El Shaddai

'It is El Shaddai who blesses you:

blessings of heaven above,

blessings of the deep lying below,

blessings of the breasts and womb,

blessings of the grain and flowers,

blessings of the eternal mountains,

bounty of the everlasting hills––

may they descend on Joseph's head,

on the crown of the one dedicated from among his brothers.' - Genesis 49:25-26

The bottle changed society.  

Billy Sunday raved at the increase of alcoholism in the early 20th century.  He toured throughout the nation, he preached from every pulpit and stage available, he published in every newspaper, he proclaimed his beliefs, and ultimately succeeded in stopping alcoholism for a season.  And yet there was no opposition when 1950 began, and another sort of bottle came to the forefront.

Bottle-feeding had been in some fashion seen since the Middle Ages.  It was not very common.  The limited and unsterile supplies available made bottle-feeding a very arduous task, causing many babies' deaths from the unclean effects of horn bottles and dried cow teats.  For this very reason the practice was unpopular.  Even when the rubber nipple was invented in the mid 19th century, the contraption was hardly used because of the pungent smell of the black India rubber.  

It was not until the 1950s, when Pyrex and soft rubber were first introduced, that Dr. Spock published his famous manual on baby and child care, and, in an instant, 80% of all women across the US had embraced the progressive model––bottle-feeding.  The fad was quite in keeping with the times.  Between processed cheeses, new inflammatory polyester combinations for fabrics, canned and powdered foods, preservatives to give food a longer shelf-life, immunizations, birth-control, and Caeserean Sections, the '50s were a time of great modernization.  How is it that, though every one of these fads have been proved as extremely unhealthy and risky life-style choices, bottle-feeding has not been paired with them?

Today it is known that breastmilk holds every nutritional ingredient that a baby needs for optimal growth.  It is the perfect temperature, it is clean, and it is extremely beneficial for the mother.  When a mother breastfeeds her baby she is protected from osteoporosis, breast cancer, and ovarian cancers.  It releases hormones that reduce stress, allows her to bond with her baby, produces estrogen, and gives her femininity and gentleness.  It is even better for her baby.  Breastmilk jump-starts a baby's immune system, builds strong bones, reduces the risk of developing diabetes, prevents food allergies, protects against heart-disease, cancer, obesity, asthma, unhealthy teeth, Multiple Sclerosis, ear infections, and even weak kissing ability.  Breastfed infants have higher IQs than bottle-fed infants and they grow up to be more independent and capable.  Most importantly, breast-feeding creates a child that not only holds an intense bond with his mother, but easily bonds with other people and is more capable of loving.

Yet the majority of new mothers are told to nurse their babies for a couple weeks and then give them a contraption made of Pyrex, plastic, and rubber.  To put in their babies' new and fresh bodies a formula that is not only extremely expensive, but is made up of additives, preservatives, chemicals that are harmful to the baby's health, and vitamins and minerals that the baby is not even capable of digesting.  The great health and spiritual benefits of the natural, divine way of baby growth is completely overlooked.

Thus we see, in the '50s, the start of a new family model that had never been known before.  Safe sex was the safe thing.  The human race was discouraged from bearing too much new life.  The fruit of the womb, the procreation of souls, was suppressed through the newly legalized birth-control, forgetting the fact that the pill aborts the sperm and egg after they have joined together to create the human embryo, is catastrophic for the health of the woman, and is the cause of many defects in children today.  The government became more influential, and, in their widened power, decided to take on more and more of a child's development, cheating the mother and father out of their God-given responsibilities.  Mothers were encouraged, if they were so selfish as to bear a child, to let the doctors get the baby out of her through a surgical procedure that would not only be extremely unhealthy for her and the baby, but would cheat her out of the toil and labor that is the birth of true womanhood and spiritual maturity.  The mother was supposed to have only one month in which to bond with her baby, and then she must put her baby on the bottle, re-enter the work-force, and give her job to an impartial worker in a day-care.  At four-years-old the child would be sent off to pre-school, and for twenty thousand, one hundred sixty hours of the rest of their childhood, the mother's responsibility would be taken off her hands and the government would indoctrinate her child in the way that they pleased.

This was the new model of family.  Even the terms for children were changed, and the words 'kid' and 'teenager' became widely used.  Children, not experiencing any of the divine bonding instruments in infancy, were raised in schools with a sterile atmosphere, and soon found themselves to be more influenced by their peers and teachers than by their parents and siblings.  At thirteen, the child began to act strangely.  They rebelled against their parents.  They flocked with their friends from school.  They adopted all sorts of habits that were extremely unhealthy psychologically and physically.  

Doctors and psychologists pronounced this a natural phenomena, forgetting the fact that for thousands of years the 'teenager' psyche had never even been heard of––that the term 'teenager' had been non-existent till very recent years.  In every culture of ancient times, from the East to the West, the child became an adult at twelve and thirteen, the time when, scientifically, the brain changes, the child's learning fashion takes on the form of an adult's, sexual maturation begins, and they believe the world-view that, according to statistics, they will die believing.  Rebellion had been scathingly rejected in these cultures.  In ancient Judaism it was a sin punishable by stoning.  Yet these facts were forgotten, and parents were, instead, told to let their children 'go their own path.'  Yet in third-world countries, where these medical habits were mostly unheard of, children from thirteen to nineteen were the best workers, the best helpers, and were generally close to their parents, grandparents, and siblings.

The wealth of the nation was such that parents, after having been told to step out of their children's way, were expected to send their children to college.  It was a very new phenomenon.  Never before had both women and men received such an education.  They were shipped off to universities where socialist, communist professors taught them to believe all the doctrines their fathers had spilled blood to purge from the world in the last decade, and in those government institutions sins were introduced through the close association of their peers that had formerly been only known in the very darkest, most secret of places.

And thus the '60s ensued.  We have seen what the '60s brought forth, when the hippies reigned, with their free sex and free drugs that were supposed to bring peace to the world, and yet brought nothing but riots and sexually transmitted diseases.  We see and taste the fruit in our leaders, our government, and our culture.  We know that our families are broken, that our government is weak and oppressive, that our education is ungodly, that the Church has melded in with the World, that every new generation becomes more and more engulfed in sin, and that we have accepted these things as the norm.  Yet God would have us taste and see that His ways are good––He would have us know life, and know it more abundantly.  He is El Shaddai, which, in Hebrew, means the God of the Breast.

Photo by Ann Geddes