In any regard, I was more or less asking about the Catholic perspective on this, since my MIL is Catholic and she was contradicting common (Catholic) faith, so I was confused.
You say that your ML is Catholic and close to “sainthood.” If you read any of the Catholic mystic saints they also describe a heck of a lot of direct personal observations that you might not understand, that you might consider “philosophy” or that you might possibly find “contradictory to the common Catholic faith”
but that they regarded as simple direct observations of life that they attempted to explain to people.
I am no mystic and no saint and no longer Catholic. I have witnessed the process of the human soul both attach to (and in the case of one death detach from) the body within me 6 times. My extremely Catholic mother was the same way. Her extremely Catholic mother was the same way. It’s not a matter of philosophy. It’s a matter of simple observation of day to day life no different than observing that the lawn needs mowing again or what is in the refrigerator! My extremely non-Catholic daughter-in-law is the same way. My non-Catholic daughter is the same way. My best friend’s non-Catholic mother was the same way. The young wives always used to come ask her the sex of their unborn children and she would tell simply by looking at them, as did her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother from a long line of midwives, long before modern medicine and modern medical tests, and she was NEVER wrong. Modern medical tests aren’t even that accurate and they certainly can’t tell from day 1 by simple observation of the fact like that either.
- The oldest Catholic great-grandmother anyone ever knew of around here, who was over 100 years old when she spoke on the matter 30 years ago said that it was once a very common observation of women when they lived close to the earth and long before all the destruction of 2 World Wars so overwhelmed and destroyed the sensitivity and sensibility of women.*
It rips my heart out with sorrow to read that a woman who is close to the earth and has conceived so many children would not even understand what I described at all. Dear God, no wonder the oldest and extremely Catholic great-grandmother of all had hugged me in tears when she had questioned me 30 years ago and given me the 3rd degree so much that she had frightened me at age 24. She was the matriarch beyond all other matriarchs and even the other matriarchs were afraid of her scrutiny and her words. She had announced to everyone at the funeral, everyone in the entire hall, in a very loud voice that she was “going home to die in peace now” that she had “seen a woman with a child again as women had been before the wars destroyed women!” I did not know any different from me, my mother, my grandmother. I did not know any different, any better. She had said that EVERYONE had become different, and that I was the odd one out since the world wars, and that I would not have been the odd one out before the world wars had completely destroyed the sensitivity and sensibility of women.
I now understand what she was talking about.
It is overwhelming sorrow to understand what she was talking about and why she was in tears. It is overwhelming sorrow.
I should not be talking to you. If you ever did understand, then you too would face the overwhelming sorrow of what endless war on the part of men has apparently done to women on a very vast scale.
