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Seven Reasons to Read Simcha Fisher’s Book on Natural Family Planning: 7QT XIV Seriatim

Seven Reasons to Read Simcha Fisher’s Book on Natural Family Planning: 7QT XIV Seriatim

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 2:13 am by Scott Eric Alt

Seven Reasons to Read Simcha Fisher’s Book on Natural Family Planning: 7QT XIV Seriatim 2017-03-09T02:13:04-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Simcha Fisher

If 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.

***

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