Getting to the Point: abortion

Showing posts with label abortion. Show all posts

Thursday, July 30, 2015

The People of the Word

I am writing a commentary on the Mass each Thursday on this blog. After six posts on the Entrance Rite, which takes all of five-ten minutes in a normal parish Mass, we have now reached the Liturgy of the Word.

This of course is one of the two principle parts of the Mass, the other obviously being the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Before diving into the specifics of it, then, it is necessary to discuss the general meaning of this liturgy, and of the Word in our lives. It is not only in the Mass that the proclamation of the Word precedes the celebration of the sacrament—this is how every rite of the Church proceeds.

This highlights a central fact of the Christian religion. We are not exactly ‘People of the Book’, as is sometimes said. In our Catholic understanding of things, there is more to it than that. We are, however, intensely and profoundly, People of the Word. People of the Revealed Truth.

This means that we do not get to make up reality. Reality—truth—is received, first. The basic structure of all our liturgy—hear the Word, celebrate the reality—is the structure of all Christian life.

We hear the Word so as to live the Mystery. The structure, meaning, purpose, origin, goal of reality is first shown to us in the revealed Word of God who is Jesus Christ, and then we live this reality out in the life of love and mercy, service and prayer.

This is so utterly of the essence. And yet it is precisely here that many of us go wrong on a regular basis. We know (most of the readers of this blog, anyhow) that this is exactly where secular modernity is flagrantly wrong. Just for example, making up new definitions of man, woman, marriage every day.

Or, as we have all seen these past week, deciding that the unborn human being is nothing but a clump of cells, but then turning around to sell at a tidy profit human livers, hearts, brains from those ‘cells’ for medical research. Then efforts to discuss that grisly fact put us back into ‘it’s just a clump of cells’ territory again. That sort of thing—reality is what I say it is, and can change and change again at a moment’s notice for my convenience. Post-modernity in a nutshell.

But we who profess Christianity need to be very careful about our own minds and hearts in this, too. There is a video making the rounds in MH right now—I can’t seem to track it down on YouTube right now, but will post it on the blog when I do. It is interviews with the families of the recent 20 Coptic men killed in Libya for being Christians. All of the wives, parents, siblings of these young men are unanimous in this video in expressing forgiveness, compassion, and a prayer for conversion of heart for the Islamist murderers of their beloved husbands, sons, brothers. And a resolute willingness to suffer the same fate, if Jesus Christ asked it of them, too.

It is a powerful video, especially since all of these people seem to be fairly poor, ordinary folks. But that’s what people look like when they have received the Word of God into their lives at a deep level. Here in North America we are far too prone to profess Christianity but then live out of the prevailing ideologies or political allegiances or the fads of the day.

We are far too prone to say, in much less extreme circumstances than those Copts, “Well, I’m a Catholic, but… you can’t expect me to love my enemies, can you?" Well, Jesus does expect us to do that very thing. His Word is crystal clear on the point, in fact. “I’m a Catholic, but we have to go along with the world—you don’t expect me to be ridiculed, mocked, maybe even fined or jailed for expressing unpopular truth, do you?” Again, Jesus’ Word is very clear on that point, and a true People of the Word would not even ask that question.

And care for the poor—too many of us subscribe either to the shibboleths of the left where the answer to poverty is one more bloated government program run by anonymous bureaucrats and funded by anonymous tax dollars, or the shibboleths of the right where it’s the poor’s own damn fault for being poor, and I worked hard for my money so I’m keeping it, so there. Personal charity, personal involvement, personal generosity to the point where it hurts, where it entails some sacrifice, a lower standard of living, say? Whoever heard of that? Again, a People of the Word would know Who has not only heard of that, but commanded it of us.

Well, we need to be ‘worded’ and ‘re-worded’ continually, then. This is the true role of praying with Scripture in our lives, a role I have highlighted in my book Idol Thoughts, that we need to continually plant the Word into our minds and hearts like seed in soil, like yeast in bread, live salve into a wound. Work it in, allow the Word to heal us, grow in us, reshape us into the image of Christ.

It is only a people who are daily worded and re-worded by the Word who can then proceed to live the Eucharistic mystery of transforming sacrificial love. But that is where the Word takes us, and next week we will start to look at just how it does that in the action of the liturgy and in the action of our own lives.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Reality Bends

I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog,

and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.

Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust,

who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie!

You have multiplied, O Lord my God,

your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us;

none can compare with you!

I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.

In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear.

Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.

Then I said, “Behold, I have come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me:

I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.”

I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation;

behold, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O Lord.

I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart;

I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;..

But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you;

may those who love your salvation say continually, “Great is the Lord!”

As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me.

You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.

Psalm 40

Reflection – The ‘30’ series in the psalms has been, I will admit, kind of a rough one—lots of psalms of distress and anguish and cries of lamentation. All of that is part of life, and so all of it enters into the psalms which capture the whole of human life. But… it has been a bit of a rough go.

Things are looking up here with Psalm 40! This is one of the most beautiful psalms in the psalter, full of many poetic images that resonate deeply in our spiritual lives. “He drew me from the pit… set my feet upon a rock… put a new song in my mouth’ And then, later on, ‘Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required… I delight to do your will, O my God, your law is in my heart.’

And so on and so forth—a truly lovely psalm of deliverance and praise expressed in obediential love. The Letter to the Hebrews explicitly puts these words into the mouth of the Son of God coming into the world (Heb 10:5-7). And because our life is in Christ and Christ is our life, these words are ours, then, in a very particular way.

Obedience—the word we shy away from, the word that in our post-modern world is so very anathema to us. We are supposed to be able to create our own reality now, to decide for ourselves just what is true, what is false, what is good, what is evil. That these things should, and in fact do, come to us from outside ourselves, and that our fundamental response in life is to obey, to submit, to bow down before realities we did not make, cannot change, cannot control, but to which we are called to make a response, to act in concert with this God who is the author of all that is—this is (we are told) deeply repugnant to many people today.

Well, reality may bend, but it doesn’t break. And we can only bend it so far before it lashes back at us. We can choose contraception and abortion over many decades, but then we cannot choose not to live in an aging and bankrupt society. We can choose euthanasia, then, to get rid of all the expensive old people (let’s be honest – that’s what the push for it is about now), but there will be unintended consequences arising from that as well.

Reality bends, but it doesn’t break, and when we choose to shape reality according to our devices and desires, it will eventually break us. Meanwhile, God awaits for patiently, too, to pull us from the pit of destruction and the miry bog and to make our lives secure on the rock.

The rock is Christ who is Truth, and the result of living in truth is to live in praise, gratitude, and a new song that never grows old. And out of that song, a great desire to tell all the assembly of the saving power of God. So let us pray for the grace and courage, first to obey God and know His power in our lives saving us, and then to be evangelizers proclaiming this power to all our post-modern brothers and sisters, who need to hear about this, don’t you think?

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Careful The Tale You Tell

Why is the Church so obsessed with abortion? Why does the Church talk incessantly about homosexuality? What is this creepy Catholic obsession with sex, sex, sex all the time? Why can’t the Church be concerned about real issues—poverty, for example—instead of always being all about the pelvic issues? Why, huh, why?

This is more and more the typical attitude of many towards the Church, or towards organized religion in general. And we are solemnly informed that it is for this reason primarily that the millennials are being alienated from organized religion and from Catholicism in particular. It is the fault of the Church and its laser-focussed obsession with sexual purity.

Except… that’s not true. Not remotely. Not at all. This article over at National Review does a great job showing this definitively. The Church, including all the various Christian denominations, gives billions of dollars every year to the alleviation of poverty throughout the world; the budgets for groups combatting the various ‘culture war’ issues is miniscule in comparison.

Meanwhile, I would echo the author of the article’s experience. I have been a Catholic my entire life, and I honestly think I could count on one hand the homilies I’ve heard that have even mentioned abortion, homosexuality, or any other point of sexual morality. I would add that the single source where we can see exactly what ‘the Vatican’ is saying is the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which reports pretty much every speech, every document, every word that comes out of Rome. While I haven’t done a scientific study of the matter, I would have to say that issues of sexual morality wouldn’t crack the top ten, or even the top twenty subjects the Church talks about all the time. My impression is that world peace and world economic justice are actually the two most urgent social issues Rome talks about, and has talked about for decades now.

All of this, while interesting in itself highlights something I have been aware of for some time. And that is the danger ‘the narrative’ poses to ‘the truth’. ‘Everyone knows’ that such and such is the case. But it turns out that it’s not the case. And yet even upon that being pointed out, everyone goes on knowing it, somehow. The Narrative trumps the facts, every time somehow.

We see this all over the place—the question of the Church’s obsession with sex is just one example which happens to matter quite a bit to me. (I do find it fairly odd and—what’s the word—oh yeah, ironic, that a culture saturated in erotic imagery and awash in x-rated material has the effrontery to accuse anyone else of being obsessed with sex).

But the question of narratives is an important one, one which we all need to be vigilant about. For Christians, we have to resist the narrative that the secular culture and those who are of that culture are utterly depraved and vile—the tendency to demonize the ‘other’.

The Sondheim musical Into the Woods, recently made into a so-so movie, has a lyric that goes “Careful the tale you tell; that is the spell.” Stories have a capacity to shape reality for us, a magical ability to both reveal and conceal. Stories, in fact, yield prejudice, and prejudice has a great power to render us blind and deaf to whatever contradicts it. ‘Liberals and stupid and evil… conservatives are stupid and evil… Muslims are all terrorists… Christians are all judgmental hypocrites… atheists are all arrogant jerks… black people are such and such, Mexicans are this and that, Jews are all xyz, Asians are all blah blah blah, white people are all that way’ and so on and so forth. Careful the tale you tell—all of reality shapes itself around that tale.

Meanwhile, life and the world and humanity are so much richer, so much more varied and complex, at once better and worse than the narratives allow for. Simplistic stories with heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators are all well and good for Hollywood or beach fiction, but serve us poorly in actually navigating the world as it is.

Personally, I try to limit the tale I tell to the One Story that I believe is absolutely true, because it is told by God and not men. And that of course is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Paschal Mystery in which everything God is embraces everything man is, in which God so utterly enters the human reality that He dies and goes to Hell, and in which the human reality is so penetrated by Divine life and love that the man Jesus rises from the dead and raises up all men and women who are joined to Him in faith. God becomes everything we are so that we can become, in Him, everything He is.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Everything else is just fairy tales told by an idiot, to be taken with large grains of salt at all times. The saying today is ‘check your privilege’, but I would like to start a new saying: ‘check your narrative’, and be vigilant always, welcome continually the facts that contradict the stories you tell yourself and others. Stories are for children (in light of the Gospel this is no problem, as we are all God’s children). We are adults and should live our life as adults, narrative-free if at all possible.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts

So we had the March for Life in Ottawa yesterday, and a most beautiful day for it, it was—sunny, warm, all that. While crowd size estimates are approximate at best, the organizers think around 24 000 were in attendance. It does seem slightly bigger each year, but it’s hard to tell when you’re on the ground. It is, without question, the biggest demonstration that happens each year in Ottawa.

What’s the point of it? We meet, we listen to some speeches of varying quality, we process around downtown Ottawa holding signs, we return to Parliament Hill where there are more talks and some prayers, and that’s it, pretty much. The counter-protestors yell at us, strip their clothes off and rush the podium (yes, that happened again this year), and increasingly try to disrupt and interrupt the proceedings (kudos to the Ottawa police for their professional calm way of removing the disruptors).

So, what’s the point of it all? We know that the Canadian political system is not going to re-open the abortion debate as a matter of law any time soon. So it’s not for them, exactly. It certainly is an event for the young people who make up a very large percentage of the crowd. Consciousness raising and conscience formation are crucial in the long-term eradication of abortion from our society—since we cannot make abortion illegal, let’s try to make it unthinkable.

In this light, the women and men of Silent No More Awareness Campaign play, perhaps, one of the most important roles in the day, as they give their testimonies on the Hill after the march. The young men and women who remain for that event, where they hear story after story of the devastating harm done by legal abortions, cannot possibly go away thinking that it’s no big deal or an easy answer to a crisis pregnancy. I only wish that some of the counter-protestors would stay and at least listen to these people—real people, who really got into terrible situations and did turn to abortion to solve their problem, only to find it did no such thing.

My own sadness in the whole thing is the extent to which the two sides seem to talk past each other. Those of us in the pro-life movement firmly hold that a new human life begins at conception (that is a strictly scientific statement, by the way), and that every human life should be extended the protection of law (a statement grounded in the entire legal tradition of our society). One human being simply cannot kill another human being, except for very rigorously defined and long established exceptions—self-defence, soldiers at war.

In terms of the strict question of the morality of abortion, that is the beginning and the end of the matter. Once we establish the existence of a living human being (and there is no question of this from any point of view of science), the legal protections given human life apply, or ought to. ‘Everybody counts, or nobody counts’, as fictional detective Harry Bosch says when he tracks down the murderer of yet another obscure demimondaine over the objections of his superiors.

Well, that is the fundamental pro-life position, but of course the pro-choice (to use their own name for themselves) position simply refuses to engage that. They really seem to believe that we don’t really believe that, and that the whole thing is a bluff to hide our real intentions, which is the suppression and control of women.

“Our bodies, our choice,” is the chant they used yesterday, along with “Pro-life is a lie. You don’t care if women die!” But the choice is to kill another human being. I cannot use my body to do that, can I? Meanwhile, it is true that every pregnancy has its risks—there is no question of that. But many women also die because of complications from abortion, not to mention the long-term negative effects of abortion on many fronts, none of which are ever presented to the woman when she is considering the procedure (so much for informed consent!).

And many doctors, faced with a woman who is pregnant and who also has this or that health issue, are quick to pressure the woman to have an abortion. I know many women who have resisted that pressure, carried a healthy baby to term and successfully dealt with their other health issues. Too often doctors prescribe abortion, not because it is medically necessary, but because it simplifies their job.

Yes, there can be wrenching and difficult situations where there are no easy answers, and it is no service to the pro-life cause to ignore those. But in the hardest and worst of those scenarios, the basic truth remains: there are two human beings here, and both have to be considered, both have to be treated as human. Everybody counts, or nobody counts.

It just isn’t true that pro-lifers don’t care about women. We do care, and we know that abortion is no kind of a solution to the real problems and real sufferings that attend crisis pregnancies. What is needed are communities to surround all our suffering people in all situations with love, with concern, with support, with concrete help. For families to do that for their own members, and when that family network fails (which is tragically frequent in our day) for the larger community to pick up the slack. The great driver of abortion is family breakdown and social isolation and abandonment.

To say ‘You mustn’t kill you child!” and then give no help or support is not really pro-life, is it? But to say “I will support you as you kill your child!” is not really supporting the woman, either.

Anyhow, I don’t write about abortion much, not because I don’t care about it, but because I care very much, and it’s hard to write about it, frankly. But these are the thoughts that marched around in my brain as I marched around Ottawa, and listened, and prayed. Everybody counts, or nobody counts. And I believe everybody counts.