This past July (06) my wife and I became the delighted parents of our firstborn son, whose entry into the world was made possible by an earlier tragedy: the unexpected death of our first child at ten weeks into pregnancy. We thought we had lost our firstborn as well to the same fate, and when we went to verify the second loss, certain to see no remaining sign of life, we were overjoyed to witness a healthy-beating heart! Having experienced the loss of our unborn child's life, and knowing the reality of the personhood of the unborn, a reality made known to us all the more by the power of science, my mind boggles at the willful destruction of innocent human life in our society. I am sickened that such destructive power and deadly practice has become acceptable in our time. I pray with hope the prayer of T.S. Eliot: "redeem the time." In our time and culture, redeeming the time means returning as a people to a true and lived respect for life.
The causes and conditions that allow the destruction of life to persist in our society, and we would do well to be open to what these really are, are beyond the scope of this Respect Life essay. Nor do I intend to explain here why abortion, euthanasia, and other such practices are horrific and evil. My aim is to reflect upon our response to these evils. Specifically, I wish to address the means by which we work to establish a culture that celebrates, cherishes, and cares for life.
Ours is an age in which faith in the efficacy of war far surpasses faith in the power of love, discussion, prayer, and grace. Unfortunately, in our defense of life, we are sometimes tempted to fight the "culture wars" as though we were fighting a military war. Our weapons are not famine, sword, and fire; but ostracism, words, and politics. When we fall to such temptation, we are prone to paint the opposition in the darkest and most terrifying hues. We cast them to fringes of the political spectrum as evil extremists, as if we could gain nothing from engaging them in discussion. Remaining ignorant of our own participation in perpetuating a "culture of death" and indifferent to any respect for life our opponents have, we call them assassins, death-peddlers, predators, and abortion enthusiasts who fight for the right to kill babies in death camps. We focus on their moral corruption, their sin, their evil ways. We wield truth as an instrument of alienation and cast our opponents away to weep and gnash their teeth.
I fear that this antagonism will bring about neither an end to abortion nor a culture of life. The battle to defend the sanctity of life, if it is even proper to call it a battle, is one to be fought with the mind and the heart and the instruments of each. The objective is not the elimination or "disarmament" of our enemies, but their and our conversion and deepened respect for life, and through those and especially the power of grace, the redemption of the time. Only by this road is there hope to establish a culture of life and consequently end the unnatural practices which assail our bodies, plague our land, and sicken our souls.
The front of this culture war is extensive, ranging from the expressions of disordered cultural and social systems to the executions of immoral laws and judicial opinions to the very souls of ourselves and of our adversaries. The spiritual front is the true front, for the former evils are the weeds of poorly gardened souls. They are the symptoms of a sickness, not the sickness itself. Reaping away the weeds with not reap away the causes that nourish their roots.
A redeemed culture is a culture of life, a culture founded upon a respect for life. This truth presents a difficulty: what does it mean to respect life or to be pro-life? Potential answers come immediately to mind. It means to protect life against unjust attacks. It means to oppose murder. It means that we vote for candidates who will initiate the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It means we devote ourselves to those non-negotiable issues.
If these answers are true, then why do I present this question as a difficulty? Because the answers given above sidestep the question: while protection, opposition, voting, and attention to issues may be actions done out of a respect for life, they do not mean the same thing as respecting. So the question stands: what does it mean to respect life?
Exploring this question may open up a path to a culture of life that we and our "opponents" in the culture war may walk together. The proponents of abortion, euthanasia, and other attacks upon life are not pro-death, by which I mean they are not intending to promote a culture of death, although that may be the effect of their actions. Indeed, some of them are among the most passionate practitioners of the corporal works of mercy. They are mistaken, gravely so, about certain truths concerning life, and these errors have inspired egregious moral judgments and horrendous moral actions. Still, let us not cast them aside as devils. There are many people and groups who shape our culture, they are among them, and they are formidable and intelligent. If we are to establish a culture of life, they cannot be removed from the equation, nor can they remain as they are. They must be engaged and persuaded and come to a personal conversion. We must lovingly engage them with hope and faith in the power of truth and grace.
What does it mean to respect? The word itself is derived from the Latin word respectus, which means to look back at. The adverbial phrase back at is important here, for it denotes re-looking, reflection, reconsideration of the object perceived or considered. Respect in contemporary English means to feel or to show deferential regard or esteem. Is there a connection between these two meanings of the word, the meaning of the Latin root and the English word we use?
The word respect, when used as a verb, is a transitive verb: it has an object. We respect something or someone. While the object does not necessitate respect, the object respected either should or should not be respected based on what the object is and what value it has. Reflecting upon or contemplating the object to be respected is an integral part of the process of respecting. We see here that the meaning of respectus is present in the meaning of respect. To respect something, we first come to know it by looking back upon it.
Given what we have said about respect, it follows that to respect life, we must look back upon life. Respecting life requires education. By education, I mean with tradition both the education of the mind and the education of the heart. Education for thinkers like C.S. Lewis and Aristotle means teaching students to like and dislike what they ought. Proper affective responses require learning. "Teach us to care and not to care," writes T.S. Eliot.
If we are taught and believe that our value judgments are mere opinions, no more true or false than another's judgment, then we become incapable of responding properly to the world. We become incapable of respecting life, for we cannot see its value. Even we who know in our hearts and minds that life is sacred and honorable are called to order our affections and further discern the meaning of life. Life is a mystery, its meaning and value inexhaustible by our finite minds and hearts. All of the collected wisdom of philosophers, theologians, poets, story-tellers, historians, and scientists has not and will not encapsulate the total meaning and value of life. Nevertheless, the more we know of life's truth, beauty, and goodness, the more we are capable of respecting life. Hence respect for life is not something we simply have or don't have. Our respect for life can grow; it can be cultivated. It can also dwindle.
The education that is necessary for increasing our respect for life is focused on more than the planks of the pro-life platform; it includes the cultivation of the mind and the heart to see the inexhaustible mystery and to appreciate the wondrous value of life. How may we accomplish it? I mentioned before the collected wisdom of the ages. We may turn to that heritage for guidance and growth. Reading poetry and sharing the great stories, where the mysteries of life are beautifully manifested before our imagination. Exploring our history; learning about the lives of others, their struggles, joys, and sufferings. Studying the work of scientists to better see the order and marvel of creation. Entering the world of art and music where truth, beauty, and goodness are expressed in ways words cannot communicate. Pondering in prayer what the best minds have said about God and his creatures and what God has said about himself and us.
We also learn of life by living it as it is meant to be lived. To be able to respect life, we must live our lives in keeping with the moral law, which points us to what we ought to be. We learn by doing. We must build the good habits of body, mind, and heart, which are called the virtues, for we get to know truth and goodness by being true and good. We are whole when we are holy. Our respect for life will deepen when we understand life by living it well. We must also live with a responsibility for the lives of others, a responsibility that takes shape through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. These in particular are acts that nourish life, both of the body and of the soul.
Now, we would not for a moment propose that reading poetry or studying history should be done as substitutes for legal, economic, and social initiatives aimed at reducing and ending abortion and other attacks upon life. That said, the problem is far graver and dreadful than bad laws or tyrannical court decisions. The underlying problem is philosophical. Like Boromir in Tolkien's tale, we make errors in judgment because we hold erroneous ideas. If the problem is philosophical, then education and discussion are valid solutions.
Educational activities, while they do not necessitate a pro-life philosophy, will, if done rightly, lift our souls to the recognition that life--in all its beauty, pain, tragedy, comedy, crisis, and triumph--is honorable, sacred, full of wonder, and worth living. From that vantage point, we will then be all the more capable of respecting life. We will know what life is and will strive to know it even better. Educated in mind and heart, we may serve as educators, and teach others to know and to respect life. We may begin within our families and from there to our parishes and to our neighbors, with whom we can no longer afford to be strangers. We must soon reform our schools so that they are institutions that preserve a respect for life. By shaping ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world to know, to appreciate, and to respect life, we set the groundwork necessary to sustain a culture of life. All attempts to establish laws or overturn abominable court decisions will be of no avail in the long run unless we as a whole people have a deep and ever-growing respect for life. Overturning Roe v. Wade will not be akin to the fall of the Dark Tower of Mordor, magically vanquishing the pro-choice movement. Much more is needed.
Establishing a culture of life based on an ever-renewing respect for life establishes a common goal among us and proponents of abortion, euthanasia, and other offences against life. Instead of picturing ourselves as reaping angels and them as engineers of a culture of death, a picture in which it is only we who care for life and only they who ever harm it, we should recognize our shared goal. Abortion and other such procedures are not ends in themselves done for their own sakes. They are evil means adopted by those who are mistaken about life but nevertheless care deeply for life. There is a striking moral difference between a woman's decision to have an abortion, fearing poverty or an inability to care for a child, and a person's decision to kill to expand his power or spread his ideology. Both killings take innocent life, and both are evil choices, but the will of the latter is far more dreadful, sinister, and hell-bent.
Too often in debates and discussions over life and death issues, the opposing sides talk past one another. The differences in language, thinking, and values hinder fruitful discussion and consequently fruitful action. The debate is seldom framed between a pro-life side and a pro-death side, but between sides that disagree on the meaning of life and the meaning of freedom and whose hierarchies of values are quite incompatible. There is, of course, no way of synthesizing our philosophies. We want them (and ourselves) to think rightly about life, but we will never see that come to fruition until we hospitably recognize that they, in their own way, respect life (imperfectly, to be sure) as well. We may even learn to respect life from those we are inclined to label enemies. The respect for life is born and nursed from an education that teaches us to think and to feel accurately about life, and this education must be shared in hospitality, though not in tolerance of evil.
To mature and to shape our lives, society, and culture, the respect for life must be lived and lived with grace. Respect for life is not a respect for an abstraction, and it is something deeper and more significant than a label for how someone votes or would arrange the seats on the Supreme Court; it is a lived responsibility for all life, the life of persons most of all. The lived respect for life is perhaps exercised most perfectly in the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. These must not be foreign to the ways of those who work for a redeemed culture, and ultimately, for the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, the question of how we establish a culture of life and by extension end attacks upon life must remain open as a question, lest we fall into a false dogmatism that prevents us from reaching prudent solutions. Answers may come from those we least expect to offer wisdom; God works in mysterious ways. Let us pray with hope for the redemption of the time.
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