Okay, this one's more preachy - but you gotta love that first paragraph!
:-)
Without being organised religious about it, I have said myself, that I feel
I am building my son's soul, as I build his bones and his brain, through
normal nursing patterns. It's just nice to see someone else say it too.
Morgan Gallagher
Online Lactaneer
Sensing the winds are changing.....
- - - - - - - - -
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/190/story_19083_1.html
Milk of Kindness
Breastfeeding helps babies learn to love not just their mothers, but God.
By Juli Loesch Wiley
If God Almighty came to you and said, “I myself have designed a special food
that will strengthen your baby’s body and develop his brain, which will
comfort him and cheer his heart, and lay the foundation for his lifetime
health and well-being. I have given this food into your keeping; I have
placed it in your body; it is my loving provision for your child”—who would
reply, “No thanks, no divine gifts, I’d rather give him a can of Similac”?
Personally embodied nourishment is not only good for the body; it is good
for the soul. It is (as some Christians would put it) proto-sacramental.
Mother’s milk promotes sanctity? From the infant’s point of view, yes. Look
at it this way. What are we here for? What is the purpose of human life? It
is “to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with him in
the next.” It is to love and to be loved.
And how do young humans learn to love? One would think this would be one of
the core concerns of theology: studying, with sustained attention, on our
knees, the process by which a child learns to give and receive love.
How does the child learn love? Where are the foundations laid? At his
mother’s breast. According to the research brought together in Fr. William
Virtue’s philosophically rich and cheering book, Mother and Infant,
breastfeeding teaches the tiniest infant some immensely important lessons:
(1) that the universe is good; (2) that he has personal power: the power to
elicit a response; and (3) that his deepest needs and appetites can be
satisfied in a committed relationship with one loving person.
Did I say “the universe”? From the infant’s point of view, yes. The
newborn’s sight, generally hazy and undefined, is designed to come to a
focus at one specific distance: 8 to 12 inches, not much more and not less.
Why 8 to 12 inches? Because that’s the distance from a nursling’s eyes to
his mother’s face while he is being cradled at her breast. Increasingly,
within weeks of birth, he’s not looking at her breast. He’s looking at her
eyes.
She fills his whole range of vision; she satisfies his hunger and thirst,
succors him with warmth and comfort; the timbre of her voice (the higher
female tone) is precisely the range of frequencies his ears are fine-tuned
to hear. She is his universe: To the nursling, she is the Immensity.
Breastfeeding is not just a connection between a mammary gland and an
alimentary canal. It is a relationship of a person to a person. It is not
just nutritive. It is unitive. If it is wrong deliberately to sunder the
unitive and procreative powers via contraception—and I am convinced it
is—then I would also argue that there is something wrong about separating
the unitive and the nutritive powers via the artificial bottle-feeding of
the young infant.
I don’t say that every use of a baby bottle is intrinsically immoral, as a
contraceptive is. What I do say is that if a mother knows the physical and
spiritual benefit of nourishing her baby at the breast, knows that her child
has a right to her milk as a proto-sacramental gift of embodied love, and is
able to nurse (even at a considerable personal sacrifice)—but chooses not
to—she has greatly wronged her child.
And if a woman does not know about breastfeeding, or is made incapable of
doing so by grave familial or social or economic pressure, then, in her
education or in her circumstances, she has been greatly wronged.
“It is thou, God, who took me from the womb, And kept me safe upon my
mother’s breasts” So says the Psalmist (22:9), speaking prophetically of the
divine care and protection to be enjoyed by the Messiah. And what mother,
loving her own baby, would want it any other way?
_________________________________________________________________
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