My purpose in these posts is to bring a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.
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“Please, talk to me about love, Mommy, Daddy.”
Notes
from a conference in French “S’il-vous-plaît, parlez-moi d’amour”given at the
Diocese’s offices March 29th, 2017 by Inès Pélissié du Rausas, a
mother who has written books on how parents can form their children well at
the various stages of their development in ways appropriate to each age to
understand and live well their human sexuality.
Inès advocates precocious but progressive education of children with
tenderness by their parents in contrast to the intrusion of culture and society
which, truthfully, is erroneous, violent, and damaging, all too often ruining
or at the very least hurting our children’s innocence and ability to appreciate
all the beauty, truth, and goodness of the gift of life entrusted to them by
God and their own great dignity and that of others.
As lionesses are so ferocious in defending their young; so too should we
be as parents to defend and form our children regarding their vocation, their
calling to eternal life, which is at stake, and the spiritual strength God
offers us with Marriage and family life. Let us think not only of our own
children, but also of the children of others and of the poor. We need to
rediscover or to acquire for the first time our spinal column, our backbone,
and stand up for our children, for our family, for our Marriage, for others,
for the poor, for the Church, for humanity, and for God.
With the Holy Spirit we have at hand an infinite variety of new
solutions to age old problems created when people – motivated by so many hidden
goals driving them – tamper with our children and seek to “play around” with
their innocent, vulnerable, trusting and hearts. No one must play around with our children’s hearts!
PRESSURES AND LOBBIES
There are 3 lobbies and “outside interests” putting considerable
pressure everywhere and all the time on our children, and particularly on what
the marketing strategists call “pre-adolescents”. In reality, there is no such
thing as a pre-adolescent unless it is in the interest of someone to target
children in the “latency stage” in view of influencing them in advance of
becoming adolescents. The latency stage is what children live from the age of 6
until puberty, when in principle all sexual things don’t interest them or are
even repugnant to them. In other words, there are interests out there
addressing our children in the latency stage as though they were already
adolescents, or potential adolescents, or children wanting to become
adolescents. These interests threaten to interrupt the safety of the latency
stage as they prematurely stimulate the imagination of children and, in so
doing, to damage their innocence.
Tactic # 1.
Under the
pretext of taking the defense of freedoms / liberties and equality, such as,
for example, the fight against AIDS, all manner of misinformation and outright
lies are propagated, always with the overhanging threat of severe reprisals
upon anyone who might dare to oppose this tactic in real life and time.
Tactic # 2.
Consider
all the frantic activity around pornography – such as with the considerable
pressure on parents to provide their young children with an I-Pad, or I-Phone,
or Laptop, or their equivalent – to sever the safety ties of young children to
their parents and make them free to “roam” and be led astray by any number of
“wolves” in sheep’s clothing presented to them in any number of creative and
cleverly disguised ways.
All pornographic voices and images and words
speak of prostitution – none of them speak of love, not of true love, nor of
divine love – but always of pleasure, greed, power, and domination.
Solicitation to draw children into various forms of prostitution of their
bodies as pleasure objects and to treat others not as persons but as pleasure
objects often takes violent forms but is always aggressive with dangerous
consequences.
The person of the child is hurt, damaged, within their very self, but they also become dangerous for others by being conditioned to believe that they are incapable of mastering or restraining their own impulses.
SOLUTION We must do all we can to protect our children against these attacks and form them to learn to avoid such animal and predatory behaviors as are portrayed and promoted by pornography in all its forms. What is hopeful is that with children we can always repair any damage, and they can always learn and grow. With a child we can always love and begin afresh.
The person of the child is hurt, damaged, within their very self, but they also become dangerous for others by being conditioned to believe that they are incapable of mastering or restraining their own impulses.
SOLUTION We must do all we can to protect our children against these attacks and form them to learn to avoid such animal and predatory behaviors as are portrayed and promoted by pornography in all its forms. What is hopeful is that with children we can always repair any damage, and they can always learn and grow. With a child we can always love and begin afresh.
Tactic # 3.
We have
all become painfully aware of and familiar with the latest new ideology which
aggressively seeks to impose on young and vulnerable children and adolescents
and even young adults a burden to select their own gender, as if our gender
were an “à la carte” activity for human beings. Gender ideology negates human
sex and gender by replacing male and female with homosexual and heterosexual, M
- F with H - H.
This new ideology seeks to replace the individuality and complementarity of our human nature as designed by God with pleonasm – that is, with what is the same as, with redundancy – favoring what is the same as me, rejecting what is different from me. It is the destruction of the richness of complementarity for the sake of the identical.
SOLUTION We must avoid using any other terms than those given to us by God – male and female – and simply say that I am woman, or I am man, girl or boy. The term “heterosexual” was coined by a German who wanted to promote homosexual activity in the 18th/19th century. He used from the Greek “heteros” which means different and “sexue” or in Latin “sexus” which means separate or different. In other words, the term is redundant, saying the same thing twice. It’s a clever trick to annihilate the final purpose of our human sexuality – which is life and union for life and stability in Marriage and family life – and replace it with individuals seeking after their own pleasure.
In the Creator’s plan for our happiness, the finality of our human sexuality is union and fecundity, life and family. These other “interests” want to promote “sex ed” – that is, education to sexual practices that it is claimed “everyone wants” and how to practice them providing safety and protection from sexually transmitted infections and diseases. However, there is never any question or concern in “sex ed” to protect the person in all that we are and can be.
Such “sex ed” ignores and tramples the meaning and beauty of the human body as well as the body’s union to relationship, marriage, children, and family, and the truth that we all want to be loved. All the “dirty” content damages the child’s heart by presenting a perversion of human sexuality. The solution is to reach the child’s heart by treating with the truth, love, beauty, and life, which is good news, and “different from what you have seen”, what is presented out there in the world, in culture, and in the various media of mass and social communication.
This new ideology seeks to replace the individuality and complementarity of our human nature as designed by God with pleonasm – that is, with what is the same as, with redundancy – favoring what is the same as me, rejecting what is different from me. It is the destruction of the richness of complementarity for the sake of the identical.
SOLUTION We must avoid using any other terms than those given to us by God – male and female – and simply say that I am woman, or I am man, girl or boy. The term “heterosexual” was coined by a German who wanted to promote homosexual activity in the 18th/19th century. He used from the Greek “heteros” which means different and “sexue” or in Latin “sexus” which means separate or different. In other words, the term is redundant, saying the same thing twice. It’s a clever trick to annihilate the final purpose of our human sexuality – which is life and union for life and stability in Marriage and family life – and replace it with individuals seeking after their own pleasure.
In the Creator’s plan for our happiness, the finality of our human sexuality is union and fecundity, life and family. These other “interests” want to promote “sex ed” – that is, education to sexual practices that it is claimed “everyone wants” and how to practice them providing safety and protection from sexually transmitted infections and diseases. However, there is never any question or concern in “sex ed” to protect the person in all that we are and can be.
Such “sex ed” ignores and tramples the meaning and beauty of the human body as well as the body’s union to relationship, marriage, children, and family, and the truth that we all want to be loved. All the “dirty” content damages the child’s heart by presenting a perversion of human sexuality. The solution is to reach the child’s heart by treating with the truth, love, beauty, and life, which is good news, and “different from what you have seen”, what is presented out there in the world, in culture, and in the various media of mass and social communication.
SUMMARY The pre-adolescent or
rather the child in the latency and innocent stage is “beaten up or mugged” by
publicity which treats him like and adolescent when he isn’t one yet.
First we have to present love as beautiful
before we can treat what is dirty, false, violent, etc. We only have to look at
video clips that turn various scenarios into pornography. Porn is to be avoided
by everyone in all of its forms, because this garbage expresses itself in the
heart and hardens it. The world of “hot” folks is actually glacial… cold…
without real love which builds the other up without exploiting him or her.
7 to 8 years old is
the age of reason which introduces a new form of stability for the child who
leaves infancy behind.
6 or 7 to 12 is the
latency period during which a form of modesty awakens and manifests itself in
different ways. From now on the child wants to bathe alone, now having a
greater awareness of himself, of his body.
As a result the boy displays a kind
of repugnance for everything sexual and even for marks of affection for members
of the opposite sex.
The young girl for
her part may begin to keep an intimate diary which must be protected from her
brothers.
In any case parents
must gently open their child to others during this period during which both
girls and boys are inclined to close in on themselves.
In the west for the
past 100 years puberty has been advancing and showing itself younger; without
doubt due to pollution and the increased presence of estrogen in the
environment due to the pill and other sources which end up in the waters and
the soils and, as a result, in the food chain.
THE CHILD IN THE LATENCY STAGE
Paradox # 1.
The child is really connected
but very alone. He has a great need to be loved. Parents should ask themselves,
“Does my child know that I love him?” Even in the culture we see evidence of
this unavoidable truth as, for example, in the “Harry Potter” series of novels
we see from beginning to end the conviction that “evil can do nothing against
the sacrificial love of a mother.”
Our children need to be absolutely loved by their parents, no matter the conditions. In addition there is the even greater good that they are wanted and loved by God. Let’s do what we must so that they can bathe in the love of God.
Our children need to be absolutely loved by their parents, no matter the conditions. In addition there is the even greater good that they are wanted and loved by God. Let’s do what we must so that they can bathe in the love of God.
Paradox # 2.
During
this latency stage the child puts forward “me by myself” but for all that we
continue to deliberately accompany, congratulate, and surround him with our
love, perhaps a little more discretely, but just as truly and personally,
despite the new “distance”.
Paradox # 3.
External autonomy versus
interior liberty – The child now becomes more competent in getting around and
doing things, but going about taking care of his own needs by himself requires
maturity, more than he is likely to have at this age. His incomplete maturity
requires a degree of support that varies from one child to another. Parents
need to observe and realize that during this latency stage the child cannot yet
be really mature or entirely autonomous. Here lies the great challenge
for the parent who is too busy and tired: to recharge his strength and energy
for the good of the child in his suffering, pain, and shadows. The challenge is
all the greater for the parent still living with his own sufferings, pain, and
shadows; which he must manage privately in order to continue providing the
emotional education of the child. This emotional education of the child becomes
all the more difficult in view of the child’s own interior states. At this
level, what the parent is going through can make him more compassionate to the
states through which his child is passing, and this same compassion can allow
the parent to sufficiently forget himself to attend to his child’s needs.
In the matter of emotional education in his human nature and sexuality, the child has the right to see, to hear, and to know his parents’ love story, and thus, his origins. It doesn’t matter if one of the parents and spouses is no longer around. The remaining parent must put aside all recrimination he may feel against his ex- spouse; because the child has both the right and the need to know about his origins in the love that his parents had for one another, and hence, for him their child.
In the matter of emotional education in his human nature and sexuality, the child has the right to see, to hear, and to know his parents’ love story, and thus, his origins. It doesn’t matter if one of the parents and spouses is no longer around. The remaining parent must put aside all recrimination he may feel against his ex- spouse; because the child has both the right and the need to know about his origins in the love that his parents had for one another, and hence, for him their child.
EMOTIONAL AND SEXUAL EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
BEFORE ADOLESCENCE
The emotional and
sexual education of our children needs to happen before they enter into
adolescence, and it can begin as soon as they ask questions that remotely or
closely touch all that has to do with their origin or sexuality. This education
of the child by their parent must always be done with great tenderness and
affection; for this is the most faithful expression of the truth about love
which gives life not only at the beginning but which continues to give life all
during life. Given the human and cultural situation in which we currently live,
parents need reference points in order to effectively embark on the emotional
and sexual education of their children.
Reference point # 1.
Human love
is lived in the world of human persons.
Human beings are not things, not animals, not machines, not toys, but persons.
We, human beings, we are a living network of body, soul, spirit, mind, and
heart. So we’re not talking about a model of animal instinct as in wild or
domesticated beasts. We are not human beasts, but rather human persons. This is
why we absolutely reject all forms of pornography, of prostitution, or of
perverted sexuality which, in every case, showcases instinctual, impulsive, and
therefore, animal behaviors and activities.
Reference point # 2.
Your body – is you – it is not a thing
which belongs to you, but you are your
body at the same time that you are also your soul, your spirit, your mind,
and your heart, which all together form the person that you are. So what your
body lives, you live it too. That is why all behaviors which deform the human
person and human sexuality by whatever pornographic expression – such as
submission to concupiscence or instinctive behaviors such as fellatio and
others – are a disruption of your dignity. Serial or
repeated sexual relations harden the heart which becomes incapable of truly
loving or being loved; which brings deep suffering of isolation and interior
cold. Having recourse to pornography causes the person with a hard heart no
longer to believe in real love or even in life. Such a person may either be
swallowed up in the impulse to suicide or may seek an escape in the artificial
option of “no sex” or refusing to identify with any gender: “I am neither male
nor female, neither man nor woman”.
Reference point # 3.
Faced wit hall this pollution
of ideas, of propaganda, and of interior states, what do we say to our
children? “I am made to love… I have a
heart.” The parent can and must soak the heart of their child in love and
the child will himself or herself recognize “garbage” assertions. In the same
way that one must wax well with many repetitions a piece of furniture made from
high quality wood to protect it from stains; so must parents must “wax well”
their children’s hearts, spirits, minds, and souls. The “layers” of wax are so
many intimate moments of complicity with their child as they entertain all
sorts of assertions about love – about their parents’ love but also about God’s
love – of which he, the child, is the product and of which he continues to be
the object, and of which he is also now becoming the subject, capable of loving
in his turn in a disinterested fashion with a sacrificial love.
VOCABULARY EVOCATIVE AND FORMATIVE TO THE VOCATION TO LOVE
The mommy’s tummy,
the mommy’s uterus is a safe cradle
for the baby right next to the mommy’s heart where the baby hears his mommy’s
heart, and together they make the music of two hearts beating together.
How will the baby come
out of mommy’s tummy? The baby will come out by a little path reserved for life and for love, reserved for the baby
to live, and also reserved for love and therefore for the daddy.
The vagina of the mommy
is made only for life and for love.
The anus is for something
else, to let the body get rid of garbage.
The channel for pee
is also for getting rid of garbage, even if it seems to be the same channel for
two different things, it is only part of it which is shared, but by only one
thing at a time.
THE TIDAL WAVE OF INNOCENT CHILDREN'S QUESTIONS
How did the baby get into mommy’s tummy?
Path of love # 1.
The baby
entered into mommy’s tummy be the same special path that the baby will take to
come out on his birthday. It is the little path reserved for life and for love,
for the heart.
Path of love # 2.
Daddy and
Mommy love each other and tell each other, but it isn’t enough – just like when
you are glad to see me and give me a hug – so Daddy and Mommy give each other a
special hug.
Path of love # 3.
When the
heart of the daddy and the mommy are full of love; then the daddy’s heart is
also full of love and he is able to give all his love to the mommy. The Daddy’s
rod gently lifts up and is able to enter into the mommy’s path which is
reserved for life and for love.
Path of love # 4.
Then there
is a crowning of their love… there is great joy in their united hearts and
bodies, and it is from this love that the child begins to exist in the mommy’s
tummy.
ADOLESCENTS
The education of
our children belongs to our right and our duty to think and to speak. Various
ideologies try to intimidate us and reduce us to silence, but it is more
essentially our right and our duty to speak more precisely to our children who,
for their part, have both the right and the need to know the whole truth about
their life and their origin, their human nature, and their human sexuality.
Adolescents now observe the dichotomy among the various voices demanding their
attention and allegiance; so we must approach them with a much more precise
language.
Approach # 1.
Confronted by all the voices
speaking of human sexuality, with adolescents we need to talk all the more precisely, because they have a greater need to
understand more concretely.
Approach # 2.
We must also speak to them of
the interior battle and of self mastery; that as human persons we
have a great capacity for self-control, but we must exercise it, and that our
self mastery grows with time and practice, and that the love of God is the
source of our interior strength. It is God who loves us first and who draws us
to love Him, to love others, and to love ourselves.
Approach # 3.
It is good and necessary for us
to elicit in the child – and
eventually the adolescent – admiration
for the perfection of love. Loving is like having a good voice. To sing well
one must see and know the partition well. The lyrics and notes of the partition
are: respect for the other, fidelity to the other, tenderness towards the
other, and paying attention to the expectations of the other.
Approach # 4.
Homophilia – at the beginning of
adolescence youth find reassurance in their peers and can feel all kinds of
emotions towards their peers, but there is nothing sexual about it. However
today the culture (which for decades has been manipulated by those with
strategic agendas to change society’s attitudes) so the culture tries to
sexualize the other. Unfortunately, this sexualization of the other renders
more difficult any ordinary true and disinterested friendship without any
sexual overtones.
Approach # 5.
One must certainly not listen
to voices that advocate “trying everything” in terms of sexual activity,
because we have a “body memory” which even after a single act colors everything
that follows. That is why outside of the loving relationship of one man and one
woman in a committed, permanent, exclusive, and faithful union, such as in
marriage, all sexual activity conditions the human heart on a path of egoism
and the quest for personal pleasure; which hardens the human heart and makes
true love all the more difficult.
Approach # 6.
A youth can become aware of a
“dragger” or homosexual predator trying to impose on him or her. This youth
must understand – this is absolutely essential – that “feeling” something is
not “consenting”. The youth, like any human person, remains ever free to ask
himself, “What do I want?” and “Is this good or not?” the “No!” of which I am
capable in my conscience protects me in order to one day be able to say a
beautiful “Yes!” to the person that I will choose to love and who will love me
in return.
Approach # 7.
The young adolescent woman like
the young adult woman can find herself temporarily in the condition of “homo
femini” or fear of male sexuality because of its violent portrayal in
pornography. She must learn from her parents that it isn’t really like that in
a loving relationship between human persons.
Parents, have many
gratuitous moments sitting down face to face with your child. See the
relationship of befriending when the fox meets the little prince. We must
approach gently, and that takes time. For boys, it’s better by the father; but
if not, the mother must do it. For example, the mother can say to him, “Your
father and I want to tell you…”
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF CHILDREN
Original sin consists in man and woman
turning away from their relationship with God the Creator to prefer making up
their own life, their own reality, their own universe, their own definition of
human life and of good and evil. There is nothing more painful in our human
condition than this isolation from God, who is not only our origin in love but
also our destiny.
That is why it is essential for parents
to introduce their child to God. However, we cannot give what we do not already
possess. Still, with God, it is never too late. So, the simple realization by
parents that there is somewhere within them some sort of desire to give their
children what is best can already open within them the gateway to all that is
“beyond”. These are the opportunities in real time, in the present moment, to
give their children the “sacraments” or knowledge of God, or prayer, or
spirituality, or faith.
The heart of the Judeo-Christian
Tradition is clearly that the God who is good and loving, the Creator of the
Universe, wants to have a relationship of friendship and love with every human
person. God, who is infinitely rich, wants to give us everything, but all the
obstacles that exist are within us… the “gates” within us are not always open,
or else they are not always open wide.
BAPTISM – At
Baptism God the Holy Trinity engenders within the human person a “family
relationship” of adoption introducing the person – even a newborn baby – into
the heart of the relationship of communion already existing from all eternity
and which “defines” the divine being we call God and whose nature Jesus has
revealed as a “communion of divine persons in a single divine being”. The life
that exists in God in perfect love and perfect harmony begins to “flow” or
“vibrate” in us, and we begin to “live in God”. As for everything else
regarding our human life on Earth, this new life “in God” must be cultivated,
first by our parents and godparents, but gradually by the free and motivated
participation of the child himself or herself.
CONFIRMATION – Whether
it is the day after its birth or at 11 / 12 years old, at its confirmation or
chrismation the child receives a new “effusion” or “outpouring of the Holy
Spirit of God” as the apostles and 100 or so other disciples received as they
gathered around the Mother of Jesus in the Upper Room on the day of Pentecost.
The Holy Spirit is ever at work to infuse his gifts: piety for greater respect
for the works of God, especially man and woman, girl / boy; and all the other
spiritual gifts for the person and the charisms for the good of others and the
Church. Parents can and must help their child to see himself or herself as
loved by God and that they receive themselves from God in love. Their gender –
female or male / man or woman – was given to them at their conception and will
ever manifest itself and develop.
HOLY COMMUNION – as
the mother gives of her blood / milk in nursing her baby at the maternal
breast, so does Jesus – risen from the dead and Son of God – give of himself as
spiritual food to communicants, giving us in holy communion a veritable
“transfusion” of the divine life He possesses with his Father and the Holy
Spirit. Our sharing in the divine life of love which is in God and in which we
are initiated through Baptism is not yet “permanent” on this Earth, but it will
only be permanent in Heaven when we will have accomplished our life and
mission.
ANOINTING OF THE SICK – As He did in Palestine, Jesus continues to heal the sick and wounded
while forgiving sins and driving out evil spirits who at various times torment
the baptised.
PENANCE – RECONCILIATION – Jesus allows us to meet Him face to face as He
did when He walked the Earth through the representatives He gives himself and
whom He sends us in the persons of his priests (HOLY ORDERS).
MARRIAGE – To those
who believe in Him and who put their trust in Him Jesus vouches that their love
will reflect his faithful and sacrificial love for his Church, his Beloved, the
body of all his assembled faithful disciples.
P.S.: Genesis portrays God’s creation of humans as man and woman in original innocence.
Sin divided us into man or
woman. Patriarchy is domination by
man. Feminism reduces us to neither
man nor woman. Gender
ideology seeks to neutralize
our innate human gender as woman or man by replacing our identity with the
illusion of a “choice”. For its part, the “gay” culture and homosexual “lobby”
prey on young children before puberty and young adolescents who are likely to
be experiencing temporary “Homophilia” as they develop, in a deliberate
strategy to impose their ideology on them precisely when they are most
vulnerable. Their objective is to have the young “fall” and identify themselves
as “gay” or “lesbian” and, in effect, deny
and abandon their great
dignity as girl or boy, woman or man, in accord with the gender with which they
were endowed at their conception. The good news is that Jesus Christ our Lord
restores lost innocence and our capacity for the reciprocal gift of self for
which our gender as man or woman empowers us, and which is God’s gift to us to
enable us to live our human life and love in the image and likeness of God the
Holy Trinity.
These
notes were taken from a conference given March 29th, 2017 at the
offices of the Archdiocese of Montreal by Inès Pélissié du Rausas with
added thoughts by me. He book containing a much more complete and detailed
explanation of her instructions to parents is entitled:
“S’il te plait, parle-moi de l’amour ! »
or at Amazon.ca at: https://www.amazon.ca/Sil-plait-maman-parle-moi-lamour/dp/2351170644/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492705376&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=S%27il+te+pla%C3%AEt%2C+parle-moi+de+l%27amour+%21%2C+In%C3%A8s+P%C3%A9lissi%C3%A9+du+Rausas
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My purpose in these posts is to help spread the contributions of a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.
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© 2004-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2004-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC
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