Observations from the Walk for Life
I’m excited to report that I was able to make it to the West Coast Walk for Life while I was in San Francisco this weekend. I came really close to confining myself to the comfort of my hotel, but I’m so glad I went. Some pictures and observations:
I’ve never seen so many people in one place.
I couldn’t make a rough estimate of how many people were there, because I could never see them all at once. Even when I found higher ground, the crowd stretched over one horizon to another. This video is the closest I could come to capturing it:
What you see there is only about 20% of the people in attendance. One man said he stood in one place and waited for the entire line of marchers to walk by, and it took an hour. I heard someone say that an estimated 40,000 turned out, but that seems a little low.
I didn’t see a single media outlet there, which was odd given the enormity of the turnout. It basically shut down part of the city.
Overall, it was a young crowd.
There were tons of people there aged 16 – 25, and they were full of energy for the cause. I wondered if that had anything to do with the fact that they all grew up in the age of ultrasounds, where we have a whole lot more information about what really goes on in the womb.
What I found most interesting was the counter-protestors. I was surprised that there were so few of them — they were like a drop of water in the ocean compared to the marchers. Also, their average age was older than that of the pro-life crowd.
The most striking thing was how many of them wore some sort of disguise.
I’d estimate that 30 – 50% of the counter-protestors wore some kind of costume or obscured their faces in some way.
Also fascinating was their heavy emphasis on the sacrilegious. Notice the upside-down cross on the face of the girl below. (I obscured part of her sign because it was really vulgar.)
A focus of many of the signs was graphic, unbelievably crude sexual insults involving Jesus and Mary. This disgusting sign below is one of the few I can post a picture of, as it was, amazingly, one of the milder messages.
Some of them put on little impromptu plays where they’d pretend to be Jesus or Mary and pantomime lurid sexual acts, shouting profanity-laden narration all the while.
The highlight of the day was listening to the testimonies of the courageous women of Silent No More. There wasn’t a dry eye on the field. God bless these women.
It was a beautiful day in a beautiful city.
After seeing the turnout of this Walk and others like it, I have no doubt that the tide is turning. As I walked back to the train station, through crowds of awed onlookers, many of whom were whispering things like “Can you believe this?”, I felt filled with hope for the future of unborn life in this country.
.
RELATED
- How I became pro-life
- My friend Abigail’s story of how she went from a pro-choice feminist at Smith College to a pro-life housewife
- St. Blogustine’s great pictures of the Washington March for Life
- The Anchoress’ link-o-rama roundup of pro-life marches
A Life Beyond Reason
I had another post all ready to go for today, but I’m going to bump it because I just read something that so moved me that I had to share it with you. Go read this stunning article called A Life Beyond Reason, in which Professor Chris Gabbard recounts how his severely disabled son made him take a hard look at his views on the value of human life. An excerpt:
I was inspired by Socrates’ statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Similarly, Aristotle’s dictum that man is the animal having “logos,” the power of reasoning, impressed me. The notion that the human being is a rational animal made sense, and I internalized it as a basic assumption, as I did Socrates’ pronouncement. At San Francisco State University, I became intrigued by the Enlightenment. John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant fascinated me. Who would not want to be enlightened? Who in his or her right mind would choose in favor of a benighted past of superstition, ignorance, and blind faith in custom? I put my faith in reason. Eventually I obtained my doctorate at Stanford in 18th-century British literature—the age of reason: Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson.
In sum, I grew up prizing intellectual aptitude — not that I am a candidate for Mensa — and detesting “poor mental function.” Perhaps what helped make me revere intelligence was growing up in Palo Alto, with Stanford less than half a mile away and a number of Nobel Prize winners and famous and wealthy technology innovators all around me. People in my immediate vicinity had good brains, and that meant money, respect, and international influence.
Given, then, my nearly metaphysical attachment to intelligence, imagine my surprise when in March 1999, at my first child’s birth, he failed to breathe and consequently suffered severe brain damage…After his birth, as I entered the intensive-care nursery, I was deeply ambivalent, having been persuaded by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer’s advocacy of expanding reproductive choice to include infanticide. But there was my son, asleep or unconscious, on a ventilator, motionless under a heat lamp, tubes and wires everywhere, monitors alongside his steel and transparent-plastic crib. What most stirred me was the way he resembled me. Nothing had prepared me for this, the shock of recognition, for he was the boy in my own baby pictures, the image of me when I was an infant.
Professor Gabbard goes on to describe how he came to see the value of his son’s life — a value beyond reason — despite lingering misgivings from his old ways of thinking. The article makes a profound statement about the limits of a purely rationalist worldview, and about the power of love to change hearts. Go check it out. (Hat tip to Dorian Speed and Korrektiv)
.
RELATED
- Finding inspiration in severe disability (an interview that echoes many of Professor Gabbard’s sentiments)
- The article touches on the question of God’s role when bad things happen. A book that does a good job addressing that subject is 10 Prayers God Always Says Yes To by Anthony DeStefano.
The most powerful woman in the world
This is my new friend, Sister Joeine Darrington, whom I met during the couple of days we stayed with the Benedictine Sisters:
She came over and sat with us during our meals with the sisters, and it was so much fun to chat with her. She’s 96 years old and has been a Benedictine Sister for around 75 years! We talked about how religious life has changed over the decades, what it was like after the sisters stopped wearing habits in the 1960′s, and all about the work they do with the elderly and the homeless. I was touched when she told me that she’d just finished writing thank-you notes to her doctor and dentist. “I was worried that they get complaints more than encouragement, and wanted to tell them how much I appreciate what they do,” she explained.
We spent a long time talking, but one thing she said stood out to me more than anything else:
She mentioned that each morning before she goes into the chapel, she carefully reads every single new prayer request, and then she prays for them at Mass and throughout the day. The sisters have a large book lying open in one of their main halls; it looks like a guest registry, but it’s actually a log for prayer requests. All the sisters pray for these intentions, but Sister Joeine emphasized how seriously she takes them. She spoke of her dedication to those prayers the way an investment banker might speak of his work on a multi-million-dollar corporate merger.
Her tone had been light and jovial, but she turned serious when she talked about prayer. “You know, prayer is very important,” she said.
Though Sister Joeine is in excellent health, as a nonagenarian she has had to slow down a bit. She mentioned that she doesn’t do as much work as she used to do, she can’t move quite as quickly as she used to, and I noticed that she uses a walker to get around. But when I considered how much time she is now able to devote to prayer, it suddenly occurred to me: This is a very powerful woman!
Especially after I set aside the first part of an afternoon solely to pray for your intentions in the chapel at Mt. Angel Abbey, I believe more than ever that there’s something special about focused prayer time. I know that the “prayers of the trenches” offered up in the chaos of daily life are great too for those of us who don’t have lots of time for silence, but it is a unique gift to be able to pour all of your love and attention into one prayer for one specific person.
I thought of all the times that other people’s prayers have impacted my own life (some examples here, here and here), and I was awed by what Sister Joeine does every day. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet could have pulled up chairs next to me, and I would have thought, “Wow! I can’t believe I’m hanging out with someone as powerful and influential as Sister Joeine!”
It’s funny how my perspective has changed since my conversion. In my old view I would have still seen my new friend as charming, witty, intelligent and an overall lovely person — but “powerful” is probably not a word that would have come to mind. Yet now that I am aware of the economy of love, where one person close to God really can change the world, I realize that my 96-year-old friend is a one-woman army; in fact, she’s one of the most powerful people I’ve ever met.
Fear of life
I keep thinking about Mei Fong’s heartbreaking article in the Wall Street Journal from a few weeks ago about Chinese parents who lost children in the Sichuan earthquake. One part in particular has stuck in my mind, filling me with sadness whenever I think about it:
[Zhu Jianming] and his wife Lu Shuhua, 45, had battled hardships: their first child, a son, was mentally disabled, so they were legally allowed to have a second child. Their son, Yinshui, drowned at 20. Daughter Xinyue, 14, perished in the quake…The Zhus said neighbors were avoiding them; Mrs. Zhu thought it was because of fears the now-childless couple would increasingly depend on others.
Hearing about their neighbors’ reaction reminded me of something I’ve noticed over the past couple of years:
One of the most obvious differences I’ve seen since I’ve gone from running in mostly nonreligious to mostly religious social circles is how much more life you see among religious groups of people. When I think back on the almost thirty years I spent in secular social networks, I’m struck by how comparatively quiet and sterile everything seemed. In religious circles I see so much more marriage, more adoption, more biological children, more people letting friends or relatives live with them — more crazy, messy, loud life.
In particular, the most striking difference I’ve seen in this area is when it comes to helping people in need. I’ve seen a sincere desire to help others in both my old and new social networks, but it plays out in very different ways. In the secular crowd people might volunteer at soup kitchens or organize aid programs for the needy, the most dedicated might even join the Peace Corps. The Christians, I noticed, volunteered and did aid programs and went on international missions as well, but they crossed a line that I almost never saw crossed in the secular world: they were willing to help others by letting them become intimately involved in their own lives.
The first time I noticed this was when my husband and I observed that since our conversion we knew of so many people who were considering adoption not only as a way to bless their own lives with a child, but as a way to help a child in need. Adoption of older children, adopting children when there were already multiple biological children in the family, adoption of children with special needs were all virtually unheard-of in my old secular circles, but not uncommon at all in my new religious circles.
For many months I was puzzled by this distinction. The people I knew in both social circles were “good people,” but there was a level of serving others that I almost never saw among nonbelievers that I regularly saw among believers. Then, one day when I was thinking about that Wall Street Journal article, remembering what it was like to be a nonbeliever myself, I realized what it was:
Fear of life.
When I was an atheist and hung out with mostly atheists and agnostics, the way we helped people was through controlled circumstances, systems that ensured that there was a clear line separating their lives from our own. We wanted — in fact, needed — our interactions with others to be safe and finite, with clear parameters on what we were expected to give.
This mentality makes perfect sense: after all, our biggest problems in life often come from other people. The more you allow someone else into your life, the more there’s the potential for them to screw it up. What if you adopt a child and they end up behaving badly and costing you tons of mental and financial distress? What if you mentor a troubled child and he ends up being a bad influence on your children? To use the example from that article, what if you’re very poor yourself and you offer to help a couple who has just become childless but they end up latching onto you and taking too many of your resources?
It’s too risky. The safest, most reasonable thing to do is to allow just enough people into your life so that you’re not lonely, and to carefully guard the intermingling of any other lives with your own after that point.
Based on the way I have changed since my conversion, and observations after living in both heavily atheistic and heavily religious circles, I’ve come to believe that to live any other way is virtually impossible without God. To use a very small-scale example from my own life, when I first met the neighbor girls, even after I got over the anger about them ringing my doorbell, I was hesitant to let them into my life. I would peer out the window, see them meandering down the street with no place to go, and tell myself that I’d love to help but I just can’t. I know they need love, but there’s only so much love I have to give. Besides, what if they end up at my house all the time and I can’t get them to leave? Too risky.
And I was right. I saw what everyone sees when they consider welcoming new life into their homes: on my own, there is only so much love I can give; there is so very little that I can offer to other people, and there are so many things that could go wrong.
But when you turn to God, you find that you have access to the very Source of infinite love, that, through him, you have more love to give than you could have ever imagined. And, as many believers can attest, you find that God blesses few things as much as he blesses the addition of new life to your own.
I believe that this is one of the reasons, as Jason Berger pointed out the other day, that willingness to accept all different sorts of life was one of the main things that made the early Christians stand out from their pagan neighbors. The fact is that, by default, we fear new life, especially “imperfect” life, and we fear it for good reason. On our own it’s just too difficult to let other people wander into our lives under anything but the most tightly controlled circumstances.
From my own experience, I believe that some of the most compelling evidence of God’s work in the world today is that, with few exceptions, it is only people who have faith in God who have overcome fear of life.