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Yesterday, someone private messaged me after I posted a “Like” on an article about Susan B. Komen’s reversal of its decision to revoke funds from Planned Parenthood. He wrote “How do you reconcile this with your Christian faith?” I said “I’m not going there” as my view on abortion discussions is similar to my Christian ethics professor who said, “When you choose your topic, you may not choose abortion. It’s too polarized an issue and we’ve lost any capacity to discuss it with any kind of reflection and discernment.”
Yet, that’s a bit disingenuous as I “went there” by Liking the article. I’d given some thought about stepping into those waters in such a public forum as Facebook. Social media is the Wild West and you gotta know when to hold ‘em. I’d made a clear decision not to hold ‘em.
But, I thought of a close friend who was a priest who told me that he was getting pressure from the archbishop for not speaking out against abortion from the altar. He said, “I can’t. There are too many women who sit in my office and tell me their painful stories of pregnancy and abortion. I can’t rail from the altar.”
When the pressure got too great, he approached me and asked me, aged 27 at the time, to chair a “Respect Life” commission in our parish. But he said, “I don’t want it to be called, Respect Life. I want to call it the ‘L’Chaim Commission.’ L’Chaim is Hebrew for ‘To Life.’ I want this to be about valuing all of Life along the continuum.”
As we talked, we envisioned something that would invite us into deeper reflection of how we, as human incarnations, value life. How do we value our own and the lives of those we love? How are we with the elderly, the sick, the poor and those who lie outside of the conventions of a nice suburban church? How do we value the biodiversity of the natural world? How do we value the complex layers of human sexuality in a Church whose sexual dysfunction is epic in its proportions?
This conversation along with his guidance has informed my view on abortion because I saw Fr. Lou embody the core teaching of the Master: “And the greatest of these is Love.” Love trumps everything.
When possible, he would not allow himself to be used as a political ploy in a very polarized issue as he knew there were countless factors which weigh into this issue. Every statistic has a refuting statistic and then you suddenly find yourself in frustrating discussion of point/counterpoint and Love is lost.
All I could think when I read of Komen’s initial withdrawal of funds, is “Farewell to another safety net for the underinsured.” So, as I read of the Komen decision yesterday, I was pleased. I’m at a medical convention this week and they’d just shown the movie “Sicko” to a group of physicians and while I’m no fan of Michael Moore’s inflammatory films, I was depressed by the state of health care in the U.S. for the uninsured. I also started to think about my sister who’s been through breast cancer once and wondered if she’d lose health insurance if any work status changed.
There’s an unstated implication in these polarized times that if you walk a Christian path, you must be pro-life (I am pro-life in its endless expressions across the life continuum) and not pro-choice (I am pro-choice). How can I call myself both? It’s black and white, isn’t it? No, it’s not. Love is never black and white because it includes all things. Love doesn’t make distinctions. People do.
Love is not bound by chronos time with it’s ever evolving notions of sex, power and gender. It does not identify with political parties and religion as litmus tests.
Still, in time bound reality we have to make practical decisions about how we vote and where we stand. We have to hold the paradoxical tensions of the evolving insights and evidence in science, economics, human behavior, gender, culture, sexuality, birth, death, psychology, spirituality and religion.
Because we’re swimming in our own subjective realities and our own lived experience, there will be times when we will fall on opposite sides of a given issue. We may even consciously insert an opposing perspective in order to expand a view in some way or even allow ourselves to change our view.
Yet, Love is the third, reconciling force between opposing forces and perspectives. You can feel its Presence. It is timeless and it changes any given conversation by slowing us down. Love invites deeper discernment and reflective listening in which we hear beyond inflammatory words.
I’m temperamentally disposed to speed, quickness and passionate debate so quite frankly, this shit is hard. But, it’s the contemplative path of the Master.
I love this sacred story in light of the Law of Three, which is a way I make life decisions for it holds the shifting forces: When someone tried to trap him between opposites by asking whether religious law should be followed by stoning a woman for adultery, he paused, crouched down and drew in the sand. He inserted the crucial, contemplative pause.
He then invited people into their own hearts and discernment and said, “He who has no sin, cast the first stone.” They became silent. They paused. Then, they dropped their righteousness, dropped their indignation and dropped their stones.
Part of the Christian path is to work towards creating the kin-dom of God in the here and the now on this material, time-bound plane. Only Love can hold the tension of the opposites which arise in a chronos time world. Yet, Love forever births new ways of seeing because we pause long enough to deeply see the Other.
For anyone claiming to follow the path of the Master, this is the one non-negotiable for it’s ever so clear: The greatest of these is Love.
