Sacrament of Personal Freedom

After the recent Worcester Catholic Men's Conference, the Chesterton Society of Worcester hosted a dinner with Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society. After dinner, I was able to talk one-on-one with Dale, and I mentioned one of my most favorite Chesterton passages. Like the late great Mr. Chesterton, I despise birth control. So many of our social ills can be traced back to the increased use of contraceptives.

In the chapter "Babies and Distributism" from the book The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton gives several reasons why he despised birth control. These reasons are worthy enough, but the highlight of this chapter is not the list of reasons against contraceptive use, but rather the argument for having a child. Chesterton understands that to talk of the child as-a-burden is to put reality upside down. In this modern dreary world of wage slavery and the world's corresponding view that people are mere economic units whose duty it is to consume and buy products for the health of the state, there is no true outlet of creativity... except one. It is no wonder that there is such a dearth of hope in modern society, and that there is such a pent up desire for change. There is something missing, and we collectively cannot put our finger on it. We're missing our children.

Our great source of freedom comes from the first obligation God placed on men, "Be fruitful and multiply!" Chesterton understands true creativity:

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

The world has it wrong. Children are not a burden, they are a blessing.