College students love Taco Bell. Cheap and quick, Taco Bell accommodates the student, who is poor in both time and money. You can easily transform two bucks into a number of delicious combinations: tacos, enchiladas, gorditas, and best of all: burritos. Burritos are the only remedy for one with simultaneous cravings for cheese, guacamole, sour cream, and bean lard.

In my experience burritos never travel alone. They often are seen in pairs or even triplets. I’ve even seen them coupled with any number of items from the 99 cent value menu. I’m no math major, but this one is easy: Burrito = delicious.

Burritos are easy to come by, but the easier they come, the easier they go. According to Taco Bell International, the average preparation time of a bean burrito is a one minute, 41 seconds, while the average life span of an unwrapped burrito is 37.4 seconds. About 20 minutes after devouring the bean, sour cream, cheese, and lard creation, the bliss has passed. In the aftermath, not only am I still hungry, but I’m in pain. I inhale burritos. But once I’m finished, I get a stomachache, which also never travels alone. These stomach pains can almost always be found in tandem with flatulence. The reality is that gas, a by-product the burrito connoisseur is forced to endure, stinks for you and everyone around you. The outcome of my usual trip to Taco Bell is never a pretty picture: a foul smelling, young man with gastro-intestinal discomfort. (Side note: The majority of Taco Bell restrooms I’ve been in have been very clean and well kept.)

You would think after three or four times, I might catch on. No such luck. It seems the hungrier I am, the less foresight I possess. But is this only true of our hunger for food? I think a worthy parallel could be drawn to the sexual appetite as well. Hunger makes us lose our ability to think of the future. How do we respond to hunger? Do we rashly, thoughtlessly try to quench it without thinking about the future? This might be permissible when dealing with your digestive system, but we cannot treat the sexuality of human beings of infinite value so callously.

If unfulfilling sex is a burrito, then sex as God designed it is the Thanksgiving Feast. Burritos are cheaper and faster, but only through patience and perseverance can the greatest good be achieved. At first Thanksgiving is a slow suffering that whets your desire. Smelling the buttery mash-potatoes, the stuffing (my favorite), and the roasting turkey is painful, especially when you see the oven timer still has over three hours. Where burritos are easy, thanksgiving is difficult. Even as a child, my mother put me to work stirring gravy and buttering bread. I’ve since moved on to peeling potatoes and chopping carrots. Thanksgiving always requires effort. Not just effort, but effort in the face of temptation. How many times did my thieving hand get slapped trying to sneak some crescent rolls? The meal is worth waiting for, had mother let me ruin my appetite, all our work would be in vain.

Sexuality is the hunger only a holy and spiritual union can fill. Why do we act surprised when anything else leaves us unfulfilled? Why do we stop at Taco Bell on our way to Thanksgiving dinner? Why are we so impatient and unwilling to allow God to cook us the thanksgiving feast that is holy sex, sex at its best. Sex at its best is a “complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman” (CCC 2337). Sex at its worst is a cheap and unsatisfying.

My mother slapping my hand is God asking us, begging us, not to settle for premarital sex. The only time God ever says “no” is when God wants to say “yes” to something higher. God asks us to skip the burrito and implores us to invest that hunger in something more stable. A burrito leaves us hungry 20 minutes later; thanksgiving feeds a family for a whole day, and for weeks afterwards with turkey sandwiches. Holy matrimonial sex will nourish the couple for a lifetime.

An appetite is healthy, but let’s not spoil it.

Men, put down the burrito and demand something higher, holier, and more nourishing. Let’s not settle for anything, but the best. We’re too good for anything but the highest good. Burritos cannot compare to well-cooked turkey.

Women, demand to be treated better than bean-lard and guacamole. Your dignity demands the attention, endurance, and determination of a real man, a Turkey-baser. You are too sacred to settle for anything less.

We must trust that God will not let us starve. We hold the menu; the choice is ours. We can have quick, cheap, unfulfilling sex, which is fleeting and leaves us hungry and gassy, or we can share the feast that God has prepared. The feast takes longer to prepare, but can be enjoyed for a lifetime.

Intimate Death: Coping With Miscarriage in the Catholic Family

I recently received two emails sparked by topics on my blog. They were both from Catholics—one male, one female—both addressing the topic of miscarriage and abortion. They were not discussing the same blog topic and yet I could not help but compare and contrast them.

The first email, from the male, thought it was so silly that I talked about the numbers of forced miscarriages that artificial contraception causes. He writes, “I don’t get it. And neither the church nor society mourns any of this as a tragedy.” He thought it was strange that I would count newly conceived human beings as persons, and their forced deaths, an injustice. His idea is that because so many humans lose their lives naturally before women know they are pregnant, there is no tragedy involved. And because there is no ritual by neither the Church nor the State regarding these lost lives this, therefore, must mean the “lives” are not really persons to mourn.

The man is quite correct when he states that the Church and the State ignore the death of the human being, mainly because they may not know that the human ever existed. He is quite incorrect to conclude that human being is not a person to be mourned, especially by the parents. Contrast his email to the one I received from the female who miscarried her baby asking me “How do I get past these feelings? What do I do with them? And can I not get a pat answer?” She wants to feel better after losing her child, and wonders why she still feels so sad long after the miscarriage is officially done.

Would we ever expect a mother who lost a five year old to be feeling good a mere five months after the death? Not at all, and yet for women who lose their children via miscarriage or even abortion we are denied the right to grieve and the first gentleman’s email summarizes that denial and bewilderment at a woman’s grief better than anything I could possibly say.

When I miscarried our second child at “only” nine weeks, I received comments such as “Oh, thank God, you miscarried early, can you imagine if it had been later?” Or “it happens ALL the time, you do realize that most women miscarry, right?” While I am sure the people were trying to lift me up with their comments, those comments directly invalidated my child’s existence and her value. Who cares if people die every day? That in no way mitigates the grief my husband and I experienced at losing our child. Unlike all those people, this one was our baby. Or the comment that my grief would be more if my pregnancy was further along. The assumption that somehow the child is not valuable until he reaches the mysterious age of . . . what age again? Either we are human from the beginning or we are not.

Unlike other deaths, miscarriage and abortion happen in the most intimate of all settings: the mother’s body. Life is created there and life is destroyed there. Prior to my miscarriage, I had always thought that the baby dies and then the body dispels the remains quickly. During my miscarriage I found out how wrong my perceptions were. No, miscarriage takes weeks to resolve. During the entire “death process,” as I named it, I was reminded every day that this was not a period, but rather the remains of my child I should have been holding in my arms. The worst part for me was that at the end of the entire process there was . . . nothing. Nothing. The remains had been flushed down the toilet, no body to hold, and yet my body knew it had carried a little life even for a short time and it would take months before my hormones had figured out I was no longer pregnant. Even worse, my heart knew I had had a baby for a short period of time.

It was at the worst moment of my life that my Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints and our belief in the Sacraments became so crucial for my healing and for my husband. We had already chosen a name for our baby when we found out we were pregnant: Grace María de Jesús (after my maternal great-grandmother and my mother-in-law). In grief, I would stop my tasks during the day and ask Grace to pray for her mother who was really struggling with her loss. I would tell her how disappointed I was that we couldn’t hold her, but that we loved her nonetheless.

My priest, God bless him, responded so compassionately. He offered Mass for little Grace and for us and then he anointed me afterwards with the Sacrament of Healing. It was so soothing for our bruised hearts and so helpful to have some sort of ceremony and ritual to recognize our child’s short existence. It is amazing how the act of recognizing her gave her value and validated our grief.

When two months had gone by and I wasn’t doing very well emotionally, my best friend paid for a visit with a counselor who focused on maternal mental health issues and that visit was so therapeutic for me, mainly to hear that just because my body was finished with the miscarriage did not mean that my spirit was finished with it. I was not giving myself time to mourn my child. I wanted to feel better sooner rather than later.

Lastly, during our family prayer time at the end we always ask each of our patron saints to “pray for us.” We decided to include Grace in our family prayer and ask her to pray for us. We have found that each of these methods helped us heal slowly and cope with our empty arms when her due date passed.

We are so thankful for our Catholic faith and belief in still being connected to the dead, for we know the dead are not dead but merely living in another place. Praise God.