Pope Francis on Families and Their Gifts, John McNeill and Margaret Farley on Fruitfulness of Gay Relationships: Generativity Depends on Ecclesial and Social Support

What Catholic theologian John McNeill is pointing to in the quotation I shared with you yesterday is very much like what Catholic theologian Margaret Farley also pointed to in her recent comments at the Commonweal discussion of whether the church is a fortress or a field hospital. Margaret Farley offered her listeners several examples to illustrate what she means when she speaks of how the tradition of natural law in Catholic moral thinking requires us to attend carefully to concrete reality, to the experiences of others, and to learn from these.

Thought for the Day: Erik Erikson on Non-Procreative Generativity

There are individuals who, through misfortune or because of special and genuine gifts in other directions, do not apply this drive [i.e., of generativity] to their own offspring. And indeed, the concept of generativity is meant to include such more popular synonyms as productivity and creativity.

Erik Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycles (NY: Norton, 1959) (p. 103).

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I must add that as a principle [generativity] corresponds to what in Hinduism is called the maintenance of the world, that middle period of the life cycle when existence permits you and demands you to consider death as peripheral and to balance its certainty with the only happiness that is lasting: to increase, by whatever is yours to give, the good will and the higher order in your sector of the world. That, to me, can be the only adult meaning of that strange word happiness.

Erik Erikson, Dimensions of a New Identity (NY: Norton, 1974) (as cited, Cheryl Merser, “Grown Ups”: A Generation in Search of Adulthood [NY: Putnam’s, 1987]. p. 205).