3^rd Sunday, Year B 2006

Our parish this weekend is somewhat diminished in numbers due to the participation of some of our families in the Washington D.C. Pro-life March and related activities this weekend. There they mix in a sea of American humanity uniting themselves to express their corporate opposition to abortion and the other crimes against what is called innocent human life. This is the greatest public witness of our country, the largest annual rallying of people, committed to a common cause in all our history, I think. It is also the most impressive national gathering of religious people of different creeds who give witness to their belief in the God-mandated duty to foster and not destroy life which has the Creator as its source.

One needs to take a look at what abortion is, from time to time, and remind oneself of it because the word may suffer somewhat from overuse (like much of our religious terminology) and then one may forget exactly what it is that is the cause of all the commentary and fervid agitation.

Think of it this way. When male and female unite (or at least make their respective donations), something is set into motion; a movement has begun which has its own self-propelled driving force. We call it life. Forget, just for a moment, of its tiny size and think about the life, the movement in it. (You might also ponder this in regard to any animal life, a pet, for example, or even an insect: its alive-ness, its movement coming from within itself.) This is the power of life and it’s something that humanity, for all its mastery over creation, cannot literally create. When one kills life, it is not only the invasion into a body of some punishing blow; it is not only an expression of hatred, or of violence; it is rather the stopping, the cessation of the life, the drawing out of it the movement, that movement which does not come from the physical material itself, the flesh, but which had been put into it from outside the biological processes that were used to contribute to it. The ‘life-stuff’–if you will–cannot be explained by materiality alone, for there is no necessity, no intrinsic reason, why the movement of life should come from matter itself. This life is the moving of an ultimate Mover (God) who ripples this life-force into all His creation.

An abortion is the deliberate act to silence that inside movement of a human being, to make it, afterward, merely human matter, flesh and blood, without the Godly part in it, without the life. And there is guilt and there is shame after one has invaded this incipient body and snuffed-out God’s part of it. The doctor, the mother, and all the participants in the deed, must answer to God the Creator for suffocating and making still this living being.

In using the example of animal life a moment ago, I ran the danger to equating it with human life (but I was only trying to make a point about the interior movement which we call life). But there is a huge difference of the two. Human life has within it a human soul, a rational soul, a dignity about it that far outreaches any animal life. Human life bears, according the Scripture, the image and likeness of God. Taking human life, which is called death, has always been the prerogative of God who has imposed death on His creatures as a penalty for original sin. No man may take life away from another man, except in those cases recognized by God’s law, in areas that we identify as capital crimes. In these cases, the life that is taken away from the body is considered just on account of the fact that some very grave crime has been willfully committed. The person thus killed is no longer innocent but rather has been found guilty of something for which the death penalty has been found justified. (Here I am not making a case for or against capital punishment, but only making a contrast between one who deserves punishment and one whom we call innocent.) In the cases of abortion (and in baby-killing and euthanasia as well), there is no crime that has been committed, no justifying reason for the exception to the law which forbids taking away the movement of life from a man. There is rather an act of malice, of pure and simple murder, of attack or invasion of another which cannot be justified. This unwarranted assault produces a guilt of its own which, in more rationally clear times, was itself a capital crime.

These unjustified killings of human life, so different from the legitimate killing of animal life under reasonable conditions, these are also symbolically-speaking the wiping out of God’s image, or (shall we say it more directly?) the symbolic desire to kill God. Human life, again, bears the image and likeness of God. To kill, to banish that image of God, has the effect of diminishing God’s image in the world. This surely must be counted among the devil’s proud accomplishments. He can retaliate against God by inducing men to obliterate God’s image from the earth. Abortion and its related crimes make men collaborators with the demons in their rebellion against the Creator.

We have so long heard about abortion as a political issue that we may perhaps have forgotten what it is we’re supposed to be opposed to. We need to pray that God will help the helpless innocent ones to continue to live and to fulfill their role and purpose in being alive, and to help us to find the way to reawaken consciences to the horrible thing it is to militate against the Creator in taking maliciously away what He Himself has implanted. We heard that fasting and prayer converted and spared Nineveh in Jonah’s day. Let’s do our own part to try to change country from a blood-guilty one into a life-preserving one.