There Should Be More Weeping

I’m tired of the politics of the issue. I could live without writing or reading another word about the topic.

Really, I’ve had it.

But there remains within me an unspeakable sadness that won’t let me remain silent.

Perhaps it’s because I grew up through the sixties and seventies.

I was there for the dawning of the age of Aquarius when all the long- haired, tie-dyed promises of the future came walking over Capitol Hill linking elbows or carrying folk guitars and peace signs.

Hope bled out on so many platforms, balconies, hotel kitchens, and jungle floors.

But the bleeding didn’t end with bullet wounds.

My generation knew about The Holocaust so we weren’t going to tolerate them in our times.

Then, we discovered the killing fields of Cambodia, the tribal feuds of Rwanda, China under Mao and the conflict in Darfur.

We encountered the red-handed fact that even armed with freedom, voices, literacy, democracy, and a generational sense of entitlement, there are some things we can’t stop fast enough.

The piles of human skulls buried in mass graves testify to our lack of power.

So, it is incomprehensibly sad to me that we can hear of our own private killing fields and not stop to mourn the dead.

Today is the anniversary of the day that we, too, said “yes” to death. 41 years. 55 million dead in America alone.

I no longer believe that I can stop a holocaust from happening in my time.

I know that every woman’s story is complicated. I know that wrapped in those statistics are hundreds and thousands of reasons, circumstances, agonizing tears and impossible pain.

But the numbers are too great for even the most staunch defenders of abortion to imagine there isn’t also some amount of callousness toward the unborn,

a measure of selfish ambition,

a percentage of men and women who have stopped valuing human life.

Devaluing their own lives as well as the lives created accidentally, incidentally by their actions and by all the choices that they made along the way to the final choice.

It’s complicated. I know.

They deserve to be remembered.

They deserve to be respected.

They deserve to be the lives that weren’t lost in vain.

They deserve to be the lives that slapped us in the face and woke us up to the value of every human life so that we found a way forward that didn’t involve killing the most vulnerable in our midst.

God made this promise in Genesis 9:5: “And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.”

Even if we forget them, God will not.

This I believe.

There is forgiveness, purchased with the spilling of more blood, the pure blood of Jesus Christ.

For all of us who have remained silent as these lives were taken,

for all of us who participated on any level in their demise,

for all of us who changed the channel of our souls when the topic arose – there is forgiveness.

But it must be preceded by repentance.

We’ve become a sensitive people.

We put people out of work to protect wildlife.

We change our daily diets so nothing with a face will suffer.

We cut off aid to needy countries until they promise to value the lives trying to survive within their borders.

What about the lives trying to survive our wombs? Will we not be moved by these faces?

Human life – every human life – deserves to be defended, valued, sheltered, remembered, and given a chance to know its own possibility.

I know that many people who have survived the womb still don’t have the basics of life but they had the chance to breathe, to cry out, to debut their stories.

In Isaiah 31:15 is this prophecy: “This is what the LORD says: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Where is Rachel? Where has she gone? When did she stop weeping and join those who sought her own flesh and blood?

I don’t know all the answers but I do know this: there should be more weeping.