I going to have to break this speech out soon:
I understand that you little guys start out with your woobies and you think they're great... and they are, they are terrific. But pretty soon, a woobie isn't enough. You're out on the street trying to score an electric blanket, or maybe a quilt. And the next thing you know, you're strung out on bedspreads Ken. That's serious.
Micheal Keaton in Mr. Mom (1983)
Yes, Sofie has a "woobie." Well, that's not what we call it. But she has developed an attachment to a blanket. It's a thin little blanket Anna's aunt, Verna, had made for her older daughter, Anna's cousin. It got passed down to the younger daughter, then found its way to Anna, when she was a baby. Anna's mom kept it. And now, Anna's blanket is Sofie's.
So many things go better with Sofie's blanket. Oh, say, bedtime, for instance. No blanket? Restless Sofie (even with bippy). Blanket? Sofie's out in minutes. Need to take Sofie away from Anna after nursing in the morning to play? If the blanket's in hand, nary a whimper. (In fact, this morning, Sofie held on to the blanket the whole time she was up--only a short forty-five minutes before she went back to bed.)
Sofie's already got a certain technique for holding the blanket. One corner bunched up in her left fist (though she does most things right-handed now), if she's sitting on a lap or sleeping. If she's on the floor, it's one corner in one hand, the corner on the opposite diagonal in the other, wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. (How she figures these things out, I have no idea.)
This blanket attachment is a new and very sudden thing. One night Anna lay it over Sofie when she put her to bed. Next thing you know, Sofie's hooked on woobie. I try to tell myself, it's only a recreational thing. She's not dealing or anything. But I know better. Nine times out of ten, woobie is only a gateway: the bigger stuff is on its way.
Maybe they'll give her some colorful key chains in woobie rehab.
St. John the Wonderworker continues to intercede efficaciously for the Healy household. Through his prayers, God provided me with needed income through a summer ethics class and full-time status where I work, worked all the myriad financial details and timing about our car, and got our tax refund to us in record time. Add to that one more answered prayer: we didn't have to pay a fine on the citation we got for the car accident because the other party didn't show. This was heavy on my mind this morning as I prayed my morning prayers and brought my particular petitions to God and his saints. For some reason I have been bringing my financial concerns to St. John to pray for, and God has heard and answered our prayers. Praise the Lord. (Oh, and Anna was in and out of traffic court in record time. I think St. John threw that in just for fun!)
I'm currently reading two massive biographies simultaneously: Eberhard Bethge's biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (over 900 pages of text), and Hieromonk Damascene's revised biography of Blessed Seraphim (over 1000 pages of text). The contrasts and similarities are striking. Both men were intellectually brilliant, yet left academia to serve God: Dietrich in the pastorate and in training underground pastors of the confessing church; Seraphim in the monastery and in regional mission work. Both men wrote important books that had profound impact on Christians worldwide. And both men's reputations suffered postmortem as fellow Christians struggled to bring divergent aspects of their lives and ministries into a single whole: Dietrich for his part in the plot to kill Hitler and his writings on religionless Christianity; Father Seraphim for what some critics called his "academic" approach to monasticism, as well as his writings on the soul after death. Both men had conversion experiences that so shaped them it called for a radical break with their lives in academia and some of their most important early convictions.
But the differences are just as striking. Dietrich wanted to understand Christianity in this-worldly terms: where is Christ here and now in our present godless society? Seraphim wanted to understand Christianity in otherworldly terms: how can one find Christ over against the cacophany of the blasphemy-shouting world? Dietrich wanted to find a way toward real and tangible unity among all the world Churches. Father Seraphim saw ecumenism as a dangerous distortion of ecclesiology. Dietrich wanted to bring traditional forms of worship (the daily office) into his modern Protestant setting. Seraphim wanted to find authentic traditional forms of worship and monasticism on their own terms.
One could go on. I have a penchant for these ponderous biographies of God's saints. There's just something about poring over the accounts of the grace of God working in men's lives, a handful of pages each day for months on end. Very, very satisfying.
On unrelated matters: my summer ethics course is done. Thank God. No more fourteen hour days. I've got a ton of grading to do, and still some loose ends to tie up from my classes this spring, but it's all downhill from here.
I found out I could register for two consecutive semesters of doctoral studies. This will keep me enrolled, give me a chance to work on my dissertation proposal, yet not add to the the number of seminar papers I need to do.
Speaking of papers, I have five, count 'em, five, incompletes to finish up in the next month. Yikes. And I came to a standstill on my thesis for Seabury. That needs to get back on the front burner. Got a lot of writing to do. So . . . I blog.
Go figure.
A Change of Foundational Thinking
So, from the fall of 1989 through the end of my schooling at Ozark, significant changes were occurring, changes which involved a major restructuring of my worldview as well as major changes in my theological understanding. These changes were mutually reinforcing of one another. A change in theology would entail a revision of my worldview, and vice versa. In time, I moved from a naive modernism, to something of a chosen anti-modernism, to eventual postmodernist understandings, and beyond postmodernism to Tradition and orthodoxy.
As most gen-x Americans, I was raised and educated in a world which believed that man was the measure of all things, and that human reason, flush with the success of the moon missions, and other technological advances, could pretty much figure out the world and change it. Though elsewhere in the world, the modernist worldview had been called into question, and deconstruction had already begun to make inroads, in the U. S., the proverbial “man on the street” was still mostly modernist.
And as I tried to live into the renewal of faith that had begun when I was in high school, I was confronted quite directly with the modernist attacks on Christian faith. To assist me in standing firm in my faith, my youth leaders provided me with apologetic resources that took these attacks head-on and showed their internal contradictions or simple falsity. This continued at Ozark, where I had entire classes devoted to these matters. It was at Ozark that this naive modernist mindset which I'd pretty much grown up with turned into a more self-chosen anti-modernism. By anti-modernism I do not mean anti-intellectualism (though it can be, and often is, that), but rather a mindset that mostly unconsciously accepts the tenets of modernism (the centrality of human experience, the authority of reason, the belief in objectivity, etc.) but uses these same presuppositions to undercut the attacks of modernism on faith. Anti-modernism essentially shows the dead-ends of modernist criticisms, but fails to appreciate the impasses of modernist first principles. And in that failure, anti-modernism is consumed by its own devices.
As quickly and as easily as I took on the anti-modernist mode of thought, I as quickly came to see its emptiness. It defined itself over against modernism, and without modernism it had nothing else to say. Of course, much of this came to me unconsciously, but with the study we were doing in Kyle's group, this eventually came to my conscious wrestlings and made for further rifts with my heritage churches and with the school.
But the move into and out of modernism through anti-modernism continued on with its trajectory, so that within a few years of graduating from Ozark, I was firmly in agreement with many of the tenets of what is now called postmodernism. Given my faith background and the work we did in Kyle's group I began to see that postmodernism, though not inherently friendly to faith, could itself be exploited for the purposes of faith. And I remained in this mindset for some seven or eight years, though I did not come to consciously understand it for what it was until roughly the autumn of 1994 (three years after I graduated from Ozark).
These broad worldviewish moves resulted in some concrete changes of belief. I began to question the very “Restoration Plea” which was a center piece of the life of my churches. As I've noted previously, this plea asserts that the beliefs and practices of the New Testament Church need to be restored into the life of the churches today. Now, of course, I still believe this—but not in the way it was taught me.
My churches taught that the beliefs and practices of the New Testament Church (up to the death of the Apostle John) became, in time, corrupted, buried and transformed under layers and layers of human tradition. It was our job, as Restoration Movement Christians, to return to the New Testament, have done with all these later accretions, and believe and live the simple and pure faith of the New Testament. Of course, we did not ask how it was that Everyman could lay aside all prejudices, all preconceptions, and understand the New Testament in precisely the way the original authors intended. We just assumed Everyman could.
Soon, it became clear to me in my hermeneutics class that to accomplish the Restoration Plea would take a particular hermeneutic; namely, the historico-grammatical method. One could not accomplish the Plea with an allegorical or tropological reading. Furthermore, even using the same hermeneutic, there were going to be important questions that could not be answered: is it permissible to use instruments in worship, or is it forbidden? All of these things begged the question of first principles. We only get the same conclusion if we come to the text with the same presuppositions. So it was not true that Everyman could utilize a simple and unsophisticated reading of the text and come to the same conclusions as his neighbor.
Not only that, but the use of the hermeneutic was inconsistently applied, based on the presuppositions which oriented the hermeneutic. Case in point: baptism versus the Lord's Supper. We restorationists believed that God's salvation was applied to the person in the act of immersion in water. We used Scripture to show that it was an essential part of the process of salvation that one be immersed. On the other hand, we did not believe that the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper was anything more than bread or wine or that Jesus was any more present to us then and there than at any other time. The Lord's Supper was merely a memorial meal. We used our hermeneutic to show the texts on baptism were intended to be taken at face value. The texts on the Lord's Supper, which would give an understanding that the bread and wine are the Body and Blood of our Lord, were taken as merely metaphorical, allegorical and not to be taken literally.
I remember that the import of 1 Corinthians 10-11 and the Lord's Supper came home to me, in concert with my growing understanding of the liturgy, as I sat quietly during the distribution of the communion elements at one of the churches I served in Mound City. I had just given the meditation and prayed, and we all sat quietly in contemplation and prayer. At that moment I knew that the bread and wine had to be more than just water and flour and pressed grapes. Christ, himself, was offering himself to us, to eat of his flesh and drink of his blood. In a move then-unusual for me, as well as for our small congregation of stone-faced farming families, I slid out of my chair and knelt on the floor. I did not then have any understanding about the sacraments, the necessity of apostolic succession, or whether anyone could make these tiny slivers of cracker bread and thimbles full of grape juice into the Body and Blood of Christ. I just knew that if I interpreted the Scriptures on the Lord's Supper in the same way I did the Scriptures on baptism, that something deeply mysterious and holy was going on. I wanted to acknowledge that.
I'll not run through a catalog of the changes in my beliefs that happened over time. Nor is it necessary here to trace my philosophical and theological developments out of anti-modernism and into, then back out of, postmodernism. That all will become evident in time as my pilgrimage from Cane Ridge to Antioch takes shape. But suffice it to say, from two simple events at the beginning of my next-to-last year at Ozark—seeing the movie Dead Poets Society, and taking part over the course of two years in the study group with my friends—my mind and heart were being shaped in ways that ensured I could not stay where I was. I would need to move on and follow the longings that were developing within me for a tangible connection to the historic Church and its sacramental, liturgical life.
The Discovery of Liturgy and the Longing for the Historic Church
I returned to campus in January 1990, intent on finishing my degree, but becoming more conflicted about my developing worldview understandings and the tenor of the intellectual climate at school. One of the classes I enrolled in was Professor J K Jones' “Practical Ministry” class. As the name may lead one to believe, it was very much about the practical aspects of ministry: conducting weddings and funerals, administering baptisms, pastoral calling, taxes, personal finances, sermon preparation, time management, and, most important of all, the minister's personal worship discipline. To facilitate that last, we were required to purchase Bob Benson's and Michael W. Benson's, Disciplines for the Inner Life, a devotional book that is very much modelled on the daily office. There was a weekly theme, with lectionary and readings. A structure including an invocation, a psalm and a benediction. It was liturgy—though I didn't then know it.
Up to that time, my “quiet time” or “devos” amounted to daily reading a portion of Scripture (usually two to three pages), some brief reflection and some prayer. I also normally included some journalling. But with Disciplines, I found myself doing the unthinkable: praying the same prayers each day. And I found my response to be surprising as well: I began to grow in my worship practice.
It will only take brief moments to tell how from that one book, which I used everyday for a year, I was eventually led to a greater understanding of the historical development of the daily office, to various liturgies, and particularly to the Book of Common Prayer. I soon read Robert Webber's Worship Old and New. I began to learn about the daily office in monastic practice. And through both of these I developed an increasing longing for a connection to the historic Church whose worship was liturgical from the very beginning.
The catalyst for my eventual leaving of the Cane Ridge trail was not some great doctrinal dissatisfaction. It was not the suffering of personal hurts at the hands of fellow Christians, though both of these things have some truth about them. Rather, what propelled me from Cane Ridge first to Canterbury and finally to Antioch was the discovery of the historical and liturgical worship of the Church.
Having begun using Disciplines, I soon found I could not return to my old worship practices. By August I had purchased my own copy of the Book of Common Prayer, and began immediately to use it for daily worship—a practice that would remain in place for a bit more than a decade. I soon grew tired of the orientation at my college, and in many of the churches I worshipped at and later served, toward “contemporary” pop-and-rock-driven music and spectacle. (Which does not mean that I did not go along with the wishes of my later parishioners who wanted these sorts of things. I did. But I wasn't surprised when this didn't last long—we just didn't have the talent pool and the resources to carry it out.)
But most important of all, it was the liturgy that awakened me to the need for sacramental worship. When one approaches God from the standpoint of a liturgy which shapes reverence and seriousness of purpose, one cannot but help to wonder if this bread and wine one handles isn't really something more, or whether this water in which one baptizes doesn't hide the spiritual forces of the deep and the trailing glory of the footsteps of our Lord. If the public service is little more than hymn-singing and teaching, one may be forgiven for supposing that one should shape a service oriented toward the needs of the congregation. But if the public meeting is the work of the people who are there to honorably and reverently render God praise, then everything changes.
I continued to meet with Kyle's group through the rest of that school year. In January I also began to serve a pair of yoked parishes in Mound City, Kansas, which would continue till just after graduation. But though outwardly many things were progressing forward along the Cane Ridge trail, inwardly many other things were happening. My mind was being changed on a number of important issues.
The Union of Faith and Reason in the Heart
I have previously written about how it is that faith and reason have become divorced from one another in human understanding, such that it is generally agreed among thinkers today that the only real knowledge that counts for anything is the knowledge of the mind, of reason. But that is demonstrably false. I have spoken about how faith is, indeed, productive of knowledge, though of a different sort than reason, and how there need be no divorce between the knowledge produced by faith and that produced by reason, but rather how the knowledge produced by each can complement and reinforce one another. I wish now to address how it is that faith and reason can be united in the heart, and on what grounds this union takes place.
But I must confess at the beginning: my words will be more from theoretical understanding than from personal experience. For I am only beginning to have some insight into this union, and have not yet begun to faithfully practice it. Further, wherever I am in error, according to the wisdom of the Church and her Scriptures, then I need correction. It is my intent to summarize what I understand the Church to teach, not to assert my own theory.
First, if Christians must prioritize these forms of knowledge, the knowledge produced by reason must bend the knee to that produced by faith. It is faith which orients our hearts, minds and lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and therefore, reason will always follow faith.
This is not as scandalous as it may sound. The fact of the matter is that the presupposition that reason should be the sole determinant of what is and isn't knowledge is itself an article of faith—it cannot be proven by reason alone (as was so ably shown by the sceptic Sextus Empiricus nearly two thousand years ago). All our first principles are inarguable, as Aristotle says in the first book of the Metaphysics. What remains is to demonstrate the coherence and rationality of one's presuppositions. The presupposition that faith should lead reason is, in fact, more reasonable than the converse.
For Christians, Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 10:5 are paradigmatic: “We take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” The Faith filters our thinking, providing us the categories with which to judge our experience and all our thinking.
But how do faith and reason become unified? I have already hinted at this: They are unified by being submerged in one's heart. That is to say, one must exercise one's faith and one's reason from within one's heart.
I have noted that the heart is both a physical organ and the central seat of the whole human person. Just as we think of the mind as that thing situated in the brain (yet we cannot weigh and measure the mind like we can the brain), so the heart is both the organ which can be weighed and measured and that thing which is beyond the mere physicality of the organ.
We moderns find this assertion that we must lead reason down into our hearts strange, esoteric, mystical, and, of course, impractical. But we have more experience of this than we might imagine. None of us would imagine that we should have relationships with family, friends and loved ones without that relationship “coming from the heart.” We even, I think, understand how it is that athletes who excel in a given contest run (or jump, or throw) “from the heart.”
It should not be any surprise, then, that we ought “think from the heart.” When we love others, we know what this feels like. We say things like “my heart is about to explode.” When an athlete excels, his chest expands, and he “feels proud” of his accomplishment. These are instances in which we have the experience of living (at least in these moments) from the heart. We pray from the heart—and a richer experience it is than in merely having the words echo in our minds and heads. In many ways, thinking from the heart is not too different. The thoughts which originate in our mind are focused into our heart and take root there.
Of course, one can immediately see the great concern we should have for what thoughts enter our minds, and which settle in the heart. Settle they will, which is why we must maintain constant vigilance over our thoughts, rejecting those which oppose Christ, accepting and ruminating on those which obey Christ. This is why the Jesus Prayer is an important ascetical discipline.
But one other thing we must contemplate. The union of the mind and faith in the heart cannot take place apart from suffering. The genius of the Church has informed us that all of Christian life is struggle, ascesis. We must fight the passions and all the forces of darkness which incite the passions. We are purified as by fire. Each of us are called to different forms of suffering, no suffering to which we are called being more than we can endure or from which we may not expect deliverance from our all-powerful Lord.
The suffering to which we are called forces us to dwell in the heart. Who of us hasn't gone through some time of suffering, and all our life in those moments seems to well up from the pain in our chest? We can do nothing except it is tinged with the ache that beats beneath our breast. This is how it should be for us in all of life. Suffering calls us to this and gives us the opportunity to bring our mind and our faith down into the heart where our Lord dwells and who strengthens our hearts for the struggle of faith.
I do not speak of this on my own authority, but as best I can transmit those experiences of the saints (both those glorified and those known only to each of us) who show us the way of suffering, and of the union of faith and reason in the heart.
The unifying of our faith and our mind in the heart is a lifelong quest. But only when that happens can we claim to know, which is a wisdom more deep than all the wisdom of the world.
Anna and Sofie have headed eastward to visit her mother who's recently relocated to Michigan. (A quick phone call just now confirmed the safe arrival, and Sofie's relatively good handling of the trip from her car seat in the back seat.)
Although I don't like it when my women leave town (even for such good and worthy trips as visiting family), still, since I'm pulling fourteen hour days this week (my final stint), it's a good time for them to be gone.
This morning, while Sofie nursed and went back to sleep with Anna, I prayed the morning office. (I have many more serious and critical intercessions to make of late.) I prayed for their safe travel. I would have gone down to the street and prayed over the car, but couldn't find an appropriate prayer for a vehicle. But as we all left the house together this morning (me to work, they to family), we gathered for a moment to pray. Anna held Sofie in her arms. I blessed us with a small hand cross a missionary gave me at Vespers Saturday evening, then prayed extermporaneously for their safe travel, for an angel companion to guide and guard them, and for a joyous return. I then venerated the cross, gave it so Sofie to kiss (who has learned to kiss and whom Anna and I are both teaching to kiss the icons), and then Anna, too, kissed the cross.
A great way to start the work day and to head off on a trip. The Lord be praised.
Kissing is such a wonderful thing. (Thank you, Captian Obvious.) I thoroughly enjoy kissing my wife. I love kissing my daughter. And in the last four years since I discovered Orthodoxy, I have found kissing icons, crosses and the Gospel (among other holy things) to be a worthy and natural way to worship God.
I was always a bit circumspect to venerate the icons at home whenever Anna was able to observe me saying my prayers. God certainly knew that I worshipped him through the honor I gave his saints. Anna may well have been pretty weirded out by it. But then she started going to worship with me. I couldn't not venerate the icons at Liturgy. So I did. And I guess she just got used to it. (She did ask me about it once. I assume my answer satisfied her.)
Well, in the last few weeks, Sofie has learned to kiss (including blowing kisses, which I always find joyous!). I just took it as natural that we should teach Sofie to kiss the icons. So, while we were waiting in line during Communion to receive Father's blessing, Sofie and I were near the icons. I bent down and kissed the icon of Christ. I looked at Sofie and said, "Kiss?" I then held her so that she could kiss the icon. She was a bit hesitant, not knowing for sure what she was to do. I kissed the icon again, and said, again, "Kiss?" She placed her hands on either side of Christ's face, and lowered herself to kiss the icon with a resounding smack.
Now, I didn't really discuss this with Anna. It's just something we do at Church. So it was neat this past Sunday to see Anna taking Sofie up to the icons, to bend down and kiss them herself, and say to Sofie, "Kiss?" Upon which, Sofie being now practiced, our little girl did.
Yep. This is how we learn the Faith.
God make us worthy parents. May Sofie soon come to the laver of regeneration.
From today's Gospel (Matthew 14:18-21):
And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full. And they that had eaten were about five thousand men, beside women and children.
This text not only drives home the sacramental nature of the Christian life, it mercilessly reveals how we Americans have made of the economy an idol. And idols are meant to be toppled.
There are six occasions recorded in the Gospels in which Jesus multiplies loaves and fish to feed a multitude. (One may also note the four instances--inclusive of 1 Corinthians--which tell of Jesus blessing the bread and wine in the upper room, and the one occasion on which he did so with the two disciples en route to Emmaus.) We can have done with the silly rationalist explanation which says this was about a bunch of people sharing. I'll pass on the WASP-ish Jesus, thank you.
No, this is the Jewish Jesus, Lord of heaven and earth, who bringeth forth bread out of the earth. This is the Messiah who is renewing the miracles of the Exodus, providing bread in the wilderness. The Christ revealed to the Church, who gives us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink. They are all one and the same Jesus, and they all condemn us for our idolatry.
We are, everyone of us, never more than on instant away from economic ruin and starvation. If the Great Depression and the attacks on 9/11 did not tell us that, nothing else would. The rich may have all their wealth eaten away in an instant as inflation reduces their portfolio to something less than the cost of the paper it is written on. What new Enron will emerge only to collapse and leave thousands with no pension, no income, and nothing on which to fall back? Those of us who live paycheck to paycheck know something of this fear of destitution, scrimping as best we can to put something into savings, only to have to take it out again as our cars exhibit a certain faithfulness to the second law of thermodynamics. The poorest among us my have some governmental support providing something of the illusion that we need never fear that we wake up tomorrow to face widespread and depthless emptiness of purse and cupboard, but even here, the painful uncertainty of life breaks through.
Some Christians among us would seduce us into the belief that if only we could eliminate restrictions on the free market, all of us would have greater liberty and a higher standard of living. But there are others of us who rightly point out the essential aspects of free market capitalism which contradict the Gospel. But though in theory one may argue that compassionate socialism is far better than consumerist capitalism, such a theoretical socialist economy has never emerged: one has on the one hand the murderously repressive planned economies of the late Soviet Union or the consumerist socialist economies of various European states. These socialists are hoisted on their own petard when the same consumerism that plagues us here is a blight on European communities as well.
Economic theories, models and critiques aside, all of these mindsets fall prey to a damnable heresy: that we can provide for our own needs without anything more than a ceremonial reliance on a grandfather deity who blesses all our consumption. The capitalists fail because they allot to human individuals the providence and prerogatives of God. The socialist fail because they allot these same prerogatives and God's sovereign providence to the state. In either case, it is rank idolatry. We find no economic theories for managing national productivity in Scripture. And those of us who would talk as if one or another economic model were found in Scripture ought know better and ought now be called to public penance.
Neither President Bush or Senator Kerry--or, more pertinently, Chairman Greenspan--can provide for us. No matter the positive or negative consequences of their economic policies, God is not dethroned. Indeed, we have it on good authority that God pretty much laughs the nations to scorn for their various pretensions. If we are taught to pray God each day for our bread, if Jesus is the Messiah who provided bread in the wilderness, if we become God's own by eating his flesh and blood in the bread and wine, then to place any sort of hope in one political candidate or another, their policies, our nation's prosperity, or anything or anyone else other than God, then we are in sin. We have bowed down to and kissed foreign gods, and we need repent right now.
Socialism in any form is not Christian. Capitalism in any form is not Christian. Feudalism and any of the failed economies of history of any type are not Christian. The enforced government care of the poor is not Christian. The only Christian economic is daily dependence on God--apart from any governmental program or paradigm--and caring for the poor and destitute in our midst from the largesse which we personally have received from God.
For we know and live this truth in Christ Jesus our Lord: there's a table in the wilderness.
There's a table in
the Wilderness
Where the blind can see
And the poor possess
Where the weak are strong
And the first one's last
There's a table in the Wilderness
There's a table in
the Wilderness
Where the blessed sing
of his tenderness
Where the lame can walk
and the weary rest
At the table in the Wilderness
When you search so hard for the promised land
But the earth won't yield to your blistered hands
And you hang your head
And you wipe your brow
And you shout it out, shout it out
There's a table in the Wilderness
Where the blind can see
and the poor possess
Where the weak are strong
And the first one's last
There's a table in the Wilderness
There's a table in the Wilderness
When you close your eyes kneeling by your bed
All the working hours spinning through your head
You remember the place
That your heart desires
Where you found life, you found life
At the table in the wilderness
Where the blindcan see
And the poor possess
Where the weak are strong
And the first one's last
There's a table in the Wilderness
There's a table in the Wilderness
Where the blind can see
And the poor possess
Ever thankful for
Being honored guests
At the table in the Wilderness
There's a table in the Wilderness
Ther's a table in the Wilderness
All is welcome
Living Water
Come find Life
Come find Peace
Come find Rest
An Individual Renaissance
The academic year that began in August of 1989 did not give any obvious portents of what was to come. Earlier that summer my girlfriend and I had broken up and I ended the student youth ministry I had served for a couple of years. During the summer I had worked on the grounds crew at the local refinery and done some supply preaching to area churches. Toward the end of the summer I sold my first car for a new Ford Tempo. When the school year began, I ended up changing my major to the more solid five-year theology degree (since I already had most of the classes I needed for it). I dated a little bit at the beginning of the semester. And I worked at odd jobs that I could pick up around town.
But two things did happen in the first month that started the process of change that was coming. I saw the movie Dead Poets Society, and was invited to an informal study group led by a local minister and adjunct professor at the college.
For all its obvious weaknesses, Dead Poets Society struck a chord in me that opened up my mind and life to a broader world. (And it did, after all, win an Oscar for best screenplay; and was nominated for best actor, best director, and best picture.) I had pretty much grown up on pop music, read science fiction and fantasy, and read popular Christian books. I was a decent student, but really had no interest in the serious study of the classic works of English literature, or of Greek and Roman literature, and definitely no interest in classical music. But Dead Poets changed that.
I'm not sure why the movie struck me in the way that it did. I wasn't unhappy with my heritage churches, or my Bible college experience. It's true that I chafed under campus rules that were stricter than what I'd had when I was at home. It's true that by this, my fourth of a five year program, I had begun to realize that there was still a fairly strong anti-modernist, anti-intellectual strain at the school left over from the controversies of theological liberalism from the era of the school's founding, and those tendencies began to be problems for me. But overall I was very happy at Ozark, and had begun to form friendships that were mutually edifying and supportive.
In any case, soon after seeing the movie a couple of times, I began using it as a guide for introducing myself to classical music (by writing down the works from the movie's credits) and to the poetry read in the movie. I acquired copies of Whitman and Frost, and an inexpensive edition of Shakespeare's complete works. But what began as something like imitation, soon spread out to other arenas. I became hooked on literature generally, and "found" favorite authors in Dostoyevsky, Annie Dillard, and T. S. Eliot Partly due to my dissatisfaction with my philosophy class, I struck out on my own and focused on those authors generally classed with existentialism: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus. I began to think along new pathways and to write more broadly. I began to engage the wider world. For a paper in my ministry class, instead of following the usual path and focusing strictly on church model paradigms or biblical text interpretations for the foundation of the paper, I decided to glean insights from Thoreau's Walden.
At the same time that this Dead Poets Society-inspired transformation was taking place, the second major catalyst was also furthering that transformation. At the invitation of a couple of my classmates, I started attending, intermittently at first, a small study group of like-minded friends. We began to look at what was to us a new concept: worldview. We utilized recognized evangelical tools: Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live? movie (and I later read the book), Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton's The Transforming Vision, and Os Guiness' The Gravedigger File. We watched Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, read and discussed T. S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Annie Dillard, wrote and read our own poetry (blank verse almost exclusively), discussed linguistics and deconstruction, and pretty much any other topic we wanted.
Our group facilitator and mentor, a local minister and adjunct professor at the college, Kyle Gardner, was a model of open inquiry on solid Christian foundations. Though stricken with multiple sclerosis, his mind was, and remains, sharp, and his dedication to serving the Church and to Jesus Christ have marked me. He is a man who knew, and knows, what it means to suffer for Christ's sake, and his example was a paradigm for all of us, and remains so for me.
We were about as disparate a group as one could imagine. We had an artist (working in many media, but mainly oils), a poet (who eventually went into journalism), a former self-confessed occultist (my roommate), a future youth minister who had an interest in film making, a future philosophy professor (one of my friends), and me.
At the time I was pretty much your standard ministry student, but was reconsidering what I had taken to be my vocation as the worlds of English literature and philosophy opened up to me. In fact, by Christmas break that year I seriously considered not returning. I began to carefully consider whether God had really called me to ordained ministry. Given the gifts I was discovering I had, could it be that God was calling me to academia to teach literature?
As it so happened, of course, I did return to Ozark for the Spring term after the new year. But that short four-month experience wrapped around Dead Poets Society and Kyle's study group opened up the future for me and started a serious wrestling with a vocation I had once thought to be so clear. That vocational struggle would last some fifteen years.
But as much as I was going through what was to be something of a renaisance for me (that would last a couple of years), what was shortly to happen upon my return to classes in January 1990 would bring what was to eventually be the end of my journeying among the Stone-Campbell churches, and the beginning of the path to where I am today.
When I got home Tuesday night from teaching class, Anna and Sofie were soon pulling up in the car from their day-long adventures up north and then over west to the burbs to see my cousin and her new baby, who were in the area for a visit. It had been a long day, for me, for them. I was hot and sweaty from the humidity we've had. (Though nothing compared to when we were in Baton Rouge.) I haven't been getting a lot of important things done, being at work all day, then at class in the evening. I've been short on sleep and sick these past two weekends. I'm a wimp. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.
But when I finished bringing the stuff up from the car, Anna and Sofie were sitting in the chair in the front room. And when I said "Howdy" to my little girl, her bright blue eyes lit up, a smile went across her whole body (because when babies smile, they use their whole bodies), and she giggled. She pointed at me in her quirky, thumb-and-forefinger, hand-at-the-tilt way she has. She startled telling me about her day in the babble-tongue that is her language. She paused, waiting for me to answer. I said, "Is that right?" And she babbled some more.
Yep. This is the good stuff.
If you have the stomach for it, read this article from the NY Times, When One Is Enough. (Link requires free registration.)
My boyfriend, Peter, and I have been together three years. I'm old enough to presume that I wasn't going to have an easy time becoming pregnant. I was tired of being on the pill, because it made me moody. Before I went off it, Peter and I talked about what would happen if I became pregnant, and we both agreed that we would have the child.
But the point of legalized abortion, is that one can always change one's mind.
I found out I was having triplets when I went to my obstetrician. The doctor had just finished telling me I was going to have a low-risk pregnancy. She turned on the sonogram machine. There was a long pause, then she said, ''Are you sure you didn't take fertility drugs?'' I said, ''I'm positive.'' Peter and I were very shocked when she said there were three. ''You know, this changes everything,'' she said. ''You'll have to see a specialist.''
My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets. I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, Do I want to?
Note well her reason for aborting two of the babies: it would interfere with her lifestyle.
I looked at Peter and asked the doctor: ''Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?'' The obstetrician wasn't an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more. . . .
On the subway, Peter asked, ''Shouldn't we consider having triplets?'' And I had this adverse reaction: ''This is why they say it's the woman's choice, because you think I could just carry triplets. That's easy for you to say, but I'd have to give up my life.'' Not only would I have to be on bed rest at 20 weeks, I wouldn't be able to fly after 15. I was already at eight weeks. When I found out about the triplets, I felt like: It's not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I'm going to have to move to Staten Island. I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it. . . .
So, two of her babies are killed so that she doesn't have to buy big jars of mayonnaise at Costco.
The brevity of the NY Times account of the procedure makes it all the more chilling.
He told me that he does a detailed sonogram before doing a selective reduction to see if one fetus appears to be struggling. The procedure involves a shot of potassium chloride to the heart of the fetus. There are a lot more complications when a woman carries multiples. And so, from the doctor's perspective, it's a matter of trying to save the woman this trauma. After I talked to the specialist, I told Peter, ''That's what I'm going to do.'' He replied, ''What we're going to do.'' He respected what I was going through, but at a certain point, he felt that this was a decision we were making. I agreed.
When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one. Before the procedure, I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear. The doctor came in, and then Peter was asked to leave. I said, ''Can Peter stay?'' The doctor said no. I know Peter was offended by that. . . .
I had a boy, and everything is fine. But thinking about becoming pregnant again is terrifying. Am I going to have quintuplets? I would do the same thing if I had triplets again, but if I had twins, I would probably have twins. Then again, I don't know.
The narcissism of this account, is, frankly, mind-boggling. This young woman kills two of her babies because it would cause her to change her lifestyle (which is fully in line with 75% of the reasons given by women for having their abortion). Remember, she knowingly went off birth control. Her boyfriend wanted to keep the three babies, but she shut him out of the decision leaving him no choice but to acquiesce.
I am sincerely trying to have some compassion on this young woman. Anna and I have talked to parents of multiples. And as much as a single child really brings new challenges to your life, it is multiplied geometrically by multiples. I don't make light of that at all. The loss of income and the drastic rearrangement of one's lifestyle are not at all easy things.
But it's the simple disconnect between the choice to engage in behavior that brings known consequences and then to avoid the consequences of one's behavior by the killing two lives that she willingly helped to conceive(!) which just strikes me as terribly, terribly wrong.
[Props to Touchstone's Mere Comments for the link.]
From Planned Parenthood, the leading abortion advocacy group in the U. S. comes this statement:
Research studies indicate that emotional responses to legally induced abortion are largely positive. They also indicate that emotional problems resulting from abortion are rare and less frequent than those following childbirth (Adler, 1989).
Anti-family planning extremists, however, circulate unfounded claims that a majority of the 29 percent of pregnant American women who choose to terminate their pregnancies (Henshaw & Van Vort, 1990) suffer severe and long-lasting emotional trauma as a result. They call this nonexistent phenomenon "post-abortion trauma" or "post-abortion syndrome." They hope that terms like these will gain wide currency and credibility despite the fact that neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizes the existence of these phenomena.
The truth is that most studies in the last 20 years have found abortion to be a relatively benign procedure in terms of emotional effect - except when pre-abortion emotional problems exist or when a wanted pregnancy is terminated, such as after diagnostic genetic testing (Adler, 1989; Adler et al., 1990; Russo & Denious, 2001). The many studies of the emotional effects of abortion, however, do not measure precisely the same variables in regard to culture, time, demographics, or the socioeconomic and psychological situation of women who seek abortion. Since the results of these studies cannot be combined or "averaged out," the following data illustrate, in general, the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of more than 35 of the worldwide studies that have measured the emotional effects of abortion since its legalization in the U.S. in 1973.
In 1989, a panel of experts assembled by the American Psychological Association concluded unanimously that legal abortion "does not create psychological hazards for most women undergoing the procedure." The panel noted that, since approximately 21 percent of all U.S. women have had an abortion, if severe emotional reactions were common there would be an epidemic of women seeking psychological treatment. There is no evidence of such an epidemic (Adler, 1989). Since 1989, there has been no significant change in this point of view.
In the face of that last claim, it would be important, then to actually see if it holds up. From the Project Rachel site, a pro-life Catholic organization comes this statement (note: bracketed footnote numbers have been replaced by the sources cited and comments in the footnote itself for ease of reference and to mirror the references given in the Planned Parenthood statement above):
In the words of the editor of the Journal of Social Issues, Gregory Wilmoth: "There is now virtually no disagreement among researchers that some women experience negative psychological reactions post-abortion. Instead the disagreement concerns the following: (1) the prevalence of women who have these experiences..., (2) the severity of these negative reactions..., (3) the definition of what severity of negative reactions constitutes a public health or mental health problem ..., [and] (4) the classification of severe reactions...."["Abortion, Public Health Policy, and Informed Consent Legislation," Journal of Social Issues, 1992; 48 (3): 1-17.]
A summary of the more significant and apparently uncontested findings:3a. Grief after pregnancy loss: The medical community is coming to accept more generally that grief is a natural and expected reaction to the loss of a child through abortion, prematurity, stillbirth, etc. Hospital obstetrical units are developing teams of doctors, nurses and social workers to help parents deal with the issues of grief, anger and guilt raised by perinatal deaths.[Wathan, "Perinatal bereavement," British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1990; 97: 759-60. Michels, et al., eds. Psychiatry, vol. 1, Ch. 41, Philadelphia: B. Lippincott Co., 1990:8.]3b. There is no single study examining all possible negative consequences for women, and the risk of each, from abortion. There are, however, a significant number of studies which show a substantial number of women, suffering moderate to severe negative psychological reactions, of a wide variety, as a consequence of their abortions. These are cited below. [i. e., in item six on the page linked above]3c. Increased Usage of Psychiatry: A Canadian study found that 25% of women who had had abortions made visits to psychiatrists over a 5 year period, as compared to 3% of the control group.[Badgley, et.al., Report of the Committee on the Operation of the Abortion Law, Ottawa: Supply and Services, 1977: 313-21.]In a widely respected Danish "register linkage" study -- i.e. one reviewing state records of women's lifetime medical histories -- researchers found that the rate of psychiatric admissions within three months after the end of a pregnancy was 53% higher among women who had aborted compared to women who delivered their children.[David, et al., "Postpartum and Postabortion Psychotic Reactions," Family Planning Perspectives, vol. 13, no. 2, 1981: 88-91, 89.]3d. Suicide: In one of the most complete register linkage studies to date, researchers in Finland examined women's lifetime medical histories and discovered that women who had abortions had a rate of suicide in the year following their abortion three times greater than all women of reproductive age, and six times greater than women who gave birth. The researchers drew two possible conclusions: either abortion poses a risk to mental health, or there are common risk factors for both abortion and suicide.[Gissler, Hemminki, Lonnqvist, "Suicides after Pregnancy in Finland, 1987-94; Register Linkage Study," British Medical Journal, 1996; 313: 1431-34.]A Welsh study which followed the Finnish study indicated that the former explanation is more likely. It looked at the medical records of women both before and after their abortions. It did not find any increased risk of suicide before abortion among women having abortions. But it did find that the rate of suicide among women after having induced abortions was twice the rate of women giving birth.[Morgan, et al., Letters, British Medical Journal, 1997; 314: 903. Another study that would indicate for the former explanation was published by L.G. Peppers, "Grief and Elective Abortion: Implications for the Counselor,"in Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow, ed. Kenneth J. Doka, Lexington Books: MA, 1989:135 (Grief measurements of the same women pre- and post-abortion showed that significantly different groups of women suffered high grief reaction scores at the two points in time.)]3e. Research Generally Dismissing Negative Abortion Aftermath: Even researchers most reluctant to conclude the existence of any significant amount of post-abortion grief, write that some women experience severe psychological reactions following abortions. They seem satisfied that the percentages of women suffering negative reactions are, by their account, less than 50%. Considering that about 1.5 million abortions annually have been performed for more than 20 years, however, a finding that even a few percentage points of women suffer severe post-abortion reactions represents tens of thousands of women.[One researcher, cited regularly by supporters of legal abortion as determining conclusively the absence of significant post-abortion grief, found the following: two years post-abortion, 19% percent of women (this would translate annually to 260,000 women in the United States) reported that they would not do it again; 12% more were undecided. When asked if their decision was right or wrong two years later, 16% (208,000) said it was the "wrong" decision. This same researcher found that 1% (10,000 women per year) suffer symptoms meeting the clinical definition of post traumatic stress syndrome. Brenda Major, Ph.D. "Beyond Choice: Myths and Facts about Adjustment to Abortion," Oct 9, 1997 California Wellness Foundation Lecture, University of California Wellness Lecture Series:1-34.]
Today at Divine Liturgy, we commemorated the Fathers of the Fourth Ecumenical Council who gave us the Definition of Faith of the Council of Chalcedon
Following the holy Fathers we teach with one voice that the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person], that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, very God and very man, of a reasonable soul and [human] body consisting, consubstantial with the Father as touching his Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching his manhood; made in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten of his Father before the worlds according to his Godhead; but in these last days for us men and for our salvation born [into the world] of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God according to his manhood. This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son [of God] must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably [united], and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Prophets of old time have spoken concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ hath taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers hath delivered to us.
I think it very simple for us in the West, considering it was St. Leo's letter that in large part fought for and preserved the apostolic understanding of the Person of Christ: if you don't believe this, you are not in line with Christian belief.
The trick is to put the rest of our beliefs in line with this one.
Theotokos: If you believe Chalcedon, you believe in the Incarnation, and if you believe in the Incarnation, you must believe that Mary was, indeed, the Mother of God, not just the mother of his humanity.
Sacraments: If you believe Chalcedon, you believe in the Incarnation, and if you believe in the Incarnation, you must believe in the reality and efficacy of the Mysteries of the Church
Sacred Scripture: If you believe Chalcedon, you believe in the Incarnation, and if you believe in the Incarnation, you must believe in the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures, for they derive their being and force from Him who is both the Word of God and the key to their understanding.
Holy Church: If you believe Chalcedon, you believe in the Incarnation, and if you believe in the Incarnation, you must believe that the Holy Church is not some merely spiritual fraternity, but is an entity with flesh and blood and a history, and that this Holy Church is both human and divine, with the authority to forgive sins and to guard and keep the Faith once for all delivered to the saints.
In the Christian Faith, you cannot select your beliefs a la buffet-style theology. It's a whole cloth matter. If one piece is missing, the remainder will find itself skewing off into heresy unless corrected. Neither can you add to the cloth, for once again, the result is a certain imbalance. Holy Orthodoxy has been criticized by what some claim to be its too-great focus on the past. But Orthodoxy has maintained the Faith whole and entire, and brings that Faith, without change, into the present. It is the standard and the standard-bearer. Thanks be to God.
Anna was there for Sofie's first step. Appropriately enough, it was at the Skokie Public Library, where Anna used to work before her new career as a mom, during the baby storytime. Since then Sofie has taken one or two more steps, the most recent being Wednesday afternoon while at the beach.
As Anna recounted to me Sofie's first steps, I have to confess, I got a bit teary-eyed. I had so wanted to be there for her first step. But just like the first time Sofie rolled over on her own, I missed her first step because I was at work. I was, am, so very disappointed. I missed a very big event.
But Sofie must have heard me in her sleep while Anna told me about the steps on the beach and I voiced my sadness at missing them, because yesterday my daughter gave me a great gift.
I had rushed home to collect my books for my evening class--and, truthfully, to see Anna and Sofie at least for a few minutes during my long day. They were playing out in the yard behind our apartment. (Yes, I know. A yard. In Chicago. Behind an apartment.)
Anna tried to get Sofie to stand up and take a step for me. And after a few unsuccessful tries . . . it finally happened! My daughter took a step for me. I was thrilled. It was amazing. Can you believe it? My daughter is really starting to walk!
But that was not the end of it. Anna and Sofie tried again. And would you believe it? Sofie followed her step . . . with another one! Two in a row.
I still am trying to get my mind around this! My daughter is going to walk. I had dreams last night of Sofie walking. Wonderful! Amazing! Extraordinary!
Also, Sofie is learning to feed herself. For some time she has used her chubby (and grubby) little hands to shove crackers, pretzels, fruit, and so on, into her mouth. But lately, feeding her has become a battle. We couldn't figure out why--till we put a spoon in her hand. Case in point: this morning's breakfast. Sofie fought me from the first bite. She didn't want to have anything to do with my feeding her. We had oatmeal everywhere. Then I gave her her special spoon. She dug into the bowl, got (by chance) some oatmeal on her spoon, and got it to her mouth. I shoveled in between her attempts, and we had a very nice, and full, breakfast. If a bit messy.
And in light of such momentous events, I've culled the rest of the blog entries here on the main page to get rid of the fluff (which is what politics is) and keep the things that really matter.
From the Project Rachel (a Catholic Pro-Life organization) comes this summary of the after effects of abortion on the women who've had them:
Evidence of post-abortion trauma is increasingly attested to by psychologists, counselors and those involved in post-abortion ministry. We now know, for example, that women hurt by abortion may have some or many of the following symptoms:
*Low self-esteem*Grief (mild to profound)*Depression (sometimes to the point of suicidal thoughts and attempts)*A sense of alienation from family and friends*A feeling of being 'numb,' not able to feel joy from activities that used to be pleasurable*Isolating self from others to avoid discussing the abortion experience with them*Guilt and shame*Difficulty concentrating*Anger toward self, or the child's father, or others involved in the abortion decision*Sleep disorders*Abortion-related nightmares, flashbacks or even sounds of a baby crying*Alcohol and drug problems, to dull the sorrow*Desire for a 'replacement' baby*Anniversary reactions of grief or depression on the date of the abortion or the baby's expected due date*Problems bonding with her other children (being over-protective but emotionally distant)*Fear that God will punish her, or is punishing her
Some, especially young girls, experience symptoms soon after the abortion. Counselors tell us, however, that it is more common for the symptoms to occur over the course of five to twelve years after the abortion before a woman seeks help.
Abortion's aftermath is largely ignored by the general public. Groups organized to protect the availability of abortion claim that abortion is no different from any surgical procedure and that pro-life groups are fabricating the existence of post-abortion suffering. Consequently, many women think that their grief reactions are somehow abnormal and believe that there is nowhere to turn for help.
The site also links to these important research articles:
Psychiatric Sequelae of Abortion: The Many Faces of Post-Abortion Grief
Adverse Psychological Reactions - A Fact Sheet
See also my post from last October, which references the article The Nightmares of Choice.
Way back when (which is to say, about a year or more ago), Opinion Journal, the online editorial presence of WSJ, hypothesized on the effect of legalized abortion on the political arena. Using statistics from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and their own political research, they theorized that abortion is killing potential liberal voters. Larry Eastland builds on that hypothesis in The Empty Cradle Will Rock:
More than 40 million legal abortions have been performed and documented in the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared abortion legal. The debate remains focused on the legality and morality of abortion. What's largely ignored is a factual analysis of the political consequences of 40 million abortions. Consider:• There were 12,274,368 in the Voting Age Population of 205,815,000 missing from the 2000 presidential election, because of abortions from 1973-82.• In this year's election, there will be 18,336,576 in the Voting Age Population missing because of abortions between 1972 and 1986.• In the 2008 election, 24,408,960 in the Voting Age Population will be missing because of abortions between 1973-90.
These numbers will not change. They are based on individual choices made--aggregated nationally--as long as 30 years ago. Look inside these numbers at where the political impact is felt most. Do Democrats realize that millions of Missing Voters--due to the abortion policies they advocate--gave George W. Bush the margin of victory in 2000?
Eastland runs through the numbers (nine tables' worth). Some of his conclusions:
There were 105,405,100 votes cast for president in the 2000 general election, representing 51.2% of the Voting Age Population. The Missing Voters [i. e., babies aborted who would have been of eligible voting age] would have been 6,033,097 based on that portion of the 51.2% represented by (at their lower voting level) 18-24 year olds. This means that Missing Voters would have been 4.48% of all actual voters in 2000.
He goes on to run through some extrapolations from abortion data, surveys of Republican and Democratic views on abortion, and how that applies to the voters of the 2000 election. His conclusion:
In the actual popular vote for president in the 2000 general election in Florida, George W. Bush was declared the winner by 537 votes. But if the 260,962 Missing Voters of Florida had been present to vote, Al Gore would have won by 45,366 votes. Missing Voters--through decisions made in the 1970s and early 1980s, encouraged and emboldened by the feminist movement at the height of its power--altered the outcome of the U.S. presidency a generation later, in a way proponents of legal abortion could not have imagined.
Eastland asserts that this affect will continue:
Examining these results through a partisan political lens, the Democrats have given the Republicans a decided advantage in electoral politics, one that grows with each election. Moreover, it is an advantage that they can never regain. Even if abortion were declared illegal today, and every single person complied with the decision, the advantage would continue to grow until the 2020 election, and would stay at that level throughout the voting lifetime of most Americans living today.
He concludes:
Abortion has caused missing Democrats--and missing liberals. For advocates so fundamentally committed to changing the face of conservative America, liberals have been remarkably blind to the fact that every day the abortions they advocate dramatically decrease their power to do so. Imagine the number of followers that their abortion policies eliminate who, over the next several decades, would have emerged as the new liberal thinkers, voters, adherents, fund-raisers and workers for their cause.
[Note: the date stamp on this post has been changed from the original, so as to keep it on the main page and further enable the argument that has been taking place in the comments.]
There's one thing we separate in our public consciousness here in the U. S. (and industrialized West more generally): the law and morality. We bristle at the suggestion that someone or some group "legislate their morality" on us. The law is simply a conventional code, in many peoples minds, that is agreed upon through the terms of a representative democracy, containing many items we can change, omit, and revise at the demonstrated will of the people and/or their elected representatives. A legal code is merely a convention for getting along.
This understanding, however, is sheer fantasy.
The law is not mere convention--though clearly there are conventional aspects to the law. The law is much more powerful than that, as Plato, Aristotle and many important thinkers have recognized throughout history. No, in point of fact, the law is a paedegogus, a tutor, instructing us in morality, inculcating in us notions of right and wrong, virtue and vice.
So the current understanding in the U. S. of the separation of Church and State is both philosophically unsound, and, ultimately, unworkable. And as the culture wars continue to flame, this is becoming more and more obvious.
We'll start first with Aristotle:
[T]he law also orders one to do the deeds of a courageous person, such as not to leave one's assigned place or run away or throw down one's arms, and the deeds of a temperate person, such as not to commit adultery or be wildly extravagant, and those of a gentle person, such as not to hit people or slander them, and similarly with the things that are in accord with the other virtues and vices, commanding the one sort and forbidding the other, rightly when the law is laid down rightly, but in a worse way when it is tossed off carelessly. (Nicomachean Ethics V.1/1129b20ff)
Aristotle's assertions have direct application and implication to our own time and place. Not only does the law tell us that murder is illegal, it inscribes within us the notion that it is a moral wrong to do murder. The law conventionally distinguishes between different types of killing (exonerating, for example, those who kill in self-defense or in the rightful and lawful engagement in military battle; while condemning, often to death, those who willfully commit premeditated killing of the innocent). But even those conventions reinforce and provide important moral distinctions in terms of the virtue of not taking another life and the vice of killing with malice aforethought.
Similarly, many states have "Good Samaritan" laws, demarcating the moral (as well as legal) necessity to aid those in distress. One could make similar cases about laws dealing with fraud, slander and libel, and so on.
Now I readily admit that our notions of morality do not only, indeed not even primarily (for many), come from the laws enacted in our communities and our nation. In fact, that is, ultimately, my point. The laws we enact come from the moral presuppositions we already hold. We do not, for example, gather together and review the statistics on death and killing, hear congressional testimony, conduct polling surveys, and then decide: killing with malice aforethought should be made illegal so that our citizens will form the moral notion that it is wrong to kill with willful premeditation. Rather, we already come to the legislative process with the understanding that killing with willful premeditation is a grave moral wrong, it is, indeed, murder, and we make laws reflecting that moral understanding. In this way the law reinforces, and also educates, the conscience of a people.
The moral imagination always already shapes and delimits our legislative activities. In short, the law codifies and embodies a community's morality. So it isn't a question of legislating morality. Any time we engage in legislative activity we are doing that: legislating morality.
The question, then, is: whose morality are we legislating? And here is where the dilemma of Church and State enters in.
Let's take the social hot button: abortion. Whenever those opposed to the practice of abortion attempt to legislate a moral understanding that gives social, political and legal recognition to the fetus (unborn child), abortion advocates raise the specter of Church and State--as did John Kerry in his recent comments about how, though he believes human life begins at conception, he would not legislate his Catholic beliefs on the rest of the nation. While this is a red herring--because the belief that the fetus is, indeed, an unborn human child, is not restricted to a specific religion or Christian denomination can easily be demonstrated, thus invalidating the claim that enacting legislation limiting abortion practices somehow establishes a religion or church--it is nonetheless true that such attempts do in fact legislate a particular morality. Namely, one that believes it is a moral wrong to abort (kill) a fetus (unborn child).
And what abortion advocates fail to admit--and many of us fail to realize--is that the laws that were passed granting the legal recognition of the practice of abortion themselves legislated a particular moral understanding. Namely, that the wishes, desires, and feelings of a mother were of more moral worth than the life of the unborn person in her womb. Indeed, the law also legislated an understanding that the life in her womb was subhuman, if human at all, and not worthy of the same legal rights she herself possessed. The law also enshrined the understanding that the father of the unborn baby held no moral status in terms of the decision to abort. The law shaped our conscience in such a way that we understand the father to be not, indeed, a father, but a sperm donor who has no legal or moral standing in relation to the product of his insemination, should the mother decide to "terminate her pregnancy." Even if the father wants the unborn child to live, the law implies he has no standing; he's just a sperm donor.
And we wonder that we hear stories of newborns abandoned to die in trash cans, or stabbed with scissors and thrown out a window to lie lifeless on a cement walkway. We wonder that we have "deadbeat dads" who refuse to provide financial support for the living products of their insemination.
As Aristotle noted: the laws legislate morality, sometimes well and rightly, and other times not. Laws can legislate vice instead of virtue. And those laws can and do shape or misform our moral understanding.
So now the question is not whether the laws legislate morality, but, whose morality will they legislate? There are two ways, in a representative democracy, to answer this question.
One can simply rely on the majority will of the people. And in America that will be a majority morally educated and informed by Christianity. So one can argue that the morality we should enshrine in law is that of Christian faith. Of course, because of the plurality of Christian groups in the U. S., we will be protected from establishing a single church as a state religion, because there will be differences in some particulars among Christians as to what is the proper moral belief to legislate. But this is the nature of political discourse in a representative democracy. And, in fact, in the U. S., this is has been the case for the first two centuries (or so). Minority religions have had their interests protected while at the same time the majority Christian faith shaped and formed our laws.
But the other argument can be made in a more general sense. What is the best source of moral understanding? Religion, broadly speaking. Therefore, religion ought to be the resource utilized for all legislation. Now, granted, this is only going to have a slightly different outcome than the above, because, once again, in religious terms, Christianity is clearly the most widely claimed religious faith. But Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and other faiths, share important broad principles and values. There are, for example, Hindus who oppose abortion on the terms of their faith. But once again, we are safeguarded against the establishment of a particular church or religion by the very plurality of religious belief.
But mostly what those who want a separation of religion from law want is a secular state. They want, however, a utopia, a no-place. Because secularism itself is a form of religion providing ultimate first principles and a life-guiding orientation--things that religions provide their adherents. And in any case, they would still be legislating morality, it would simply be a secular one.
[Note: the date stamp on this post has been changed from the original, so as to keep it on the main page and further enable the argument that has been taking place in the comments.]
The Washington Post highlights that Kerry Says He Believes Life Starts at Conception.
Presidential candidate, John Kerry, has, I believe, just put his foot in it again. As do many pro-abortion politicians, he tries to straddle the fence on the issue. Instead, all he does is show either the irrationality and inconsistency of the abortion advocacy argument or his own inconsistency on social policy. Perhaps both.
The WP notes:
But even as he tried to avoid making news Sunday, Kerry broke new ground in an interview that ran in the Dubuque, Iowa, Telegraph Herald. A Catholic who supports abortion rights and has taken heat from some in the church hierarchy for his stance, Kerry told the paper, "I oppose abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception."
I'm sure Kerry's campaign wishes he'd left off that last sentence.
First of all, Kerry clearly hasn't thought this through. His spokeswoman seems obviously surprised by his comment.
Spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said that although Kerry has often said abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," and that his religion shapes that view, she could not recall him ever publicly discussing when life begins.
If Kerry believes that life begins at conception, then he is saying that the ending, aborting, and killing of human life should be safe, legal and rare. Kerry, as an abortion advocate, wants every mother to have the legal right to kill (end the life of) the human being in her womb.
Furthermore, if Kerry really believes that the baby in a mother's womb is human from the time of conception, then what necessity is there to arbitrarily demarcate the time of birth as the cutoff point for when one can end that life "safely, legally, and rarely"? After all, on his own view, the fetus is a human life before and after birth. Let's say a mother has a month-old infant, but that it is interfering with her work, school, or other responsibilities, or that she can't afford her infant (three-fourths and two-thirds, respectively, of the reasons women have abortions). Why should she not be allowed to kill her baby, "safely, legally, and rarely"? On what principle can Kerry argue that to do this sort of "ending of a human life" is wrong? Why is it that some human beings can be killed legally, but the rest of us can't?
Kerry has made the mistake of paying attention to the fetus. He has allowed the argument to be taken to a focus on the baby in the womb. And every time--every time--the abortion argument gravitates to the nature of the life in the womb, the abortion argument will fail. Because the argument has to either deny the humanity of the unborn child--which then forces the question as to when do we become human--or argue for the right to kill a human being--which then forces the question of why those rights only apply in utero.
But then, of course, Kerry wants to shield himself from criticism, so he tries to take the high-minded route:
"I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist," he continued in the interview. "We have separation of church and state in the United States of America." The comments came on the final day of a three-state Midwest swing, during which Kerry has repeatedly sought to dispel stereotypes that could play negatively among voters there.
So, let me get this straight: Kerry believes in the separation of church and state, so he won't legislate his morals on someone else. But he will legislate somebody's morals on the rest of the country, even if they're not his own.
This "separation of church and state" notion is nothing but a canard. The fact of the matter is, lawmakers always legislate morality. The laws are always instruments of virtue and vice, and through them are shaped the character of a people. This has been recognized since the time of Plato and Aristotle, and was a matter of common understanding up until the twentieth century. One needs only read such things as the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the speeches of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and many of our other historical leaders. The law was not some neutral device, but was, rather, a highly influential device to reflect and to shape the moral beliefs and character of a people.
But even if today people attempt to understand the law and the state as somehow necessarily amoral, the fact of the matter is, it is a fantasy. The law is, by its nature, moral. The only question is, what sort of moral does it inculcate? In the case of abortion, it says to us, we may kill the unborn child in our womb if it gets in the way of what we otherwise want. And even though the instances of abortion in the cases of rape and incest are so rare (about 1% of all abortions) as to be exceptions to the normal rule of practice, even in those instances our laws tell us that the solution to a deeply personal trauma is to take another human life.
But more to the point, for Kerry to state that he opposes abortion himself, doesn't like it, in fact, but won't legislate his morals on others shows a remarkable lack of principle. Or rather, the principle it shows is that his personal beliefs can be violated for the sake of political principles. Presumably, then, Kerry's foundational beliefs are those of politics and not those of his Catholic faith.
Kerry garners no points here. He simply shows himself to be the secularist that he is in terms of the abortion debate. If he truly believed his Catholic dogma, then he would also know that such a thing as abortion cannot be trumped by politics. The "separation of church and state" canard cannot apply here. Kerry has claimed to be a good Catholic on this issue, that is, he still maintains his private beliefs. But his private beliefs (insofar as they actually line up with Catholic dogma) on this matter are being violated in point of fact by his actions in his advocacy of abortion. The fact of the matter is, Kerry cannot both claim to be a good Catholic on the matter of abortion and advocate for abortion rights. To do so is to serve two masters, or, rather, only one. To continue to claim his Catholic faith in this issue is sheer hypocrisy. For Catholics, as, I would argue, for all Christians, there is no such thing as private belief.
My parish priest, Fr. Patrick Reardon, makes some important points with regard to the First Amendment and freedom of the press and of the free exercise of religion:
It is important to examine carefully the precise wording of this very precisely worded affirmation. It does not say that religion and the press shall be prohibited from bringing political influence and power to bear on Congress. It says, rather, that Congress must not bring political influence and power to bear on religion and the press. In not the slightest respect does the First Amendment restrict the influence and activities of religion and the press with respect to the political life of the nation. The restrictions in this amendment are laid entirely on the government, none of them on religion and the press.
In order to appreciate this distinction, we may consider how the First Amendment commonly applies--and has always applied--to the press. Everyone expects the press to be actively involved in political life. No one is surprised when newspapers, radio stations, and television networks comment at length on political activity. We hear no complaints that a constitutional principle has been violated when a city newspaper or a local television channel espouses a particular political cause or endorses a particular political candidate. On the contrary, this is exactly what we envisage as healthy to the political process. We welcome the interference of the press into political matters. This is the state of affairs that the First Amendment was painstakingly written to preserve. Those responsible for the crafting of that amendment were convinced that a vigorous and vocal press is beneficial to the life of the nation.
The prohibition that restricts Congress from interfering with the press has never been regarded as some kind of "wall of separation" between government and the press. We do not expect to find on the editorial page of The Chicago Tribune a statement that says, for example, "Although we ourselves personally approve a woman's right to choose, we refrain from pushing the point in these pages, lest we appear to be imposing our own moral persuasion on the normal workings of the courts and the legislature. The traditional wall of separation between Press and State must be maintained at all peril." Likewise, we would be more than slightly miffed if The Weekly Standard were to declare, "No standard is more serious than the separation of government and the press. Therefore, we think it inappropriate for us to interject our own views into the political process and impose our morality on others. We are willing to admit, however, strictly in our private and personal capacity, that our own view of 'gay marriage' is something other than completely favorable." We never expect statements like that from the press.
Father's comments, it seems to me, make perfect sense. I have commented on this notion of the separation of church in state in this post and this one as well. Father Reardon gives support to my assertion that the notion of separation of Church and State is philosophically and politically untenable.
He goes on to say:
For the same reason, if we expect the press to argue for its own views with respect to the decisions and workings of government, we should expect no less from the churches. If we are not shocked when a newspaper editor takes a very firm stand in favor of “abortion rights” and employs all the influence of his position to advance this view, it is illogical to be shocked when a bishop takes a very firm stand in favor of “the rights of the unborn” and employs all the influence of his position to advance that view. The same First Amendment protects both the editor and the bishop. The government neither ties nor shortens the arm of either.
Father's summation of the main argument is extremely important:
The motive inspiring the First Amendment is the key to its understanding. It was the conviction of the founders of this country that the freedom of Americans was to be embodied and expressed in institutions other than the government. They did not believe that the government had all the answers. The government, on the contrary, because it bears not the sword in vain, always has about it some aspect of coercion. The better to insure the government’s own freedom, therefore, the First Amendment provides that there will always be other institutions left free to bring their own influence to bear on the government. Chief among these institutions are the press and the churches. The press and the churches, understanding this to be their role, have always functioned this way.
If you listen to, or read, the arguments for abortion (and an exemplary one from Judith Jarvis Thompson can be found here), you quickly find that the unborn baby (fetus, conceptus, fertilized human egg, or what have you) must be ignored if the argument is to have any hope of success.
In the aforelinked essay, Ms. Thompson does just that: ignores the baby. What? you say, having read the article, How can you say she ignores the baby? She spends nearly the entire essay on whether or not a fetus can reasonably and rightly be said to have a right to life. Is this not taking the baby into account?
Actually, no. It isn't.
In her essay, the fetus as such is not discussed, but rather the fetus as concept is discussed. How can the fetus have rights if it (and notice a fetus is most certainly "it") does not have interests wants and desires? And while it is not reasonable to assert that a fetus does not have rights, neither is it reasonable to assert that it does. A fetus has no more right to life than a piece of flesh from one's thumb. As Ms. Thompson puts it:
The stronger claim says that reason does not compel us to believe it more probable that an embryo is a human person than that any piece of human tissue is. If allowed to develop normally, an embryo will develop into a human person, whereas a cell in your thumb will not; it is not contrary to reason to think that that lends no weight at all to the idea that the embryo is a human person now.
But note, to accomplish her argument, she must do two things: focus on the earliest stages of fetal development (for the purposes of highlighting that opposition to abortion must include every moment of fetal life from conception and because to accept that earlier term abortions are somehow less evil than later ones forces the proponent of such a view to argue for why he makes such a distinction) and deny that this mass of cells has any intrinsic difference from any other mass of cells.
This only serves to show her hand. She knows that for an argument in favor of abortion to work, on her own terms, the fetus must be ahuman (that is, not fully human) and without legal status from the moment of conception until birth. However, just as she rightly criticizes abortion advocates who feel compelled to make a distinction in utero between what sorts of fetuses are okay to abort and what sorts not, so one must press Ms. Thompson to clarify her implication: if it is proper to deny the legitimacy of a right to life to a fetus on the grounds that a) a fetus has no interests, wants or desires and b) there is no reasonable necessity for assigning a right to life to a fetus, then on what grounds is it improper, indeed, murder, to kill a newborn infant, or, for that matter, a toddler?
Presumably, she might respond that newborns and toddlers clearly have interests, wants and desires, inarticulate though these may be. But the new technologies opening up to us also reveal behaviors in utero that similarly and clearly demonstrate interests, wants and desires that are inarticulate.
And to assert that a fetus is a mass of cells indistinguishable from any other mass of cells is just plain bad biology. It is well-known that the fetus (and I continue to use pro-abortion terminology for the sake of argument) is in no way simply another mass of cells belonging to the mother. The fetus has, from the moment of conception, a completely distinguishable DNA from its mother, frequently a different bloodtype, and so forth. Even the placental sac is technically an "organ" of the fetus' and not one belonging to the mother. Clearly the fetus is dependent upon the mother for nourishment, which it gets through the umbilical cord which attaches to the mother's uterine wall, but in all other respects, the fetus is a completely distinguishable biological entity. It is another mass of cells similar to the mass of cells of a thumb, alright, but the thumb of a completely different individual. And just as a person would reasonably object to some mother trying to sever his thumb (on the grounds that it is just another mass of cells), so it is reasonable to suppose would a fetus object to being aborted.
This is what I mean by ignoring the fetus. Abortion advocates cannot really and completely acknowledge the reality of who and what the fetus is--an unborn human child--because if they did so, their arguments for abortion would be seen to be as monstrous as they really are. Instead, who and what the fetus is must deliberately be clouded and concealed--it is a mass of cells; it has no desires, interests, or wants--so that the argument can seem to be "reasonable." But reason that ignores the reality with which it is confronted is not reason--it is madness.
One hopes that the reality of 45 million babies that have been aborted since 1973 would break through our society's insanity and bring us back to our senses.
. . . the less you can rationally defend the monstrous practice of abortion. This story (props to the Touchstone blog) on the BBC web page, highlights the 4D ultrasound technology that's now available and what insights it has given us of the life of the baby in the womb.
This video (requires Real Player) includes a clip that startled the peewadden out of me when it showed the footage of the baby suddenly smiling. And this series of pictures clearly shows how energetic and vibrant is the life of the unborn. The things we thought unborn babies didn't do have proven to be things that they, indeed, very much do, and the very things which display their humanity. "Fetuses" are more alive and aware, indeed, are much more human, than scientists have previously thought, but which pro-life/anti-abortion advocates have long argued.
How ironic that science, which pro-choice/pro-abortion advocates tout in their "arguments," so severely undermines their case that it is shown for the cruel hoax that it is.
Sofie's First Major Injury
Since yesterday's brief "teaser" we've spoken to legal counsel. And I find myself much more somber (we thought we were over the worst), though equally as concerned, about Sofie's current health, at least until more tests are run.
Monday evening, we were at a hotel near the conference center where we were attending the American Library Association's annual meeting. The hotel has a tradition in which, in the morning, they lead a small handful of ducks down from their habitat somewhere in the hotel to the central fountain in the guest lobby near the entrance, and in the evening they lead them back. A voice-over announcement--of the quality of a major sporting event--directs one's attention to the fountain, to one side of which has been placed some red-carpeted stairs, themselves placed in front of a red carpet leading to the hotel elevator. A red-jacketed attendent helps ensure the ducks get from the pool to the elevator (or the reverse in the morning). And everyone takes pictures.
I should say that on Monday evening, that's what we had come to see. As it turns out, we missed the entire production.
Just before the ritual was to begin, we took some seats around a glass-top table near the fountain, which had just been vacated by some other patrons. Sofie played at Anna's feet, to one side of the table, a colleague of Anna's took one of the other chairs, and I took the third.
After a few minutes, a waitress came to clear the glasses and napkins of the previous guests. As she did so a heavy-bottomed glass either slipped from her hand or tumbled off her tray (I didn't see, I was watching Sofie at Anna's feet), and landed in the middle of the glass table top. The table top shattered and a thick, heavy shard of it struck Sofie in the forehead, making two cuts just along and below her hairline. (That it missed her eyes, is a minor miracle. And with the weight of the glass, she is also fortunate a piece of it did not sever a finger or toe.)
Sofie was startled silent for a moment, then began screaming and crying. Anna immediately picked her up and got her away from the broken glass. Sofie's cuts were bleeding profusely. As we took Sofie away from the broken glass, Anna ordered someone to call an ambulance.
After a few minutes the fire department EMTs came, followed a few minutes after that by the ambulance. While we waited one person whom I assumed to be part of hotel security spoke to me, but only to get our names and the hotel and room number to where we were staying and a brief description of what had happened.
Shortly after that, we got to the hospital, where, thankfully, we didn't have long to wait for Sofie's care to begin. Part of her care included seven stitches on her forehead.
After a couple of hours at the hospital, I called the hotel to call us transportation back to the hotel--where our personal belongings had been stored--but since we didn't have the car seat with us, we had to have a taxi with a car seat. Well, after three calls to the hotel, more than an hour of waiting, and no taxi immediately forthcoming, we hiked to a nearby busstop to see if we could find out how to get back to the hotel. Eventually we flagged down a sheriff's deputy who helped us out. We got our stuff, and headed to the trolley to go back to our hotel room, which was a few miles from the hotel where Sofie had had her accident.
At eleven, we finally got in and headed to bed.
Sofie continues under medical care (she has an appointment shortly). We would appreciate your prayers for her (and for us, for wisdom and discernment). The more we learn, the more we understand the potential dangers there are for her health.