10/16/2008

God Willing

This is the issue. Me. Me above all else. Abortion is such a grave ill because fundamentally it is the willingness to destroy another person for direct personal gain. In any other area of life, we hear how horrible this mentality is. A man enslaving another man? Terrible. A corporation shortchanging its employees and grossly overcharging its customers? Horrible. A company paying a woman less than a man? Despicable. A bunch of corrupt CEOs, some fat-cats on Wall Street, and a handful of sympathetic senators destroying the economy to line their own pockets? Outrageous. And yet abortion gets a pass.

That’s because babies get in the way. Babies ruin careers and cost a huge amount of money. Babies spoil all your plans. Once you have a baby, just one, it is a minimum of eighteen years before you get your life back (unless you’re in Nebraska, at which point you can drop your kid off at any hospital and skedaddle). And that’s supposing your kid doesn’t go to college for seven years and then come home and spend the next five trying to figure out what he’s going to do. Have two kids, three? You’ll be well past your prime before you get your life back, and by then you’re too old and aching to enjoy it.

The implicit assumption is this. I deserve everything good that life can give me, and nothing should get in my way of that pursuit. If something does, I am perfectly justified in removing that obstacle from my path. I had better be guaranteed a good life with everything I want. It’s the American dream, isn’t it?

If your world view is that this life is all there is—that once we die, that’s it—then there’s no other way to behave than to take all we can here and now, and who cares who gets trampled. A fetus is easier to destroy because it can’t fight back.

[snip]

At what point in time did we abandon, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done”? Because it is the departure from that statement that makes the Catholic Church’s insistence on abortion seem so unjust. We decided we were the arbiters of what happens in our lives, and we arbitrated that our lives are so vital to the working of the universe that we can justify the murder of an innocent human being in order to protect ourselves. We’ve pushed God from the center of everything, and we’re now playing King of the Mountain trying to fill His role.

This is important to realize. If we can justify the murder of an innocent human being, we can justify anything: socialistic policies that kill the dignity of the worker; unjust wars, in which hubris and fear of unstable oil supplies trump any other consideration; cooking the books to yoke as much profit as possible out of a gullible public; propagating any lie to support our position and win elections.

The issue of life is the most fundamental there is. It is fundamental because ultimately, every issue is a life issue. To fail on the most blatant cases does not bode well for the less-obvious ones.

So what’s the point? Abortion is a vote of no confidence in God. Supporting abortion, either directly or tacitly by supporting pro-choice candidates, states that we don’t believe God has a clue of how to provide ultimate justice. Having a baby would ruin our life plans? Did we never think that God has a better plan? Did we never think that that baby is more important than a $60,000 a year job, a fat retirement plan, and decent health insurance? Or worse—suppose that baby demands that we indeed lay down our lives for the sake of not committing such a terrible sin. Did we never think that God is demanding that we be willing to lay down our lives for His sake? It is a hard thing to do, and it seems cruel to tell someone that is what God requires. But that is exactly what God requires, and we have to keep in mind that this life is not the end of things. Maybe the best thing we could do with our lives is to show that obedience to God is worth dying for.

--Ryan Harkins explains the root of all abortion at American Catholic.

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I was struggling with the Precious Blood Chaplet, in which you say 33 Our Fathers while reflecting on text from Evangelium Vitae. Sounds good, right?

But repeating the Our Father that many times got tedious, and I wanted to pray it with my heart (I know, this shouldn't be a struggle for someone praying the Rosary).

I feel like this post was the answer to my unspoke prayer. At this time in history, on the cusp of an Obama presidency, we need to pray the Our Father more times than we think we ought. "Thy will be done!" must be our constant refrain as we submit to the rule of Choice, as we watch more of our tax dollars pile into the hands of abortionists, as we watch cloned embryos treated as waste products, as we watch the right to life lobby get beaten to a pulp.

No, we will not stop our outcry. But God have mercy! Thy Kingdom come~

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