A Prayer by Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

I was late today in getting to my emails. I deleted the ads, but I didn't open the posts I wanted to read until after 10 PM. And then I found this gem. 

Dr. Mark D. Roberts, who posts the Life for Leaders Daily Devotion, today shared a prayer written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was only 24. It's an incredible prayer, one I plan to copy into my commonplace book and try to pray regularly. 

Here is the link to the original Life for Leaders post by Dr. Roberts which includes the prayer along with key information about Dr. King: A Prayer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

And here is the prayer itself, broken into separate lines by Dr. Roberts to aid us in praying it:

Thou Eternal God, out of whose absolute power and infinite intelligence the whole universe has come into being, we humbly confess that we have not loved thee with our hearts, souls and minds, and we have not loved our neighbors as Christ loved us.

We have all too often lived by our own selfish impulses rather than by the life of sacrificial love as revealed by Christ.

We often give in order to receive.

We love our friends and hate our enemies. 

We go the first mile but dare not travel the second.

We forgive but dare not forget.

And so as we look within ourselves, we are confronted with the appalling fact that the history of our lives is the history of an eternal revolt against you.

But thou, O God, have mercy upon us.

Forgive us for what we could have been but failed to be.

Give us the intelligence to know your will.

Give us the courage to do your will.

Give us the devotion to love your will.

In the name and spirit of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

Amen and Amen. 

Soli Deo Gloria,

I have long been a reader and devoted follower of the Life for Leaders Daily Devotions. Mark Roberts writes the devotions for Monday-Friday, and various others write the weekend devotions.

This weekend's devotions are written by Inés Velasquez-McBryde, one of my favorite weekend devotional writers at Life for Leaders. 

I would like to share the thoughts on this devotion with my brothers and sisters in Christ and with anyone willing to ponder these thoughts. I found in them a personal challenge that I pray will help me to extend the love of Christ into our world that is hurting more than is usual right now. (Or, at least the hurt is being shown, addressed, discussed, and acted upon more than usual.) This message is not political; it's spiritual. 

All credit here is given to Inés Velasquez-McBryde and the Life for Leaders Daily Devotions team. Many thanks for consistently challenging me to grow in my faith. 

From PART I: THE BEATITUDES ARE NOT FOR THE BLESSED
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. He opened his mouth and began to teach them saying: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” 

Matthew 5:1-2, 4 (NRSV)

As a leader, I am a woman of color, but I am not African-American and cannot speak for my African-American sisters and brothers. Yet I can mourn with my siblings who mourn. A Christ-like leader cannot depart from the Christ on this mount. The message of the Beatitudes is ensconced in a painful present. Yet the Messenger of the Beatitudes points to a present and future hope in the midst of dark realities. I am called to mourn the systemic inequities that brought about the death of yet another African-American brother.

...

In light of all the national racial trauma, I realized that the beatitudes are not for the blessed; they’re for the oppressed. Jesus sees the marginalized crowds whose bodies and lives have been taxed heavily by both state and synagogue, which at the moment was the Roman empire and local religious leaders, respectively. Jesus sees the crowds and knows that they have been exploited and abused. Jesus is aware of the inequities for they have been waiting for 400 years in a hard, long and unresolved waiting to be saved from this empire. Justice has been denied to the people as well. Social relationships were marked by hierarchy and order of importance. The elite were growing rich at the expense of the poor. The people who sat down in front of Jesus… were tired of waiting, too.

...

The message of the Beatitudes is ensconced in a painful present. Yet the Messenger of the Beatitudes points to a present and future hope in the midst of dark realities. I am called to mourn. I am called to comfort. I can do both. As I marched with my sisters and brothers I listened, lamented, and learned. I felt the presence of the Jesus on the mount walking in the midst of the march, marching to the heartbeat of heaven with that beautiful upside-down kingdom. The leader of that mount led a peaceful protest, for God is the God of the protest and the redeemer of the oppressed.

May we as leaders listen, lament and mourn as we live into this blessed beatitude.

PRAY

Jesus, we as your disciples have romanticized and individualized your sermon on the mount. Teach us to let it discomfort us and expand our imagination for our collective family. Lord, we mourn over our blindspots; show them to us. We mourn over our apathy; inject us with your heart. We mourn over historical inequities shown to our African-American sisters and brothers; show us our complicity. We mourn over a late awakening; invite us into your resurrected and restorative life that rights the wrongs. First, let us mourn, alone and with our sisters and brothers. Amen.

And from today's Part II: PRAYING THE BEATITUDES BACKWARDS

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.”

Matthew 5:9 (NRSV)

In this familiar passage of the Sermon on the Mount, it is easy for us to insert ourselves and our desire to receive individual blessings. However, Jesus is speaking to a crowd with collective, historical pain. It’s a communal message, not an individual message. What would it look like to turn the message into a prayer of confession with an outward-facing Kingdom imagination?

...

PRAY

Jesus, may we sit at your feet as you sit on the mount. May the heart of your message cut to the heart of our misses and mistakes. May we be the students and you the divine teacher. May we reflect and rest on every word that pierces, convicts and comforts. May the heartbeat of this message give us life and breath in our life’s message. May we live into this message, that others would recognize the one that has sent us with this message. Help us be brave and courageous. Grant us grace that points to your grace. Amen.

Thank you, Inés Velasquez-McBryde!! 

Soli Deo Gloria,

Love Conquers All...

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." ~ Jesus, (John 15.12-13, ESV) 

"...'Black Lives Matter' simply refers to the notion that there's a specific vulnerability for African Americans that needs to be addressed. It's not meant to suggest that other lives don't matter. It's to suggest that other folks aren't experiencing this particular vulnerability." ~ Barack Obama 

"Racism is a white problem. It was constructed and created by white people and the ultimate responsibility lies with white people. For too long we've looked at it as if it were someone else's problem, as if it was created in a vacuum." ~ Robin DiAngelo

"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite." ~ Nelson Mandela

"Race and racism is a reality that so many of us grow up learning to just deal with. But if we ever hope to move past it, it can't just be on people of color to deal with it. It's up to all of us — Black, white, everyone — no matter how well-meaning we think we might be, to do the honest, uncomfortable work of rooting it out." ~ Michelle Obama

"Activism is my rent for living on the planet." ~ Alice Walker

"In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist." ~ Angela Davis

"The beauty of anti-racism is that you don't have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it's the only way forward." ~ Ijeoma Oluo

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"Justice is what love looks like in public." ~ Cornel West

"For too long politicians told most of us that what's wrong with America is the rest of us. Them. Them the minorities. Them the liberals. Them, them, them. But there is no them; there's only us. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all." ~ Bill Clinton

"I see what's possible when we recognize that we are one American family, all deserving of equal treatment." ~ Barack Obama

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all." ~ Elie Wiesel

"Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eye and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice." ~ Robert F. Kennedy

"None of us is responsible for the complexion of his skin. This fact of nature offers no clue to the character or quality of the person underneath." ~ Marian Anderson

Soli Deo Gloria,

The Value of Church History

Revised Post from the Archives....

Earlier this month, I was praying from one of my favorite prayer books, John Baillie's little gem, A Diary of Private Prayer. The second half of the prayer for the morning of the fifth day is a prayer I would never have considered praying before I started learning about the liturgical church. Now it's an idea that encourages me more than I can possibly express:

"O Thou who wast, and art, and art to come, I thank Thee that this Christian way whereon I walk is no untried or uncharted road, but a road beaten hard by the footsteps of saints, apostles, prophets, and martyrs. I thank Thee for the finger-posts and danger-signals with which it is marked at every turning and which may be known to me through the study of the Bible, and all history, and of all the great literature of the world. Beyond all, I give Thee devout and humble thanks for the great gift of Jesus Christ, the Pioneer of our faith. I praise Thee that Thou hast caused me to be born in an age and in a land which have known His Name, and that I am not called upon to face any temptation or trial which He did not first endure.

"Forbid it, Lord, that I should fail to profit by these great memories of the ages that are gone by, or to enter into the glorious inheritance which Thou hast prepared for me; through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen."

Benjamin and I have been reading about the Reformation in his ABeka World History textbook. It's a well-known text used by many Christian schools and homeschooling families alike, but I cannot emphasize enough how disappointed (and sometimes downright angry!) I was at their treatment of our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters in the Lord. (The other three kids read this textbook as well, and while we definitely discussed these points, B and I delved into the nitty-gritty of the topic and the way in which it was mishandled because I'm reading the text aloud to him.) Because I know church history fairly well (also another subject in our home school this year--again for the fourth time), I was alert to their obvious bias which, to my perhaps over-sensitive spirit on this topic so near and dear to my heart, seemed to border on hatred and was definitely built on exaggeration and half-truths.

I'll not get on my soapbox about "majoring on the majors" as far as evangelicals and Roman Catholics go (besides the fact that we share 85% of Christian doctrine in common), so I'll focus on the topic at hand, This journey through the Reformation highlighted one of the weaknesses of evangelical "tradition" (for lack of a better word) in that it often seems to divorce itself from church history and Biblical tradition. How can we move forward as God's ambassadors without knowing where the church has been? As an evangelical, I knew nothing about the church from the end of the New Testament to Martin Luther posting the 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg. Nothing. I truly appreciate the church history review we had in Lake Murray Community Church's adult Sunday School class many years ago, but I had already invested several years of study into the topic on my own before the class was taught. To me, the overall ignorance of evangelicals regarding church history is lamentable and decidedly unhelpful in being an ambassador for Christ.

Almost all evangelicals would state that our main focus of study as Christians needs to be the Bible, God's Word, and our personal relationship with God. And they are right. But church history may be compared to a map of our Christian walk, allowing us to recognize and thus avoid some of the pitfalls and detours as well as the traps set by our immortal enemy along the way.

So where do we find this road map? For beginners, I recommend Bruce Shelley's Church History in Plain Language. It reads delightfully like a novel and is very fair-minded in not "taking sides" in the many issues that have cropped up over two millennia. For those who want a more in-depth resource, The Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzales (in two volumes or both volumes bound together; the link takes you to volume one only) is a great read.

If you appreciate beautifully-illustrated books, The Story of Christianity by Collins and Price is both informative and gorgeous. This is the volume that Sonlight, our main homeschool curriculum, uses as the "spine" for their high school church history course, and it's the book that Benjamin and I are reading now for our church history elective. One author of this lovely book is Protestant, and the other is Catholic, so an excellent balance is maintained. Our other three kids have either read this book or I've read it aloud to them during their school days

Knowing the "Pilgrim Pathway" is of the utmost importance to our Christian walk. The French writer, poet, and politician Lamartine stated, "History teaches everything including the future." I think the same case can be made for church history. As the prophet Jeremiah wrote, "Ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way in, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls" (Jeremiah 6:16).

One of my favorite Scripture quotations is from Psalm 84;4 in another of my devotional books, The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle (a series in three volumes)in which this verse is translated beautifully as:

"Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrim's way."

~Psalm 84:4, The Divine Hours

Wishing you all a blessed week in the love and grace of our Lord Christ!

A Poem by Langston Hughes in Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

This poem arrived in my e-mail this morning, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets (poets.org) Poem of the Day. It speaks for itself on this day of remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let America Be America Again

by Langston Hughes

 

Let America be America again. 

Let it be the dream it used to be. 

Let it be the pioneer on the plain 

Seeking a home where he himself is free. 

 

(America never was America to me.) 

 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- 

Let it be that great strong land of love 

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme 

That any man be crushed by one above. 

 

(It never was America to me.) 

 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty 

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, 

But opportunity is real, and life is free, 

Equality is in the air we breathe. 

 

(There's never been equality for me, 

Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") 

 

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? 

 

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, 

I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. 

I am the red man driven from the land, 

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-- 

And finding only the same old stupid plan 

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. 

 

I am the young man, full of strength and hope, 

Tangled in that ancient endless chain 

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! 

Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! 

Of work the men! Of take the pay! 

Of owning everything for one's own greed! 

 

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. 

I am the worker sold to the machine. 

I am the Negro, servant to you all. 

I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-- 

Hungry yet today despite the dream. 

Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers! 

I am the man who never got ahead, 

The poorest worker bartered through the years. 

 

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream 

In the Old World while still a serf of kings, 

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, 

That even yet its mighty daring sings 

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned 

That's made America the land it has become. 

O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas 

In search of what I meant to be my home-- 

For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, 

And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, 

And torn from Black Africa's strand I came 

To build a "homeland of the free." 

 

The free? 

 

Who said the free? Not me? 

Surely not me? The millions on relief today? 

The millions shot down when we strike? 

The millions who have nothing for our pay? 

For all the dreams we've dreamed 

And all the songs we've sung 

And all the hopes we've held 

And all the flags we've hung, 

The millions who have nothing for our pay-- 

Except the dream that's almost dead today. 

 

O, let America be America again-- 

The land that never has been yet--

And yet must be--the land where every man is free. 

The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--

Who made America, 

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, 

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, 

Must bring back our mighty dream again. 

 

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- 

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, 

We must take back our land again, 

America! 

 

O, yes, 

I say it plain, 

America never was America to me, 

And yet I swear this oath-- 

America will be! 

 

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, 

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, 

We, the people, must redeem 

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. 

The mountains and the endless plain-- 

All, all the stretch of these great green states-- 

And make America again! 

 

 

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.

With prayers for freedom to ring, this day and always,

Health Care Reform?

The health care debate raging right now among both Democrats and Republicans ignores a growing component of health care: Christians sharing each other's burdens instead of insurance.

Keith has been self-employed for over 25 years, and obtaining health insurance when one is self-employed can be likened to climbing K-2. As a couple back in 1990, several plans wanted $800 per month for just the two of us. So you can compute how much insurance for self-employed costs now, almost 20 years later, plus adding our four children? Most health plans are way out of reach for the vast majority of the self-employed.

We had catastrophic coverage only for the first seven years of our marriage. Just as I was pregnant with our first child, the publishing company where I worked part-time offered us full coverage which we gladly accepted only a week before severe complications occurred in my pregnancy, necessitating several hospital stays and a C-section birth. I experienced further complications soon after Elizabeth's birth with the C-section itself. After months of painful cortisone shots that didn't help and months of being unable to stand up straight because of the pain of the scar, I finally begged my way to surgery to clear out the scar tissue. I was on the phone day after day, unable to work, tearfully begging paper-pushers to approve my surgery. It was humiliating, but it was the only way to move the system forward.

Once I was working at Point Loma Nazarene University, we had different coverage that was a slight improvement -- but once I quit to stay home with my kids and our COBRA option ran out, we were once again stuck with no health coverage we could afford except Kaiser, an HMO that proponents of government health care hold up as a model of what the government system will strive to be. Kaiser was great with pediatrics as the kids grew up and with my complicated pregnancies except for Benjamin's birth. Both of us were endangered by Kaiser's shortcuts of not doing an ultrasound before inducing labor, an oversight that almost cost Benjamin's life and necessitated an emergency C-section to remove him because of severe decelerations of Benjamin's heartbeat, down into the 50's (normal is around 150). During the C-section, they had crash carts ready, one for me with my erratic and uncontrolled heart rate and one for the baby. It was terrifying.

After I finished "birthin' babies" I was still having occasional problems with erratic heart rates and chronic pain, all of which were dismissed by my Kaiser nurse practitioners and the occasional doctor -- it was rare to see an actual doctor at Kaiser. After seeing an out-of-service chiropractor (paid for out-of-pocket) who sent me immediately to my medical doctor, I was finally diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a doctor who "specialized" in the chronic pain condition; a third of her patients were diagnosed with the condition. Within six months of my original diagnosis, I was wheelchair-bound and in so much pain that I was basically bedridden. The doctor tried prescription after prescription, but nothing helped. She referred me to pain specialists who dismissed my pain because I "smiled too much to really be in pain" so the pain must be "all in your head." After over a year of useless experimentation, my "specialist in fibromyalgia" finally referred me to the psychiatry department because she couldn't do anything to help me and "they have more meds." Now wheelchair bound everywhere but home, I wept, totally disabled by pain that no one understood, not even my doctors.
So I finally started to see an osteopath -- a full M.D. with additional training in "blended medicine." Again out-of-pocket. And the first words he said to me was that the pain was NOT "in your head at all -- it was REAL; it was physical, not psychological, and it could be treated." He advised our family to leave Kaiser "before they convince you that your pain is imaginary" and to join a Christian medical sharing plan called Samaritan Ministries. He had just shifted his own family over to this sharing plan in which we pay the bills of other Christians. Each month we receive a packet in the mail with a list of prayer requests and the newsletter listing one family whose name, address, and health need is given. We are to write a note of encouragement along with our check to this family, and we are to pray for them for the next month.

It wasn't until my osteopath stepped outside the bounds of my diagnosis and followed the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis given by my chiropractor, a diagnosis not supported by my medical tests, that I finally experienced some pain relief. Despite mostly negative tests, Dr. A. treated me according to the protocol for rheumatoid arthritis with prednisone and extremely strong narcotic meds (fentanyl patches, to be precise) that the pain finally began to be controlled. However, with my condition pre-existing and thus not covered by Samaritan, my patches cost us $950 per month, not including other medications and supplements. We quite often totalled medical bills of over $20,000 per year for several years in a row. Because of these medical bills, we've been on the brink of bankruptcy, but I am somewhat functional again now that my pain is mostly controlled. Dr. A. shifted my meds from the expensive fentanyl patches to inexpensive methadone a couple of years ago which work better and have fewer side effects.

But my doctor did what the HMO's would never do: he treated me according my symptoms rather than my test results, something that almost certainly would never be allowed by managed health care, much less government health care. We will almost certainly lose freedom when the government takes responsibility for America's health care because doctors will be bound even more than they are now by the HMO's. And that's a scary thought. If I hadn't left managed care behind, I would not be having quite the financial difficulties that we are currently experiencing, but I also wouldn't be walking, either.

Some people I read talk about how we will have more freedom with the addition of government health care -- how it will be just another option as it is in schools with private and home schools being options providing choice. However, according to sections of the health reform bill I have read, no new patients may join private practices by a certain year. So, governmental health care is not at all like school choice ... unless private and home schools are going to be prohibited from enrolling new students in a few years also.

(Kerataconus cornea)

I have seen many failures of the Kaiser Permanente system of managed care. In addition to our "scare" with Benjamin's birth, a frightening and life-threatening turn of events that would have been avoided by a simply ultrasound, my own grandmother's as well as Keith's mother's cancers were not caught early enough to ensure their survival despite complaints to their doctors of extremely suspicious symptoms for months if not years before their diagnoses. Kaiser also missed Elizabeth's diagnosis of kerataconus (an eye problem that prevents perfect vision) for five years despite seeing Kaiser's optomologists every six months during her childhood. One eye doctor thought there could be a problem and sent her to a specialist who found nothing, except that her eyes couldn't be corrected to 20/20. When we returned to our private eye doctor, she saw the problem, ran two diagnostic tests right there in her office, and had Elizabeth diagnosed and under treatment within 45 minutes, but much damage had already been done to her eyes by not having the condition caught at an early stage. She will most likely need a double corneal transplant when she's in her late twenties because of Kaiser's missed diagnosis.

If health reform is really to work, is really to help the uninsured, then provisions need to be made to help self-employed Americans obtain private health care premiums in an affordable range and to help small businesses provide health care for their employees -- perhaps both could be accomplished through tax breaks or some other means besides a complete takeover of the private health care system by our government.

Managed care itself doesn't work well. Doctors need the freedom to go outside of usual medical parameters at times so that patients can be treated like people and not like numbers. If these private companies cannot manage health care well, how can the government possibly do so? The $1,000 government toilet seats that made the news years ago could become $10,000 flu shots in a few years. Currently our government can't keep track of itself in the least. Do we really want to hand over our medical care system to them as well?

Thoughts on Uncle Tom's Cabin

Our reading and book discussion group at Lake Murray Community Church, Logos, is meeting on Sunday afternoon, and this month's book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is my second time through it in about five years, and I'm liking it even more this time than last. Tom himself is an admirable character, and Little Eva (Evangeline -- how perfectly named!) is intriguing to say the least. The two stories that stemmed from the original home in Kentucky are interesting: Eliza and George's flight to Canada with their child to avoid the breakup of their family and Tom's trip down river, meeting little Eva and being purchased by her indulgent and careless father, Augustine (again, well named after the 6th century saint who lived an indulgent, even debauched life until turning his life over to God).

But when the idea of propaganda came up during the writing workshop last Saturday, I mentioned Uncle Tom's Cabin as a prime example. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe's plot is interesting, it was obviously written to inflame the sympathy of the abolitionists and to condemn slaveholders. Stowe doesn't necessarily showcase the "good" masters who treated their people truly as people because writing about truly good slaveholders wouldn't serve her purpose. I am not in the slightest supporting slavery; I am just pointing out the weakness of the book: it truly is propaganda. It contains much truth but was written from the most biased point of view that I have ever read in literature.

While we realize that the book is indeed a piece of propaganda, we can still find much to admire in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe shows the disgusting underside of slavery with clarity: the families being torn apart even by "good" masters who must sell them to settle debts; the slave traders who treat their "property" with extreme callousness; the "bad" masters who breed children only to sell them away from their mothers, treating the Africans just like thoroughbreds or prize heifers; the idea that Africans do not feel with the same intensity as whites do and Stowe certainly shows us how wrong that inhumane treatment is; Africans being hunted down by whites, even little children and old women; and the death of Africans as a business expense, as in the death of Old Prue who told her sad tale to Uncle Tom just before her masters killed her by locking her in their basement and refusing to feed her. The novel represents an extremely sad time in American history, yet we must also keep in mind the danger of propaganda and how it can warp and twist the facts by appealing to emotion rather than logic.

As I am only half done with a mere day remaining to finish the book, I shall go curl up on my sofa, perhaps have T build a lovely fire in the woodburning stove, and pick up Uncle Tom's Cabin once again. It's a heart-breaking novel, filled with three-dimensional people who are suffering physically, mentally, and spiritually from this evil.

Today as the boys and I studied the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the southern slaves but not the slaves in the neutral border states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, I found myself thinking often of the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The people are so memorable, so striking, that they, and hence the book, are not easily forgotten.

Judgment of the Next Generation

One of my favorite Christian writers is Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Eastern Orthodox writer who used to be Episcopalian. I've read just about all of her books and have met her twice -- she's so lovely. She used to be a hardcore 70's feminist and then God spoke into her life ... and the life of her husband. Now he's an Orthodox priest and she writes about their little parish and about Orthodox with humor and wonderment. Her latest articles can be read at her website, along with her testimony and information about Orthodoxy -- and her list of wonderful, wonderful books: Frederica Mathewes-Green.

Frederica started her writing career with a book on the abortion debate, an attempt to get both sides to truly listen to each other and dialogue with each other in a non-confrontational manner. And her latest article in the National Review addresses the abortion debate again. The whole article can be read on her website: Judgment of the Next Generation.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

When I was a young fire-breathing college feminist in the early 70’s, we didn’t see abortion as a melancholy private decision—it was an act of liberation. By choosing abortion, a woman could show that she was the only person in charge of her life, and bowed to no one else’s control. But this formulation turned sour as the grief felt by post-abortion woman began to accumulate. The flip side of autonomy is loneliness, and for many women, their abortion decision was linked to emotional abandonment.

And then there was the advent of ultrasound technology, enabling live images of a baby moving in the womb. In 1989, word went round the pro-life movement to order the tape of pollster Harrison Hickman’s presentation at that year’s NARAL convention. On it he said, “Nothing has been as damaging to our cause as the advances in technology which have allowed pictures of the developing fetus, because people now talk about that fetus in much different terms than they did 15 years ago. They talk about it as a human being, which is not something that I have an easy answer how to cure.”

So there are some reasons to think that the abortion question has not been settled, but has merely gone underground. That might be a necessary step. It has to go away so that it can be rediscovered, and seen in a fresh light.

And another excerpt:

But the time is coming when a younger generation will be in charge, and they may well see abortion differently. They could see it, not as “a woman’s choice” but as a form of state-sanctioned violence inflicted on their generation. It was their brothers and sisters who died; anyone under the age of 36 could have been aborted (and somewhere around a fourth or a fifth of all pregnancies, in fact, are aborted). A younger generation might feel a strange kinship with the brothers and sisters, classmates and coworkers, who are missing.

And I’m afraid that, if they do see things that way, they aren’t going to go easy on my generation. Our acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. The next generation can fairly say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They’ll say, “After all, they had sonograms.” And they may judge us to be monsters.

Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe future generations won’t think twice about abortion. But even we who have grown sick of talking about it still harbor some doubts. In particular, people who think of themselves as defenders of the weak and the oppressed must have many a quiet moment when they wonder, “How, in this one issue, did I wind up on the side that’s defending death?”

Frederica's views after twenty-some years of working with both sides of the abortion debate have given her wisdom and insight into both the pro-life and pro-choice camps. There are certainly no easy answers, no clear-cut course to take. But thinking carefully without judging may be a way to finally make progress in a difficult, difficult problem that truly possesses life-and-death importance.