"Honor, Honor": An Open letter to Mogama's black father, concerned about life--vote for Obama!
Posted: Wednesday, October 29, 2008
by Walter Rhett
Charleston Perlo
Your post today recalls a proverb I know. Two traveling priests arrive at a river where a young woman needs help crossing the ford. One priest gallantly takes the woman on his back and crosses. Later that night, when they made camp, one priest was brooding. When asked why, he replied, "You violated our vows by carrying that young woman, we aren't supposed to have contact with women!" The other priest replied, "I carried her then; you carry her now."
Abortion is a people's issue, one for the states to legislate, one for the courts to decide, and one that doesn't rest in the hands of a single person, including our national leader. If I vote against Obama have I helped unborn children? Have I taught morality and self-respect to teenagers who are casual about their sex and blase' about unwed birth? How does that vote, or absence of it, fulfill the empty and aching space that is the hole around which these lives evolve?
Is it possible the message I send is that I will punish you by absence of my vote-and deny you the opportunity to create a community that restores the self-respect and inner strength to resist early, unwanted pregnancies, to find more productive ways to build esteem and value the God-given self?
I do know the God I serve has often taken the least likely of folk, the most repulsive experiences, and the most controversial ideas and acts, even violations of His law, and found a means for these to become vehicles of mercy and love, and examples of change. Paul who persecuted Christians become a great Christian witness and the organizer of the early church. When we vote, we should leave the things of God to God, and the things of man should be rendered to society. For without community help to restore an innate respect and precious sensitivity to the gift that human birth represents, without love and the extra steps of caring, the beginning of the problem will continue to escape our watchful eye.
The father in your essay is watching the wrong end of the problem-what to do after the unborn begins. He is carrying a frame that focuses on the end. The real problem lies at the beginning! And Obama has said, what ever we say about a woman's right to choice, legally or morally, we as a nation and as a society and as a beloved community can come together to reduce and lower, and strive to eliminate unplanned, undesired children, born to single woman, out of wedlock, without the support of the fathers of the children, or sufficient economic means. Obama has said he will work on that problem, focus on that issue, build ways to reach those women and men, and dialog about teaching the value of sex as the deepest personal expression, the value of children as the greatest gift of God, the value of human love as the most wondrous and mystic bond, the value of marriage as a sacrament before God and community to lift up a union of divine principle, the value of hard work and a home for the safety and growth of children-he will attack the difficult, impractical, messy work of changing the world view of sex for pleasure and conquest and triumph without commitment, and then we will not need to discuss choice or pro-life as poles of division, but will find a new measure of grace and know its fullness--and have eliminated the options at the end by changing the beginning.
If the father in your essay knows this in his heart, he will vote not for scissors and bags of medical waste, nor will he vote for the fear and terror for women facing motherhood alone, and nor will he vote for special needs children who are the products of mothers unable to nurture, nourish, teach, train, or provide loving care.
Instead, he will vote for the careful, concentrated embrace of a mission to bring the lost sheep back into the fold, by offering love and guidance, correction and comfort, mercy and patience, hope and charity that values and creates opportunities for a milieu in which each and every child has a opportunity to find his or her gifts, develop his or her skills, be surrounded by love, be guided by self respect, and be armored by the perfected virtues of living by their own testimony to his glory and majesty through his love and mercy. Ironically and by paradox, the pro-choice candidate has articulated and stands the country's best hope of embracing the problem on the right side, to step in before it begins. Cure is impossible, but prevention IS within our reach. And so, no matter what our position about the end, is his grace and mercy.
A Prayer for Guidance in the Procreation of Children
" Lord, who is the source of all creation, keep a watchful eye over our tongues and guide our hands to reach toward those who are new born into your blooming, living world and enable us and strengthen us in good works toward those who grow by our guidance, are comforted by our care, are strengthened by our teaching, and corrected by our counsel, so that the beloved community of virtue and godly abundance which we seek by eternal hope is known known and open to others, especially families with children, in our own world and time. By your mercy and grace, we pray.
"Honor, Honor," is a children's baptismal spiritual, recorded by Kathleen Battle at the Met on New York.
This Article has been viewed 168 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)thoughtful, reflective, a revelation, a pathway, a purpose.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.