The
Fairfax memorial service has a coordinator other than me! I’m done!
God is good indeed!
The
last item I was working on was collecting accounts of the dumpster months. ChristyAnne’s story is not available in
electronic format. Juli’s reflection, a
context for a larger thought, is available.
Juli Loesch Wiley is the best writer in the pro-life movement:
balanced, funny, insightful, unpredictable, imaginative, clear, gentle, gutsy,
independent, prayerful, loving. One of
the great blessings of my life was that she lived awhile in the DC area,
including a stint with my family. In
fact, where I’m writing now used to be a prayer room, then her room.
Today is the feast of St. James. I think of James and his brother John as another
Martha/Mary pair: John the loving contemplative, and James the activist. That may be just ignorant confusion; the activist
James probably wasn’t John’s brother, but rather another man with the same
name. Anyway, Juli’s reflection starts with a
pungent remark from the Letter of St. James (the activist).
What follows is an excerpt from “Conformed to Christ,” by Juli
Loesch Wiley, published in the flagship issue of Caelum et Terra. C&T
is a personalist, agrarian, Christian journal, a delight to the left, often intemperate,
illustrated as thoughtfully as the New
Yorker. The editor had ties in
Maryland and Michigan, so he settled carefully in midpoint Ohio – which is
neither. His approach to politics and
religion is similar.
Sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death. James 1:15
On December 21 – on the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of
the year – I went out with a few friends before dawn to collect garbage bags
from the dumpsters behind some Washington, D.C. businesses. We hauled our “take” – eight bags – to a
secluded area and went through the contents.
And we found what we were looking for.
There, amidst cigarette butts, newspapers, and half-eaten hamburgers, we
found the battered bodies of children.
I was not shocked. I’d
seen the pictures and I knew what to expect.
Still, something made me catch my breath as I held in my hand the
severed shoulder, arm, and hand of a child who was perhaps 10 to 12 weeks into
life at the time of death. The arm,
which was intact from shoulder to fingertips, measured about the length of my
little finger: the hand alone was as long as the end of my own finger up to the
first joint.
No, we were not shocked, my friends and I; we hardly
spoke. We prepared the remains as
respectfully as we could, said a brief prayer, and buried them.
But that arm stretching the length of my finger, and that
delicate, sensitive hand, continue to haunt me.
They are a blunt kind of evidence – like traffic-killed raccoons gummed
with red, or the mutilated body of an Indian on a Guatemalan roadside – that we
are being steadily diminished. Something
is tearing us apart.
Full
article available. Thanks, Juli.
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