Seven reasons to read Simcha Fisher’s book on Natural Family Planning. 7QT XIV, seriatim.

f you talk to Sim­cha Fish­er, she will tell you that she did not write The Sin­ner’s Guide to Nat­ur­al Fam­i­ly Plan­ning to do what oth­er dis­cus­sions of the sub­ject already do well. So you will not find moral or the­o­log­i­cal argu­ment in this book; nor will you find a how-to man­u­al for using this method of post­pon­ing preg­nan­cy.

“Priests are so thrilled,” she says, “to dis­cov­er that here final­ly is a cou­ple who wants to use NFP instead of con­tra­cep­tion, and there is sel­dom any dis­cus­sion of: Now what?” Her engag­ing, wise, and often wit­ty book dis­cuss­es the so-now-what real­i­ty faced by cou­ples who choose nat­ur­al fam­i­ly plan­ning.

Sim­cha Fish­er picks up where the priest leaves off, and not with the­o­ry but with the wis­dom of a woman who has been there too and will hold your hand through the rough spots.

II.

And there is refresh­ing hon­esty in her writ­ing. She gives no “rosy pic­ture” such as the “NFP boost­ers [often] paint,” where­in cou­ples enjoy a recur­ring “hon­ey­moon effect.” She under­stands why the “boost­ers” do this: NFP is “a hard sell” to a cul­ture with a con­tra­cep­tive men­tal­i­ty. “You’re not,” she writes, “going to con­vert the mass­es by say­ing, ‘Hey, every­body! Who’s ready for some redemp­tive suf­fer­ing?’ ” But the real­i­ty is: NFP is not “sun­shine and but­ter­cups”; instead it is “the Cross.”

“The truth is that the mar­riage-build­ing ben­e­fits of remain­ing faith­ful to Church teach­ing are real. They’re attain­able. It’s just that you have to work hard to get them.” (13)

The real­i­ty of it is, “You’re doing every­thing right [but] your hus­band is angry and frus­trat­ed, you’re bit­ter and per­plexed, and the whole thing has some­how become an aching knot of mis­un­der­stand­ings, hurt feel­ings, and alien­ation” (12).

Does not sound entire­ly fun. Does not sound all that “mar­riage-build­ing.” But if you’re the audi­ence for whom Ms. Fish­er writes, and you’re already com­mit­ted to Church teach­ing, you trust what she writes because you know she is hon­est. You trust her because she tells you, not that there is no Cross, but how to bear the Cross.

III.

Of course, many will ask, Why should we trust this moth­er of nine to make the case for NFP? That’s a fecun­di­ty beyond all rea­son! Either she’s not using NFP at all (oh the deceit!) or it does not real­ly work. Nan­cy Pelosi infa­mous­ly said that you call NFP-users “mama” and “dada,” and Sim­cha Fish­er is exhib­it A.

But she laughs when I raise this poten­tial objec­tion and ask for her reply. “If it weren’t for nat­ur­al fam­i­ly plan­ning,” she tells me, “I would have 43 chil­dren. It’s the one thing I’m good at!”

IV.

She also is very good at writ­ing. It is not very many writ­ers who will dare to write about a sub­ject by not writ­ing about it. It is a blast­ed dif­fi­cult thing to pull off. G.K. Chester­ton was able to do it; Annie Dil­lard was able to do it.

The rea­son Sim­cha Fish­er is able to pull it off has to do with an impor­tant point she made in an hour-long inter­view with me this week: that NFP is not so much an end in itself but “a vehi­cle through which we under­stand oth­er things.” So she writes about the “oth­er things” and comes at her true sub­ject by indi­rec­tion.

One of the things we learn through NFP is that “God’s will for us is big­ger and more flex­i­ble than our will for our­selves.”

More flex­i­ble, not less. So Ms. Fish­er talks a lot about choic­es, and the mean­ing of free­dom and dis­cern­ment. She talks a lot about rela­tion­ship issues between cou­ples, and how men and women dif­fer in their approach to inti­ma­cy. She has a whole chap­ter on whether it’s okay to laugh about sex. (It is.)

V.

Dis­cern­ment is a much mis­un­der­stood sub­ject, and she spends a great deal of time ear­ly on in the book clar­i­fy­ing what it is not. It is not, she says, as though there is a box some­where marked “God’s will,” and we have to wrack our brains to fig­ure out what the one thing is inside that box: NFP or 43 chil­dren.

Instead, there is a wide­ness in what we call “God’s will” that allows for free­dom and indi­vid­ual choice (with­in obvi­ous moral bound­aries). God sel­dom says, “Do this,” but rather, “If that’s what you want to do through prayer and self-reflec­tion, let’s work with it.”

So if you want­ed to know whether or not to use NFP, or when, or how many chil­dren to have, sor­ry, she’s not going to say.

What she is going to tell you is what to expect and how to cope through the inevitable dif­fi­cul­ties. And she’s been there; she knows what the dif­fi­cul­ties are, and how hus­bands and wives can mis­un­der­stand each oth­er, and resent each oth­er, and also how car­ry­ing the Cross togeth­er can help heal all that.

VI.

In order to be hap­py, you do not think of your­self. You think of the oth­er.

If the first half of the book is about choic­es, the sec­ond half of the book is about hap­pi­ness. It is about think­ing of the oth­er who is going through the Cross of NFP with you and help­ing him, or her, through their tri­al. It is, after all, a Cross that hus­band and wife car­ry togeth­er. They should not each be made to feel as though they are car­ry­ing it alone.

The real val­ue in NFP, Ms. Fish­er tells me, is not that it is anoth­er kind of con­tra­cep­tion. “It is,” she says, “anoth­er kind of life.” It is hard­er: “It involves dili­gence, it involves self-con­trol, it involves coop­er­a­tion.” And it involves sur­ren­der to God. By learn­ing self-mas­tery through NFP, one learns how to sur­ren­der to God and not always say “my will.” Yes, we have choic­es; but then we sur­ren­der the path and the outcome—and ourselves—to God.

Ulti­mate­ly, the val­ue in this book is less that it tells us what to do, or makes an argu­ment for NFP, as it is that it tells us how to sur­ren­der and how to love. And that we will be hap­py when we do.

VII.

When our con­ver­sa­tion turns toward the sec­u­lar world that does not accept the Catholic moral teach­ing on con­tra­cep­tion, Ms. Fish­er says she is opti­mistic that peo­ple are start­ing to see that Pope Paul VI’s stark pre­dic­tions in Humanae Vitae were right and that an entire­ly sec­u­lar case against con­tra­cep­tion can still be made.

Fem­i­nist writer Nao­mi Wolf has made a strong case against pornog­ra­phy not on reli­gious grounds, but entire­ly on the basis of its pow­er to decrease male sex­u­al desire and increase real wom­en’s feel­ings of being unable to com­pete with the inter­net fan­ta­sy.

In a sim­i­lar way, many women, and not on reli­gious grounds, are com­ing to under­stand that it is just not good to muti­late or cram their bod­ies “with every spring, cork, dam, plug, sponge, and tox­in you can lay your hands on” (63). It is not good for women psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly or emo­tion­al­ly when inter­mit­tent use of an IUD, for exam­ple, turns their fer­til­i­ty on and off like a spig­ot. They do not want to do that to their bod­ies, and they do not want to do that to their rela­tion­ships. By nat­ur­al law, they under­stand part of what John Paul II talked about in the The­ol­o­gy of the Body.

Which is why it works for Sim­cha Fish­er to spend so much time talk­ing around NFP—not only for the sake of those who don’t need the moral les­son, but for the sake of those who don’t want it and can still be per­suad­ed to con­sid­er the integri­ty of their bod­ies and the impor­tance of their choic­es and the val­ue of where they put their love. And the truth that, ulti­mate­ly, a woman wants a hus­band who will val­ue the integri­ty of her body too.

 

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Con­ver­sion Diary.