at must itself be morally justifiable wholly on its own merits, above any beyond the desired ends being sought, as well as above and beyond our intent in pursuing said ends by said means. Yes, that’s a more demanding framework to work within…but where Morality concerning the value of human life is concerned, we should be more demanding.