Through its prohibition on birth control, the Church has suggested that the only right way to have children is through biological reproduction: a kind of forced labor culminating in the production of another soul for God. What kind of a God stands like Lee Iacocca at the end of an assembly line, driving his workers with a greedy 'More! More!' while the automobiles pile up in showrooms and on freeways and in used-car lots and finally junkyards, his only satisfaction the gross production figures at the end of every quarter?

From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

I will write myself into well-being.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely."

One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.