If Catholics got graded on attention at Mass, I’d be lucky to break double digits. “In the name of the Father,” says the priest, and in one Pavlovian instant, my mind is off to the races. Got to pay attention, I think. I’m at church. God is here. Focus. Focus. Shoot! My fingernails are filthy! Now what? It’s too hot for mittens…
Not knowing what this is like, dear reader, you can only imagine how surprised I was last Sunday to find myself jolted by a Prayer of the Faithful. Usually, these intercessions are at best familiar and at worst banal. “We pray, dear Lord, that those who do not listen to Your suggestion to, quote, Love thy neighbor, unquote, will become loving, give lots of hugs, and donate heftily to our Building Fund.” Rarely do I hear anything that might intersect with anyone’s actual life, like, “We pray that You help husbands and wives to stop bickering like tomcats, especially in front of their children.” But last Sunday, sandwiched in among the usual fare, the lector suddenly said (something like):
We pray that those who use the phrase “This is my body” to justify abortion, will say, as Christ said, “which will be given up for you.”
Wow. A trite sentiment if it hits you wrong, but it gave me chills.
Maybe I thought of The Passion, that glimpse of the raw strength of Christ’s love. People complained about the bloodfest, but aside from historical accuracy, which covereth a multitude of sins, there’s the film’s whole premise: that Body was given, not robbed. Every brutal instant was freely chosen by a victim Who had a mob of angels at His back. He chose it for love. Whether you believe that happens to be true or not, it’s true in the movie. That makes that violence like no other.
On the other hand, maybe I thought also of my wife. She gives up her body for our daughter. Pregancy, birth, nursing — plenty of joys, but also plenty of pain and aggravation. And plenty of time. Already, this child is forever entwined with her, and me too.
If anything bad happens to her, we’ll be devastated. Everything she goes through matters. She’s not even a year old, but as long as I’m alive, I will be there when she walks, talks, reads, learns, makes friends, get betrayed, sprains her ankle, does her taxes the first time, falls in love, marries, has her own kids…
It makes me happy, but it boggles the mind. I am not “free”, if the word includes only those activities which a person can cease at any time. But what’s freedom? I’ve been given a whole world I could never know as a bachelor. And in return, my body is given up for her. There’s no union without gift.
And gifts can be rejected. A woman can be so close to a little stranger that her body completly encloses it, that she is food and bed and home to this person, but they’re not together. Given up for you. Birth that baby, raise her, love her, and your body will be given up. Everything else, career, the father, reputation, everything that used to be “life”, may be lost. Given up. In exchange, a child. A whole new child.
Is there an alternative? Only violence. Whether the fetus is burned alive by a saline solution or cut apart by a surgeon, the termination of a pregnancy is violent. But this victim is given no choice.
Still, when a mother says, “It’s my body,” people aren’t quite thinking when they shoot back the obvious scientific evidence that a genetically unique organism thrives in her womb. Of course the baby isn’t her body. Only a demented, willful ignorance in the face of a torrent of pictures, data, and common sense could keep up that fiction. Who really thinks that? But the mother is right. That baby’s life demands hers. It is her body, her time, her future, that will be given.
That’s why I got those chills. For when another body was given, it was shredded and butchered for love. Yet that story had a happy ending. Brief as the scene was in the movie, the tale was only half-told until the body that was given rose joyous from the slaughter.
And so it is with us. No matter what terrors infest her arrival, a baby is a happy ending.
