Bound in Love

From the Psalm today, we hear the pure prayer of the true disciple:

One thing I ask of the Lord; this I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord and contemplate his temple.

This is the last Sunday in January and the American bishops have for the past 50 years suggested that it is an appropriate time to preach on the importance of the protection of human life. For this is roughly the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling Roe vs. Wade. There was a March for Life in Washington DC on that last weekend in January every year, where hundreds of thousands would come to march in front of the government in support of innocent human life.

Most of the pro-life activities are focused on the protection of the unborn. But of course those are not the only points in life when human life is vulnerable and needs to be protected by people who call themselves Christian. The elderly, for example, can be quite vulnerable in many cases.

So what I’d like us to think about today is life. Why are we pro-life? And for what kind of life are we pro? I recently saw a beautiful saying by St. Anthony of Padua. He said, “the life of the body is the soul. The life of the soul is God.” St. Anthony reminds us that we are pro-eternal life. We don’t simply want babies to have a chance to live; we want babies, and indeed all living persons, to have a chance to live eternally. It is our souls that give life to our bodies. And our souls will live even when our bodies die. And the life of our souls is from and in God himself.

For God is the author of life. It is not Mom and Dad who made me, it is God. The marital act does not always result in a baby. So it cannot be that we men and women are the ones who give life. God decides when a baby is to be conceived. And we are reminded in the Annunciation that life begins at conception. Jesus is already here with us at the Annunciation in March even if he won’t be born until Christmas in December.

If we acknowledge that God is the author of life, then we should acknowledge that he alone can justly decide when that human life should end. There has been some confusion recently on the prohibition of the death penalty, but whether or not the Church’s teaching on the death penalty has been fundamentally changed, one thing hasn’t changed. We should not take lightly upon ourselves the authority to start and end human life because God alone has that final authority.

Our society rejects that view because it has rejected Jesus. Our society says that we can decide when to have a baby, and we can use every means available to manage the outcome we want. Our medical industry has a whole array of procedures and pharmaceuticals to prevent inconvenient conception. And it also offers another array of procedures and pharmaceuticals to cause convenient conception. And it has pursued a product offering of convenience such that there is an industry to allow you to have your baby but not in your own body. Looking at this activity from their various positions, one must assume that God shakes his head and the Devil strokes his chin in delight. For in all of that activity we deny the just authority of God to create human life, and we unjustly take that authority for ourselves.

Just as we have sought ways to control the beginning of life, our modern age has offered equal control at the end of our life. Especially in Europe, but sadly also in the United States, there is a service offered by the healthcare industry to take your own life. In one of the most amazing examples of euphemism, this is called “physician-assisted suicide.” The Hippocratic Oath, which has historically been the basis for healthcare, requires doctors to pledge to never give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor make a suggestion to this effect. And yet doctors now do offer people suffering a way to terminate their lives through drugs they obtain from their doctor. Again, Satan must stroke his chin in delightful satisfaction.

As Catholics, we know that God alone is the author of life. The world today assumes that the human body is ours to start and to stop when we want to, that the human body is ours to mutilate when we want to, to be used as a harvest of organs when we can get away with it; all of this is profoundly wicked. And as Christians, we must stand up against this wickedness. So we march in the cold of late January to defend human life from its “in utero” termination, from its “before you’re ready to die” termination, and from its “your organs are useful to us” termination. We recognize that just like our lives, our bodies are a gift to us from God; indeed they are a temple. And we make every effort to protect and strengthen the temple rather than to destroy it.

We do all this not because life on earth is so wonderful. It isn’t wonderful. But it is the way to the wonderful life. It is the way to eternal life. It is the way to the house of the Lord, where we seek to dwell all the days of our eternal life. So that we may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord and contemplate his temple. Put another way, we protect earthly life so that we have a chance to behold the beatific vision in our eternal life. For the Lord is our light and our salvation.

This earthly life that we live will have its ups and its downs. There will be wonderful stretches and also long periods of toil and difficulty. But the life that we are given by the author of life is the life we are called to live so that we can live the true life, the life with him in heaven. And we protect innocent human life, especially the unborn, because every person that God chooses to give life to deserves to have the choice to choose him forever.

We were made for eternal life with God. We were made to see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living, which is Heaven. He gives us our earthly life so that we can begin the journey that can end in the house of the Lord. We were made for heaven, and God gave us life on earth so that we could choose heaven. Let us continue to defend human life at every stage, from natural conception to natural death, with respect for the human body all along the way. Let us do our part as Christian disciples to share the good news of the purpose of our earthly life so that others can see why they were given life and by whom they were given life, so they can truly choose eternal life, which is the true life.