Humanae Vitae 15th Annual BBQ Family Picnic - Sunday July 13th 2008

 

 

The Couple to Couple League (CCL) is an international, interfaith, non-profit organization dedicated to teaching Natural Family Planning (NFP) to married and engaged couples. It is essentially a volunteer organization because services are provided by professionally-trained volunteers who are supported by a small staff at the international headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

The Eastern Ontario Chapter is the sponsor for this site, and currently seeking to develop more online resources, promote more teaching couples to join CCL, and to hopefully make available some Canadian outreach from CCL headquarters in Cincinnati. 

 

Some couples desire to learn NFP for a single reason and then are happily surprised to find there are many advantages to using Natural Family Planning they never suspected.

 

Marital Giving: Knitting together the family of man, woman, and baby is love, a fidelity and common interest that is also friendship.  The bond that draws a man and a woman together in the first place is friendship.  It is their friendship that they have decided is so profound and precious that they have pledged to show it in a way they will not to anyone else.  It is their friendship that they deem so important that they ask the Lord to give them a lifetime of grace through the marriage sacrament to preserve it.  The conjugal friendship, as the only kind of friendship that allows for a closeness so complete that one of its proper activities is to love the spouse with one's body, is the sole species of human friendship that has its own sacrament.  The solemnity of a sacrament is the only befitting means to treat a friendship of this seriousness.  For incarnate beings as we are, who are fusions of body and spirit, the act of loving another with one's body has enormous significance.  Because our bodies are inseparable from our spirits, the act of loving with one's body invariably means that ONE'S WHOLE SELF - spirit, too - is involved.  That is why casual sexual union is so demeaning and damaging.  We are not people who can offer our bodies alone.  Our spirits always tag along.  Our incarnate natures gives us the possibility of loving another so completely that the love itself will become flesh in a new life.  It is no wonder, then, that a phenomenon so powerful encompasses our whole selves - body, mind, heart and soul.  Moreover, it is right that a union that entails such complete self-giving should be exclusive.  We can have a number of friends, but we can give ourselves completely only to one.  Anne Husted Burleigh

 ©2005 Eastern Ontario CCL Chapter.  All Rights Reserved.  Technical Questions.  General Information.