Recently, I was asked to preach at a liturgy within which a young woman made her final vows as a religious sister. A rare event. But she is a rare person.  Rarer and rarer is becoming the case where a young person whose life is full of every opportunity for marriage, sexual intimacy, career, and worldly wealth and success pledges to live a lifetime of poverty, chastity and obedience. This is not an easy time to make religious vows. Many are predicting the death of religious life as we have known it. On the surface, at least, there seems some foundation to the prophecy.

More are leaving religious life than are entering it. In the past 20 years, perhaps one-quarter to one-third of all religious in the western world have left religious life. Relatively few have entered. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are out of tune in our culture, vocation recruiters are frustrated. Religious life appears to be in deep trouble.  That’s one view. There is another: Far from dying, religious life today is undergoing an immense purification, a pruning, a clarification which will serve to make it again a thing of challenge, prophecy, importance, witness and indeed a thing of beauty. What we are witnessing today is not the death of religious life but a metamorphosis, a paschal passage, a painful but fruitful wandering through the desert that has brought us to the edges of the promised land. A religious life is being born within which there will be few numbers, but greater witness. It is all very paradoxical. Formerly, there were too many religious. Religious life was not presented as the unique and rare call that it is. I say this without in any way casting negative reflections in the direction of those who have left it. Almost all those who did leave were, and remain, very generous and sincere persons, persons whose sojourn in religious life was willed by God.  They should feel free and feel good about the years they spent within a religious community.

Indeed, religious life is, in my view, intended to be a rare vocation, something for just a few. All Christians are intended to be prophets, but religious are intended to be prophets in a special sense. Of these latter kind of prophets, God doesn’t need thousands. He only needs a few… though these need to be clearly seen and heard. As I witnessed this young woman’s vows, I envied her because, despite the decline in numbers and the predictions of gloom and doom, this is, I believe, the best time in centuries to be making vows as a religious. Precisely because the call is rare it becomes, if it is responded to, a glorious opportunity to speak with a clarity, a beauty and a power that is less accessible to others. But God needs more married prophets than he needs vowed celibate ones. Marriage is for the many, religious life for the few. Why?

Because religious life is a call to be uniquely lonely, uniquely paradoxical and to enflesh a unique compassion. To be called to religious life is to become an anomaly. It is to sleep alone even while believing that “it is not good for the man to be alone.” It is a call to watch at night, alone, lonely, crying over Jerusalem, envying the foxes who have homes of their own. It’s having the whole world for a family while having nobody to really call your own. That is a unique vocation. To be called to religious life is to become a paradox. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, pronounced within a culture that reflects them, and pronounced out of a mind and heart which more than anything else wants intimate love, husband, wife, children, ownership and freedom, makes the truth they express repellent and so drives all who witness them inward, forcing them to assimilate the truth in a new way. The vows, precisely because they are repellent, of themselves, force one to live in such a way that his/her life would not make sense if God did not exist. For this reason, the vows enable the one who takes them to live in a special compassion with those who, because of circumstances beyond themselves, cannot get married, cannot have children, cannot own things, and cannot actualize themselves and do with their lives what they would like.

It promises sleepless nights, and meaningful days; it delivers cold seasons of loneliness, but spawns new kinds of intimacy; it strips some of everything and then gives back the whole world in return; it makes one curse its unfairness and then brings one to one’s knees in gratitude for its privilege. It is a rare, strange, dreadful and wonderful vocation.

As I witnessed that young woman’s vows, I realized that religious life is far from dead. It is not dying. It is being wonderfully reborn.

We live in a time of pain and division. Daily, in the world and in the church, hatred, anger and bitterness are growing. It is ever harder to live at peace with each other, to be calm, to not alienate someone just by being. There is so much wound and division around. Women’s issues, poverty and social justice, abortion, sexual morality, questions of leadership and authority, issues of war and peace, and styles of living and ministry, are touching deep wounds and setting people bitterly against each other. This is not even to mention issues such as personality conflicts, jealousy, greed and sin – which habitually divide.

Our psychic temperature is on the rise and with it, as Jesus predicted, son is turning against father, daughter against mother, sister against brother. We are being divided. It is no longer possible to escape taking a stand on these issues and, to take a stand on them, is to make enemies, to have someone hate you, to be accused of being narrow and to be alienated from other sincere persons. For anyone who’s sensitive, this is the deepest pain of all. Moreover, none of us ever approach these issues in complete fairness and objectivity. We are wounded, whether we admit it or not. Knowingly and unknowingly, in all these issues we have been either oppressor or oppressed and consequently we approach them either too full of wound or too defensive to see straight. In either case, the temptation is to become bitter and to give in to the propensity to feel that we have the right to be angry, to hate certain people, to be self-righteous, and to dissociate entirely sympathy and understanding from certain others. That is a tragic mistake. As valid, painful and imperative as these issues may be, reason, love, understanding and long-suffering, may never give way to a progressive and militant bitterness which can irrevocably alienate. That is the road to hell because bitterness is hell.

Yes, that is what is happening today. We are too easily giving into the temptation to think that because we have been wounded, or because others are wounded, we have the right to hate, to withdraw our empathy, to think in terms of black and white, and to be bitter. It is getting worse. Bitterness like cancer is slowly infecting more and more of Christ’s body. We need to read this, the sign of the times, and respond to it out of the Gospel. It is my submission that, given this bitterness, the Christian vocation today, for a time, will be that of letting ourselves bleed, in tears and tension, to wash out these wounds.

Let me illustrate what this means by way of an example: Just to be alive in the church today is to be caught in a painful tension. For example, the issues of women’s rights and social justice are, without doubt, two of the primary challenges that the Holy Spirit is giving our age. Yet Rome refuses to raise seriously the question of the ordination of women and it silences Leonardo Boff, a voice for the poor. With that comes a wave of resentment, bitterness and hatred.

Daily I move in circles where people are bitter about these issues and I find myself increasingly reluctant to defend Rome’s stance on them. On these two issues we are sitting on a powder keg and a deadly bitterness is flowing from them. Yet, no serious Catholic can be cavalier about the church as institution, as universal. Some 800 million Catholics cannot travel together without compromise, frustration, impatience, tears, rules and traditions which, at times, might seemingly strangle some of the life that the Holy Spirit is spawning. When a universal church moves forward, it can only be in baby steps. So what does the Christian who wants to be faithful today do? Ignore Rome? Consider the women’s movement and social justice as fads? Grow cynical? Mind his/her own business and let be what is? Say “the hell with them all”? Since nothing else is possible, for now, save for bitterness which must be rejected, the answer lies in a fidelity which accepts suffering. To be faithful today means to live in pain, in tension, in frustration, in seeming compromise, often hated by both sides.

Our call today is to reconcile by feeling the pain of all sides and by letting our pain and helplessness be a buffer that heals, the blood that helps wash the wound. As a simple start, we can test how open-minded we are on all of these issues by seeing how much pain we are in. Not to be in pain is not to be open-minded. It is a time of pain for the church, a time when we will all feel some hatred, a time when above all we must keep our peace of mind, our inner calm of spirit and our outer charity. Most of all, it is time to resist bitterness and that hardness of spirit which dampens the Holy Spirit.

Following is the first of a two part series on the paschal mystery.

It’s cruel to talk about death, but it’s crueler still not to. Adult life is not child’s life. As adults, we are asked to die and, like Christ, we sweat blood about it. Physical death is only one part of it. We are dying all the time, struggling painfully to let go of youth, health, daydreams and possible dreams, infatuations, romances, honeymoons, and, in the end, of life itself. No one lets go easily. Ernest Becker contends that the denial of death is the primary repression within Western culture and that, from that repression, come the majority of our psychological ailments. He’s right.

We don’t accept death. We deny, daydream, mummify, pretend, cling, drug, refuse to wake up, and do everything except accept that we must let go. Two images describe us: The first is that of Mary Magdala on Easter morning wanting desperately to cling to the Jesus she had known rather than accepting the resurrected one. The second is that of mummification. Like the ancient Egyptians who reacted to death by embalming and mummifying their dead, we tend to embalm and mummify what has died in us. The proper response to death in all its kinds is not these postures, but the acceptance of the paschal mystery. But this needs to be explained. As Christians we need to distinguish between two kinds of death, paschal and terminal. Terminal death is death that ends life, ends possibilities. It brings dreams, health, honeymoons and happiness to final closure. Paschal death is real death. Something precious dies. However, in this kind of death, there is in the dying an opening to new life and new scripture.

In paschal death, there is always a birth as well, just as in childbirth a woman loses her child even in giving it birth. The paschal mystery, the passage through death to new life, though normally associated with Christ’s death and resurrection, is in its widest sense a natural mystery. All reality grows and deepens through it. Christ’s life, however, offers its deepest modeling and his death and resurrection is a paschal drama that we can participate in. As an event in Christ’s life, the paschal mystery has four distinct movements to it. Together, these form one dynamic movement from death to life and together they form a psychology of love and growth. In a very simple schema, the paschal mystery, as an event and as a psychology, might be charted as follows:

            Passion and death … “the loss of life”

            Resurrection … “the reception of new life”

            Ascension … “the refusal to cling, as ascending beyond the old life”

            Pentecost … “the reception of new spirit for the new life”

What does all this mean concretely? It can better be understood through a series of stories.

A priest I know tells the story of a family whose father was dying of cancer. Big, tough, a welder, the man was not dying easily. For months he hung on, long after there was any hope. In intense pain, his body wasted away, the disease terminal, he still refused to die. He lay clinging to life. Each day his family spent their time with him. One day the oldest son sat by the bedside watching his dad suffering. Overcome by the pain and hopelessness of it, he squeezed his dad’s hand and said: “Dad, die for God’s sake! Let go! It’s got to be better there than here.” Almost immediately, his dad became calm and within minutes he died. The words his son spoke were paschal words, Christian words, words that trust God enough to be able to die in him and know that new life and new spirit will be born in the dying. When King David’s illegitimate son was dying, David put on sackcloth and began to fast and pray, begging God to save his son. However, messengers arrive and David learns that his son is already dead.

Upon hearing this, David arises immediately and puts aside the sackcloth and prayer and goes instead to his house where he bathes, anoints himself, eats, drinks, then sleeps with his wife, who conceives a new life, Solomon. When he senses that he has scandalized those around him who feel that he has not properly mourned his son, David speaks paschal words: “While the child was alive I fasted and prayed, imploring God to save the child. Now the child is dead. I must move on to create new life.” When we stop clinging, when we give ourselves over to God in trust, new life will be conceived and new spirit will be released. Death will be paschal and not terminal.

In my next column I will examine this mystery as it applies to the letting go of youth, dreams and honeymoons.

Few things divide us as emotionally and decisively as does the issue of abortion. Any doubts I might have had about that were put to rest last week when I attended a conference given by a Catholic theologian, Marjorie Maguire, who spoke out in favor of abortion by demand. Perhaps there were only about 100 people there, but the whole world might have been present. In that small group, everything showed up – the magnitude of this issue, the deep emotions, the pathos, the anger, the woundedness, the righteousness, the hopelessness of the division. It was a microcosm of the church and the world on this issue. Whoever cares was represented.

There were militants present for whom abortion on demand is the issue, the inalienable right of women. The wounds contingent upon a past and present sexism and oppression, for them, crystallized around this issue: “Abortion is our right – anyone who denies us this choice is sexist, oppressive, non-compassionate, the enemy!” Present, too, were the wounded, the women who have had abortions and those who are struggling with that choice. Never far from tears, this group sits quietly, afraid, confused about guilt, feeling bitterly alone in their choice. Then there were the vocal pro-life advocates, who speak and shout out a pain that comes from the deep belief that abortion is the callous taking of human life. This group doesn’t sit quietly. For them, abortion is so intolerable that it demands that body and soul be thrown in front of its perpetrators, regardless of consequence. I sat with a more silent group of pro-lifers. We sat, my friends and I, muzzled, feeling guilty about our silence, but not knowing what to do. We believe that abortion is wrong, but are not sure what concretely, barring prayer, can be done in a situation such as this public forum. What will help and what will hurt? Are we being respectful or just too chicken to risk ourselves? We left the hall in pain.

Finally, there was Marjorie Maguire herself, a perplexing anomaly – pro-choice, but antiabortion; a Catholic, but strongly against the official Catholic position on abortion; feminine, respectful, insightful, intelligent, compassionate at points, yet given to displaying a surprising callousness and narrowness on other key points (e.g., “If I conceived a defective child I would abort” … as if only the healthy and the whole have a right to live.) I left the hall silent, guilty. I speak now, to assuage my guilt and to vent the moral spleen. In fairness, it must be admitted that Dr. Maguire said many meaningful, profound and challenging things. Among other things, I was impressed that she was not speaking out of hatred, out of wound. She refused to ridicule, didn’t play for cheap applause, and refused consistently to appeal to the baser and crueler instincts of her audience. This she might have done; the opportunities were there.

Insightfully, she pinpointed the deepest reasons for abortion, namely, sexism, sexual irresponsibility, ignorance and selfishness within our culture as a whole. The woman who stands at the reception desk at a Morgentaler clinic is merely the inevitable product, and victim, of a culture such as ours. She is the tip of the cone of sexism and irresponsibility. She is the one who deserves our compassion, and we are the ones who deserve to bear the guilt.

And, in the end, Maguire said that abortion is always wrong, always a negativity. But I was less impressed after that. The bottom line was that she argued for abortion on demand, submitting “if someone depends upon someone else’s body for life, that someone does not have an inalienable right to life.” To illustrate that, she used the analogy of someone being asked to donate an organ for a transplant. Imagine that there was somewhere on a computer, precise information about your blood type, organ types, etc. One day you receive a phone call telling you that the computer has matched your organ type to someone in need of a transplant.You are asked to donate one of your bodily organs for transplant. Now, to donate such an organ, at great physical cost to yourself, is an heroic and generous act. But no court may demand that you do it. It must be your choice. So, too, for abortion, she argued. An unwanted fetus demands your body and your commitment to come to term. No court should be able to demand that you donate your body. That must be a free choice. Unfortunately, if that were true, then, I submit, newborn babies also have no inalienable right to live. Like an unborn fetus, they, too, demand upon someone else’s body to survive. This could be viewed as an unfair imposition upon a woman’s rights.

Her views on when a fetus becomes a person are interesting, nuanced and too complex to be responsibly discussed in a short article. She made me think; e.g., “If a fetus is a person already from the moment of conception, then God is the great abortionist since there are many more spontaneous abort ns than there are therapeutic ones.” Ultimately, however, my judgement on her position is negative. Her compassion is too selective. It does not embrace equally the strong and the handicapped. It shows a preference for the former. For all of us, ultimately, the hermeneutics we use for discerning values and goodness are something higher than logic. Love is the eye. We discern and choose value by looking at the lives of those we most admire and feel most confident to entrust ourselves to. In the end, and I am sure this is also true for Marjorie Maguire, we feel the most trust for those who have the most compassion for the weak and the unwhole.

For this reason, I do not place my trust with those who would argue for abortion on demand.

It’s been a bad spring; not for weather, but for suicides. Warm restless winds have stirred both nature and the human spirit and for some it’s been more than they could handle. Most of us have been raised to think of suicide as the ultimate despair, the final and unforgivable sin. A true suicide could be this, but almost all actual suicides have little to do with sin and despair. We used to think that they had. Suicide, it was argued, was an act of despair, a refusal to hope, an irrevocable closing of oneself to forgiveness and new life. As G.K. Chesterton once put it, suicide is the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take an oath of loyalty to life. A person who commits suicide, he contended, defiles every flower for refusing to live for its sake.

Chesterton would be correct if people did in fact commit suicide out of despair. Normally, they don’t. Their propensity for suicide is, in most cases, a psychological illness, a terminal disease which is no more sinful or indicative of despair than are cancer, high blood pressure and heart attacks. We are creatures of body and soul – either can break down. Some die from physical cancer, high blood pressure or heart attacks. Others die from emotional cancer, emotional high blood pressure and emotional heart attacks. In both cases, the death is not freely chosen. In both cases, there is no despair. Normally too we see Judas’ death as the prototype of despair. Poor Judas! He betrayed Jesus and then was unable to accept forgiveness and so took a rope and hanged himself – and Jesus himself commented that it would be better for him if he had never been born. To Judas, we contrast Peter who also betrayed Jesus. Peter, however, was able to accept forgiveness. Unlike Judas who despaired, Peter went out, had a good cry, accepted Christ’s forgiveness and became the rock upon which the church was founded.

But such an interpretation, regardless of how deeply it is enshrined in Christian piety and popular tradition, is simplistic and, in the end, itself despairs of the compassion of God. First of all, Christ’s words that it would be better for Judas if he had never been born, were written by the apostles (who out of hurt pronounced their own very human judgement on Judas). More importantly, the dynamics involved in accepting forgiveness and love are far more tied up with how much unconditional love we have been given than they are with virtue and faith. If, when we are little children, those around us love us in such a way that we have a sense that we are lovable even when we make mistakes and if those around us give us the sense that love does not have to be earned or merited, then we will grow up to be persons who are able to accept forgiveness as Peter did.

Perhaps the difference between Peter and Judas was not so much that Peter loved Jesus more, but that Peter had come from a more loving home, that he had had a better mother, and that he had been given more unconditional love (as a free gift). Because of this he could accept forgiveness. Looked at humanly, Judas despaired and Peter didn’t. I doubt, however, that such an assessment is correct. If it were then love and eternal life would be only for the lucky and the strong. But God’s compassion and understanding is not so limited as is ours. One of the articles of our creed is that Christ descended into hell. Among other things, this teaches that, by dying as he did, Christ loves us in such an unconditional way that he can descend into our private hells. His love contains such empathy and compassion that it can penetrate all the barriers we construct out of hurt and fear and enter right into our despair and hopelessness. After the resurrection, we see Christ, time and again, going through “closed doors” to breathe the spirit of peace and love upon huddled, frightened and miserable disciples.

He still descends into hell, entering closed hearts, to breathe peace and love in places where there is huddling in fear and hurt. Our ability for compassion and empathy and unconditional love is limited. When we meet certain barriers, we are helpless and can go no further. But God’s compassion can go through closed doors and closed hearts. It descends into hell. Most suicide victims are trapped persons, caught up in a private emotional hell which is an illness and not a sin. Their suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, much like a man whose clothing has caught fire might throw himself through a window. They are not, on the other side, met by our human judgements, but by a heart, a companion, a love and a Mother whose understanding and tenderness is beyond our present imagination. She descends into their hell, holds them to her breast and breathes the spirit of peace and love over their fear and hurt. Then finally they experience that unconditional love and tensionless peace which eluded them during their lives on earth.

Certain questions bring us pain. The question of love is frequently one of them. Have you ever experienced a love that gave you the sense that you were lovable despite everything that is weak and lacking in you? Have you ever been loved unconditionally? Often times these questions make us ache. We look at our lives and see a searing lack of unconditional love. The impression is that nobody loves us in a way that assures us at our deepest levels that we are lovable. Our friendships, our loves, our families, our marriages appear to be anything but matrixes of unconditional love. At least, so it seems. But there is a confusion here. When we think of love, we think of affection. These are not always the same thing.

One kind of love is generally expressed through affection, through positive stroking, physical caressing, emotional affirmation and sexual intimacy. But our experience of these is usually weak, only rarely is there enough physical touch, emotional stroking, expressed affection or satisfying sexual expression in our lives. Because of this, most times we feel unloved and perhaps even unlovable. But these gestures of love are not identical with love. Sometimes in our friendships, marriages, families and communities, there is beneath the lack of physical and emotional stroking, beneath the sexual frustrations, and beneath the harsh and angry words which are frequently exchanged, an unconditional concern and commitment. There is unconditional love. Unfortunately, because the love isn’t expressed in affection, that love remains largely unperceived.

When that happens then we do not feel that we are loved and there are negative consequences for our self-image. One part of us – the physical, emotional, sexual and affective part of us – begins to lose confidence and progressively atrophies. We begin to feel that nobody loves us and we begin to identify love entirely with what we are lacking, namely, with physical, emotional, sexual and affective stroking. Just recently I dealt with a middle-aged lady who felt like this. She had grown up in a family in which care and stability abounded, but physical affection was never expressed. She had remained single and, save for a few dissatisfying sexual encounters which had been entered into because of depression and desperation, had never expressed physical affection in her life. Now she was convinced that she had never been loved. When she thought of love she filled with pain, aching and bitterness. Yet, when she was able to move beyond the hurt and look at her life objectively, she saw some things which surprised her. She had always been loved, solidly, deeply, unconditionally. She was also very lovable.

Her strict Irish family had never been able to tell her through words, physical touch or emotional stroking that they loved her. But they had in fact loved her despite being affectively inarticulate. Their love had expressed itself in commitment, generosity, concern and fidelity. But these were given too starkly, without affection being expressed, and this experience had remained constant throughout the rest of her life. In her friendships and relationships invariably the same pattern resurfaced. She had indeed been loved through more than 50 years but, at one level of her being, had not known it. But at another level of her being she had known it. While she protested that she had a weak self-image and felt unlovable, she radiated stability and confidence and lovableness at every level of her being, save the physical and sexual one. There she felt insecurity and lacked confidence. Her story is a paradigm for all of us, God’s poor, the little ones who go through life too-starved for affection, convinced that we aren’t loved nor lovable, burdened with a bad self-image. We think we are not loved, but beneath it all we are strongly loved and lovable and possess a tremendous confidence and stability because of it.

Equally as tragic is the reverse: Many persons have a lot of physical, emotional and sexual affection in their lives. Yet, underneath that, they do not feel loved nor lovable.In their case, the self-image inflicts the opposite demon upon them. It lets them operate with considerable social, affective and sexual confidence, but it strips them of confidence and stability in virtually every other area. There are many lessons in all of this, not the least of which is that we need to express affection, we need to touch each other physically and we need to affirm each other more explicitly. We need to express affection more, to stroke each other physically and emotionally into wholeness. But we need also to realize that love is more than this. Even when there isn’t a satisfying affection in our lives, our eyes need not fill with tears every time we contemplate whether or not we are loved.

I am old enough to have known another time. Things were different when I was little. Many of life’s pleasures weren’t available and people made due, celebrating what there was to celebrate and not over-expecting. Back then, few expected or demanded the whole pie. Heaven was seen as something for later. My parents and their generation lived a simple spiritual philosophy: This life is but a short time of waiting, “mourning and weeping in a vale of tears!” It is not so important to be happy. Today there are sneers about their tears. But that sombre philosophy of theirs got them through life with their faith and loves intact and, ironically, probably equipped them with a greater capacity for enjoyment and happiness than we possess today. There is today too little talk, in our churches and in the world, about the “vale of tears” and the incompleteness of our present lives.

Spiritualities of the resurrection and psychologies of self-actualization, whatever their other strengths, no longer give us permission to be in pain, to be un whole, ill, unattractive, aged, unfulfilled or even just alone on a Friday night.  The idea is all too present that we can only be happy if we somehow fulfil every hunger within us, if our lives are completely whole, consummated and we are never alone on a Friday night. Unless every pleasure that we yearn for can be tasted, we cannot be happy. Because of this we over expect. We stand before life and love in a greedy posture and with unrealistic expectations, demanding the resolution of all our eros and tension. However, life, in this world, can never give us that. We are pilgrims on earth, exiles journeying towards home. The world is passing away. We have God’s word for it. And we need God’s word for it! Too much in our experience today militates against the fact that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. Somehow, we have come to believe that a final solution for the burning tensions within us lies within our present grasp. I am not sure who or what gives us this idea.

Maybe it is the movie and television industries with their leading men and leading ladies who are presented to us as already redeemed, persons who are gorgeous, immersed in love and meaning, and who have the wherewithal within their grasp to taste whatever life has to offer.  But something has led us to the belief that we need not put up with tension and frustration and that there are persons in this life who are already enjoying a redeemed life. That belief, however unconscious and unexpressed, lies at the root of much of our restlessness and unhappiness today. None of us are whole, not even our gorgeous leading men and ladies. Yet because we believe that somehow, we can or should be whole, we go through life denigrating what chances we have for rest and happiness.

A simple example serves to illustrate: In our culture we suffer from what might be termed “Friday Night Syndrome.” Few people can stay home quietly and rest on a Friday night. Why? Is it because we are not tired and ideally could not appreciate a nice quiet time. No! We cannot stay home quietly on Friday night because inside of us moves a restless demon that assures us that everyone in the whole world is doing something exciting on Friday night. Once that voice is heard, then our homes, our families and our commitments begin to look unexciting. Peace and restfulness slip away, and we are caught up in an insatiable restlessness. This example illustrates the basic principle: So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case, to a cancerous restlessness.

In a culture (and, at times, in a church) that tells us that no happiness is possible unless every ache and restlessness inside of us is fulfilled, how hard it is to be happy. How tragic it is to be alone! How tragic it is to be unmarried! How tragic it is to be married, but not completely fulfilled romantically and sexually! How tragic it is not to be good-looking! How tragic it is to be unhealthy, aged, handicapped! How tragic it is to be caught up in duties and commitments, small children and diapers and routine, which limit our freedom and relationships! How tragic it is to be poor! How tragic it is to go through life and not be able to taste every pleasure on earth! It almost isn’t worth living! There is wisdom and, yes, even comfort, in the old “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears” philosophy. Sometimes that expression was abused, and people forgot that the Creator did not just make us for life after death…He did also intend some life after birth! But those who lived that philosophy generally did not attempt to milk life for more than it could give them. Those who lived that philosophy were a lot less restless and greedy for experience than we are today. They could much more restfully enjoy God’s great gifts – life, love, youth, health, friendship and sexuality – even as they are limitedly given in this life. Those who lived that philosophy were, I am sure, much more restful on Friday nights!

At the Democratic national convention in San Francisco last summer, Jesse Jackson ended his address with a plea to everyone to vote according to conscience. A vote for conscience, he stated, is a vote for truth “and when conscience and truth win, the poor win; and when the poor win, women win; and when women win, children win; and when children win, we all win because they are the future!” It is uncertain whether the problem lies in our voting or with our consciences, but lately children haven’t been winning. Abortion has. Abortion, like the word of God, divides. It slips between the bone and marrow, within conscience, within families, within bodies, within our culture and it separates, making the one into two. Most of the rational arguments on both sides of this issue have already been articulated. What I submit here is not an argument but a challenge and a plea to women to examine how the women’s movement may be unfairly coloring this issue. My challenge is this: Look at what is happening within the feminist movement and discriminate, separate what is legitimate from what is a temporary and unhealthy overreaction. The influence that women’s groups have had on women regarding the question of abortion falls into the latter category.

As it stands right now the women’s movement has seized the abortion issue as its own issue, a women’s issue. It has linked the right to freely choose to have an abortion to the right to full equality. This is a disastrous and unfortunate connection which leaves everyone poorer, children, women and men. The arguments vary a little, but always there is the common denominator: “This is a women’s issue!” “Men don’t get pregnant!” “We have a right to our own bodies!” “If men got pregnant, the abortion laws would have been changed years ago!” These arguments are the result of an overreaction and an unhealthy hypersensitivity that is temporarily clouding many women’s thinking and robbing them of one of their most precious qualities, compassion. Too many women, I submit, are being sucked in by an excessive feminism which is making them defend positions (in this case, the right to abortion by demand) which are far from their true feminine nature. Thus, for example, there is the argument that abortion is a women’s issue. As if men should decide issues of war, economics, politics and the like, and women should decide about drapes, kids, day care and abortion. There are no women’s issues, just as there are no men’s issues. All these issues are everyone’s issues. But that is a fringe point.

More salient is the issue of femininity itself and how it is desperately needed to bring sanity to the issue of abortion. Radical feminism argues: “If men became pregnant, they would have changed the abortion laws years ago!” Sadly that is probably true. But it is more a commentary on the callousness of men than on the justness of abortion on demand. Men would have probably changed the laws, but they would have done so because they, men, were selfish, insensitive and unwilling to let their lives be upset by pregnancy and young children. Women, fortunately, have always been the ones who have been less selfish, who have let their lives be upset by pregnancy and children. Accordingly, they have also been the ones who have had a deeper sense of the sacred, the sacredness of life and the sacredness of children. It has been women who have always been the ones sensitive to the young, the helpless, the aged. They were, and to a large extent still are, the humanizing component in a too-macho, too-cold and too-unfeeling world. As men shot each other, women protected the children and bound up the wounds. Their greater sense of compassion stems from that. But the males kept the females away from the places where important decisions were taken. Men decided the issues of war, politics, economics, law, education and religion. Little wonder females eventually grew frustrated and angry.

I don’t doubt that if men could become pregnant that they would have long ago liberalized abortion laws. But that would just have added to an already unjust, cold, macho and inhuman system. Knowing men and knowing our history, I fear for a society where women no longer protect the helpless and the unborn. And so my challenge to women is this: Through having your lives upset by pregnancy and child-rearing, you have developed a compassion that, for now, men can only envy. Don’t jettison that in order to imitate a macho insensitivity to the helpless. Equality will not come as a result of punishing men by punishing the unborn. Challenge men, not the helpless. Men need to be challenged to allow their lives to be upset by pregnancy, children, the helpless, the weak and the aged. That part of the feminist movement that challenges here is eminently healthy. That part which demands, in the name of feminism, abortion on demand is not. Jesse Jackson stated that “when women win, children win; and when children win, we all win because they are the future!” Lately women have been winning…but children haven’t and the future hasn’t been winning either.