My wife has lost two children to miscarriage and there isn't a day goes by without me thinking about where they are and what state they are in. I await developments in this area with great interest.
One has certain feelings and hopes of course, but not being a theologian or any sort of authority on this subject, one is simply left to commend the issue to God in prayer.
Fascinating.
The Bible says we are born in sin. No birth, no sin. Something to think about...
It's not really a development.
My wife has lost two children to miscarriage and there isn't a day goes by without me thinking about where they are and what state they are in. I await developments in this area with great interest.
I've been there, too. But I simply can not see how a God who sends His Son to die for us could withhold His Presence from an unborn child. Jesus did say that those who prevent the children from coming to Him would face a grave penalty.
SD
"My wife has lost two children to miscarriage and there isn't a day goes by without me thinking about where they are and what state they are in."
Mine too.
I have no real doubt that my children are in Heaven.
I think that what is really happening is that we Catholics have a massive respect for tradition, logic, the written word, etc., but there's a lot we don't know, and a lot that's been written that conflicts, and when you put it all together on something like this, we get wrapped around the axle like yarn in the wheels of a child's toy.
We get caught up in this line or that line from the Bible.
Jesus didn't write any of that.
He came to earth, taught a pretty simple messsage, left, came back and affirmed, by that, that he was the real McCoy.
Since then, people have been talking to angels, to God, etc., over and over again.
Jesus didn't leave us a book to confuse us, He left us the Holy Spirit. A Church, yes, and when the Church remains a thing spiritual, it is an aid to the Holy Spirit. When we get too legalistic and rationalistic, the conflicts start coming out: the Bible is rife with contradictions, our written doctrines are rife with contradictions.
What we have to have is faith that it will all work out in the end.
Thanks to modern science, we have empirical data too.
Modern medicine has revived thousands of people who were dead. And thousands of them report very similar experiences, the world around. These experiences are culturally inflected, but they have all the same basic components. Now, in the past three years there have been four CONTROLLED hospital studies of near death experiences published, and their results were very consistent with one another.
We have good empirical evidence that there's really an afterlife, which means the fundamental truth of the religion is to an extent proven true scientifically.
And the good news is that folks of all sorts saw it: God has His own criteria. Also, there are trees and animals there, and the full-grown souls of those who went before us.
Your "children" in heaven are not really your children any more. They are full grown beings with full capacities that you will not have until you die. To them, you are a child.
There is a mystic poem from the middle ages called "The Pearl", about a man who "lost his precious pearl", which is to say his two year old daughter, but then encounters her spirit, come from heaven to guide him. He is as a child to her, she is not a child, but as a queenly angel, and he is quite the limited worm beside her. It may have been a rambling poetic account of an actual experience. Certainly the near-death studies and various saints and mystics encounters with angels and the spirits of the dead tell us something here.
There is every reason to believe that your "children" are in Heaven, and not children at all, more akin to angels if anything.