Respect life 10/6/07

27th Sunday C Respect Life Sunday 5:30 PM Saturday A woman told this story: When our son Jimmy went to Navy boot camp, we waited impatiently for word from him. Finally we received a post card telling us he was doing well and we shouldn’t worry. It went on to say that he was being kept busy acclimating to a military lifestyle and that he would send a detailed letter in a couple of weeks. After reading his card a second time, however, we noticed that Jimmy had faintly underlined letters throughout the note. When the letters were combined, his hidden message read, “Help me!” The month of October is set aside as Respect Life Month. It is a time of intense consciousness raising with regards the sacredness of human life and, again, especially the human lives of the unborn. Unlike Jimmy in the bootcamp, the unborn babies cannot send out the plea, “Help me!: Respect life month reminds all of us that there is no area of life that is not subject to gospel values. The value in the gospel highlighted by pro-life activities is Jesus’ coming that we might have the fullness of life and his restoration of people to the wholeness of life by his miraculous deeds. Obviously there can be no fullness or wholeness of life if there is no life in the first place. Sister Joan Puls in her book, The Spirituality of Compassion, echoes the gospel when she says, “Human life is lived in relationship and love is the essential experience.” Abortion is the rejection and negation of human life. Abortion is the ravaging of the lived relationship of human life and the destruction of the love which expresses this relationship. In other words, abortion demolishes the essence of human life: love. And the same is true of all other unjustified and immoral killing. We are living in a “culture of death” because we exist in a society of lovelessness. “All life is an interconnected membrane,” Annie Dillard said in Teaching A Stone To Talk. The redundancy, interconnected and membrane, is a deliberate attempt on her part to emphasize the fact that we cannot put life into various compartments. The life of the unborn and the life of the born, for example, cannot be treated as separate kinds of life. All life is a whole. There are many excuses offered for the committing of abortion. The primary claim is that a woman has control over her body which no one, not even God, can regulate the use of her body. A variety of other excuses and rationalizations are offered: financial insecurity, unmarried status, other children to be raised and the most tragic of all, inconvenience. These are but a few of the excuses. But John J. Collins in Chicago Studies (Spring, 1982) appeals to the Christmas image to dispel these excuses. He says, “The stable of Bethlehem is an abiding symbol for the triumph of the gift of life over poverty of circumstance.” As applied to abortion, his image says that there is no excuse or rationalization for the taking of the life of the unborn. Father Bernard Bush in the book Belonging challenges our “culture of death” with these words: “To share another’s life we must be willing to sacrifice because to affirm another’s freedom and identity can mean sacrificing our own self-assertion and selfishness.” Is not a pregnant woman sharing in the life of her unborn child? Is she not obliged to affirm her child’s freedom to be born? Affirm the child’s identity as a human being? Is not the aborting of that child an act of self-assertion and selfishness? Is not abortion the vilest, the most atrocious, the most repugnant refusal to sacrifice? And lest there be any doubt, the pregnant woman is not always alone in her decision to abort a child. More often than not the father of the child is a reinforcing coercion behind that decision. Often it his decision alone. Every person, born or unborn, is a divine expression of life and love. But can a loveless culture accept that statement? Cornel West in his book, Race Matters, formulated a challenging observation. He wrote that “The cause of violence is the monumental eclipse of hope, the unprecedented collapse of meaning and the incredible disregard of human life.” He was writing about racial bigotry but what he said about violence is most applicable to abortion. Abortion is violence. Not just another act of violence but violence at the very root of human life. If anyone has been involved in an abortion, that person should not plunge into the deep pit of guilt feelings, God in his infinite mercy has forgiven that person. So that person should move on and work tirelessly for the preservation of the lives of the unborn. All of us need to pray for the grace of receiving life as a promise, as a response of gratitude for our own lives, as a pledge of bringing all human life to fulfillment. All of us must work together to transform our culture of death into a culture of life, not becoming discouraged but keeping in mind that it is not the triumph but the struggle that develops, enhances and fortifies hope. Ask Jesus, your indwelling friend, to give you the perseverance to continue the work of preserving the life of the unborn. THOUGHT: Always recognize and remember that all life is a gift from God.