The Image of Blood

The following is an Afterword from Emmanuel, Solidarity: God's Act, Our Response, published in 2000. I post the Afterword now because a pro-life organization launched a couple of ads including a child's body in the last couple of days of the election campaign. The ad caused an uproar. Blood ... (6,222 words)

Afterword: Nonviolence and the Image of Blood

Nonviolence is most interesting and valuable and valid in situations where it is the alternative to an endless cycle of violence. Like war, a campaign of nonviolence can be a bloody business at times, not because the practitioners spill blood, but because they are needed amidst bloodshed, and often because theirs is spilled.

In Poland and in the Philippines, there was bloodshed. It may have been limited, but it was crucial to the final outcome. The Filipino Revolution was sparked by the unjust killing—the martyrdom—of many people, including especially Benigno Aquino. And in Poland, Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko’s martyrdom lit a fire that could not be quenched.

Shifting words and images

Grasping the meaning of bloodshed can be almost impossible in our time, when the image of blood is almost completely negative. The response of modern man to blood is not the same response that others have had throughout history.

In the cultural struggle of our time, many words are used by prolifers and pro-abortionists as if they meant the same thing to both sides. But the words often have very different or even opposite meanings. When we say “love,” we mean the willingness to do good for the beloved; they mean sex. When we say “faith,” we are referring to a decision to respond to God’s revelation; they mean self-confidence. When we say “hope,” we mean an assurance about things to be revealed in eternity; they mean “I kinda wish.” When we say “freedom,” we mean that our lives can match our aspirations; they mean having a variety of choices. Obviously, we differ about the meaning of “human” and “family.”

We also differ in our understanding of the images that we use. St. Paul said that the cross was foolishness to the Greeks, but wisdom for us. It isn’t surprising that people react very differently to the cross; that’s a difficult image, full of paradoxes. But today, people have vastly different attitudes towards simple images like water.

Throughout most of the history of Western literature, water was a symbol of rebirth. In the Odyssey, Odysseus wanders for 20 years on the sea, and then returns to—is reborn—in Ithaca. The Israelites left slavery behind when they crossed over the Red Sea. They came into a new life when they crossed over the River Jordan. Jonah emerged from the belly of a whale repentant and ready to preach. In the waters of baptism, we are reborn. In Shakespeare’s plays, in The Tempest, a life of injustice and treachery is drowned and a brave new world emerges from the water. In King Lear, Lear crosses over from delusion to truth when he is completely drenched during a storm on the blasted heath. For most of our history, the image of water has been associated with new life or rebirth.

Today, though, water has connotations of death. When you see a movie or a play, and somebody falls into the water or drives off a pier, you do not expect them to emerge changed; you expect them to drown. “Go take long walk off a short pier” means “Drop dead,” not “Be renewed.” Our cultural attitude toward the symbol of water has changed, from life to death. Virginia Woolf and others have taught us to fear drowning.

There is a fascinating poem by one of the Romantic poets of the early 19th century which has a transitional image of water. In that poem, someone drowned in a baptismal font. In that poem, the symbol of life becomes a symbol of death. At that time, the symbol was still shocking.

The same thing has happened with our attitude toward blood. Most people today think of blood simply as bad news, as death. But that is not the connotation that blood has carried in the past. For much of history, blood has been a symbol of life. To grasp that requires a mental struggle, but the struggle is worthwhile.

The ancient attitude toward blood can be glimpsed in primitive societies, for example in the legendary hunter who shoots a deer with his bow and arrow and then looks the dying animal in the eye and thanks it for the gift of life for his family. The deer’s blood was bad news for the deer but good news for the family. Or in another primitive society, boys who have been reading Tom Sawyer might make a commitment to each other to be blood-brothers, by cutting their wrists a little bit and sharing their blood. (Mark Twain wasn’t worried about AIDS.) Before you dismiss the practice as gross and as extremely dangerous, note that the idea is not to die together, but to share life together, even in the face of deadly threats. (Got it? Okay, now dismiss Tom Sawyer as gross and dangerous.) The blood is a symbol of life.

The blood of the Lamb of God is at least that significant. Jesus has chosen to be a blood brother.

In the novel The Cypresses Believe in God, the great Spanish novelist José Maria Gironella wrote about a young man giving blood at a hospital for someone who needed a transfusion. He gave his healthy blood to save life. The idea of a transfusion may be the closest we can get to the ancient attitude toward blood as a symbol of life, not death.

The blood of Jesus is like a healthy transfusion. The blood of the Lord Jesus is supposed to pump in our veins.

On Valentine’s Day, we exchange cute pictures of hearts. The little cutouts do not have anything left of the old symbol. St. Valentine was a martyr who used the powerful muscle as a symbol of love. I got a glimpse of what he meant when I was in high school. I worked in a lab synthesizing drugs. One summer, I helped with the drug trials, injecting mice and then seeing where the drug showed up. I killed hundreds of mice with a little guillotine, and then cut out their hearts. Believe me, a beating heart, even from a tiny mouse, is an impressive item. For several minutes after the heart was cut out, it beat and beat and beat. It was very impressive. And a human heart is much bigger.

Valentine’s symbol was a gross, graphic effort to use an image of something of immense power, as great as the power of death. In fact, Valentine the martyr knew that the blood of Jesus was a power far greater than death.

The word blessed refers etymologically to blood. It means “sprinkled with blood.” The very ground, the dirt, of the Colosseum, has been prized for centuries by people who remember that Christian martyrs poured out their blood there. The ground was blessed, sprinkled with blood. Today, perhaps the barbed wire at Auschwitz is a similar symbol: the blood shed there inspires us more than the brutality inflicted there frightens us. We identify with the victim of evil, not the perpetrators of the evil.

During a rescue in 1977, pro-lifers saw blood on the liner of a trash can in Milan Vuitch’s abortion mill at 1712 I Street, just a few blocks from the White House. The blood reminded us that we stood on holy ground, desecrated by slaughter but consecrated by innocent blood.

In Deuteronomy, the Lord says: “I set before you life and death; choose life that you and your children may live.” Pro-lifers today can choose violence or nonviolence. Whichever way, there will be blood.

 The Tobit Project: From Image to Reality

“Father, one of our nation has just been been murdered; he has been strangled and then thrown down in the market place; he is still there.” I sprang up at once, left my meal untouched, took the man from the market place and laid him in one of my rooms, waiting until sunset to bury him (Tobit 2:3-4)

Rescues and nonviolence don’t make sense to people who want to belong to a safe pro-life club and do safe clubby things. They make better sense when you put them in the context of reality, amidst the massive bloodshed and death of our age. If we are going to risk bloodshed, we need clarity about the plight of children. The Tobit Project provided a glimpse of what happens to our children.

In August 1986, I was with a friend going through the dumpster of an abortionist looking for financial records when we found four small mesh bags of tissue in the trash. The tissue resembled rice pudding, with a few spots of blood. We examined the tissue for some minutes, suspecting that we had found tiny bodies. When we were unable to recognize any part, we concluded that the bodies had probably been disposed of elsewhere, and that we were looking at placental material or something, and we threw it all away.

Over the next few days, the two of us discussed our find repeatedly, and I consulted Dr. Bill Colliton, a pro-life obstetrician/gynecologist, about the tissue. Colliton suggested a couple of other possibilities, but the more we thought about it, the more worried we became.

On August 19, I returned to the dumpster with another friend, and picked up some more trash, looking for bodies. Again, we found mesh bags of tissue. This time, the tissue was bloodier. Again, I poked through the messes, looking for fingers or toes, but found nothing. I saw what looked like tiny pieces of liver in each bag, but was just guessing.

In those early days, we were very clinical: “Is this the liver, or a clot of blood?” Our emotions surfaced later.

At the house where I was poking through the trash, friends came down to chat, and were interested in ghoulish possibilities, but the investigation was time-consuming and mostly boring. Four of the eight apparent corpses were freshly killed, but four were from August 16 (I think), and they stank fiercely. Keith Rothfus stayed with us, praying quietly for us, for which I am immensely grateful. But the other two went back upstairs to watch TV, which was perhaps a healthy reaction. You cannot let this stuff take over your life.

I did not throw these specimens out; I was pretty sure they were corpses. I took them home, wrapped them, and put them in the freezer. I did not tell my wife about it, and was a little nervous every time we needed something from the freezer.

Over the next week, I spent some time trying to get them to Bill Colliton. My schedule was full and so was his, and transportation was a hassle. At one point, I put the corpses in an insulated jug, with a couple of cans of frozen orange juice to keep them cold, and took them downtown to give them to a friend who was planning to drive out to see Colliton. But that did not work out.

We called another physician, Bill Hogan, who had taken some of the early bloody photos which were used in Jack Willke’s Handbook on Abortion. Hogan said that suction abortion before ten weeks would be likely to smash everything beyond recognition. He said we might find bone slivers in the remains of older children, or might be able to pick out liver tissue. He said he would be glad to look at what we had, but did not expect that he would be able to tell us much that we did not already know. Instead, he gave us the name of a pathologist who could examine the remains with a microscope.

We called the pathologist, Mike Dolan, who confirmed what Hogan had said. But he was discouraging about recognizing anything by the naked eye. Even what appeared to be liver tissue might be just blood clots; only examination under a microscope would tell us for sure.

I should emphasize that the doubts expressed by Colliton, Hogan and Dolan were not about whether the tissue was in fact fetal remains, but about whether they could identify it positively, and testify in court as expert witnesses that they had seen smashed bodies. After discussing the circumstances of the remains—eight mesh bags from an abortion clinic, each with a spot of blood that resembled liver—none of them had any real doubt that we had eight corpses there.

Dolan was about to leave town for ten days. He told me how to preserve specimens in the future, and said that he would be willing to examine them for me when he returned.

I decided to dispose of these eight, and get fresh specimens for Dolan when he came back to town. So I carried my yellow jug with eight corpses and two cans of orange juice home, and put the corpses back in the freezer. Then I waited for an opportunity to bury them quietly.

                                 

I was determined not to let my wife know what was going on. Her life with me is weird enough without corpses in the freezer. So I wanted to dig the graves discreetly. But what with scheduling problems and rain and whatnot, time passed, and the corpses never made it into the ground. Then a new problem arose: I started going a little bonkers.

For one thing, where was I going to put the corpses? In the orchard, the meadow, or the woods? In the woods, I could mark them, without any fear of being asked for explanations any time soon. Should I mark them, or just get them into the soil like dead mice? In the orchard, I could remember where they were without marking the graves. But if these eight are just the beginning, I may need the space in the meadow. Mass grave, or eight separate graves? I wasn’t worried about the depth; the soil here gets rocky a ways down, and regardless of good intentions at the outset, I would not dig much past the rocky level.

The big problem, though, was that I had no reason to doubt that more corpses were being dumped. Each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, another half a dozen or so children are killed there. I could call a press conference and display the corpses, and make life hard for the abortionist for a few days. But then he would continue as before, except that now he would flush the bodies down the toilet. The more I thought—to be more accurate about it at this stage, “stewed”—about it, the more I thought (stewed) I should try to keep retrieving the bodies. The public relations angle was interesting, but not very interesting, especially since the poor bodies are mangled beyond recognition. Until there was an exposé, the bodies would keep landing in the dumpster, three times a week.

Slowly, the recognition dawned on me that I knew where and whenbodies were being dumped, regularly, as in Argentina under the junta or in Cambodia under Pol Pot.

I left bodies rotting in that dumpster in Bethesda. I had to admit that I did not have the inner strength to go get them. (I didn’t have time, either; but even if I had, I would have let ‘em rot.) Until I knew where they are going, I was not going to consider getting any more.

I kept going back in my mind to that scene in Gaithersburg, with Keith helping us pray, but two good, sane, pro-life friends deciding to watch TV. What has happened to us that we can watch TV as bodies are unwrapped in the basement? Poor naked little bastards.

I had never felt so keenly that abortion has three sets of victims: children who are killed, women who are exploited, and all the members of the surrounding community—who are offered a powerful lesson in impotence and apathy and despair.

As time passed, we became extremely angry. Our anger was not at the parents, nor even at the abortionists whose work we uncovered. We became enraged at the cold, callous society that allowed such things to take place in broad daylight. We fantasized about going into the offices of lukewarm clerics and piling bodies on their desks. We felt the urgency expressed so well by Archbishop Weakland in the bishops’ pastoral on economics, that “the greatest injustice” is to treat a person as a nonperson, to act as if they simply are not there.

Over time, the horror weighed us down. There was one body in particular that broke my heart. I found a body bag, a small mesh bag that fits over the intake of a suction bottle to catch the pieces as the machine sucks the child out. In the bag, there was a pile of mush, with a hand sticking up. I picked up the hand and lifted it out slowly. The arm came out, then the rib cage, then a torn abdomen and the legs. I had the whole body except the head and one arm. This was in a mesh bag from a suction abortion, and at first I could not understand how the body had gotten through the tube. I guessed that what must have happened was the hand got caught by the suction first and was pulled into the cannula. The arm followed. When the shoulder hit the mouth of the cannula, the body was stuck until the cannula cut through the chest and ripped off the head and one arm; the body went through a little more. The hips did not fit until they were crushed in. Then the legs went flapping through. That body broke my heart.

I had looked through gore for fingers and toes, had learned not from a textbook but from observation that all eyes are blue before birth, had admired the beauty—the stunning beauty like the glory of the earth as seen from outer space—of skulls, with lacy plates forming. I have never heard anyone before or since talk about the beauty of the skulls of babies. They are so fine, so delicate in appearance although they are quite resilient, so clearly the objects of loving attention by a great creator. But for some reason, nothing moved me as much as this body.

In the dumpsters, I cried out to God in agony. I saw the unchecked power of death. In the face of these dead babies, who could speak of sweetness and light? All hope and all joy seemed to be extinguished; itsee med that only the blind and ignorant could maintain hope.

An image of God’s love came to mind. In the U.S. Capitol, off the rotunda, there is a room full of statues of American heroes, one from each state. One of them is Fr. Junipero Serra, the Franciscan missionary who worked all along the coast of California, holding up a large cross, about two feet high. This symbol of missionary work is by no means unique to the Franciscan saint, but it is a gesture I had never understood well. I had never been able to imagine what you would say while holding up a cross like that. That audiovisual aid did not correspond to any thought that I had ever wanted to communicate.

I had seen someone hold up a cross that way once before. At the close of an all-night vigil outside an abortion clinic in Kensington, Maryland, during our dawn prayer service, a man from a Catholic Worker house suddenly held up a small cross, as if he were warding off vampires. I was intensely embarrassed. I could not imagine what might be going through his mind. It is not that I was unmindful of the significance of the death of Jesus, but I felt that crosses belonged on the wall. The gesture seemed bizarre.

But in the dumpsters of Washington, I came to understand why one might use it, what one might want to communicate that would be helped by a cross held aloft. It is a statement of God’s love.

I came to a new appreciation of Jesus as savior. The words of the prophet Zephaniah moved me deeply. Zephaniah said, “You have no more evil to fear.” How true, I thought, but at what price?

Zephaniah said, “Do not let your hands fall limp.” We frequently found hands and feet with fingers or toes sliced off, and sometimes we would hunt through the gore trying to find the missing digits, while these words echoed in my mind, as a plea for life.

Zephaniah said, “He will exult over you, and renew you by His love.” O God, I prayed, is that true? Jesus Christ, Lord of the universe, where are the toes? Is it true? You will “renew” and “exult”? Who can imagine exultation? Zephaniah said, “He will dance over you, as on a day of festival.” I thought, How can I believe that before I see it? Dance? With what opiate?

The world is full of saviors. In Harvard Square in the 1960 and ‘70s, there were lots of them—Guru Maharaji, Kahlil Gibran, Meher Baba, the Church of Scientology—lots of them, all selling sweetness and light. I’m in favor of sweetness and light. But the question that matters about it is, can you get there from here? Or is like the old Yankee gag about getting directions to someplace over the hill: “Let me think. You could go that way . . . Nope. Or you could try this way . . . Nope. Come to think of it, you can’t get there from here.”

In the dumpsters, sweetness and light is an attractive offer.

But the overwhelming reality of death snuffs out shallow hopes and dreams, crushing them contemptuously.

In the dumpsters, the difference between Jesus and all the other purported saviors stands out. The first thing you hear about Jesus is the story of His crucifixion. In the dumpsters, when your heart cries out in pain, the first thing that Jesus says is, “I am with you.” If he wants to go on to talk about sweetness and light, he can do so credibly—because he begins by saying, unmistakably, “I am with you.” In the dumpsters, the blandishments of other saviors do not mean anything. How can you believe them? They offer an alternative to pain, but once you have slipped into the abyss, alternatives are irrelevant; you need a way out. Jesus doesn’t offer a lot of philosophy about pain. Or if he does, that is not the way he begins to teach. He starts by saying, unmistakably, from the cross, “I am with you.”

When I cried out in pain, broken and crushed, he did not explain it or drug it or ask me to look at flowers. He said, “I am with you.” Because he knew the pain, understood the question that was deeper than a verbal question, understood the question that agony does not pose but is, his response could be credible. He said, and I heard, “I am with you.”

Because he had been broken like the children whose bodies I was recovering from the trash, he had credibility. When he spoke of peace, his peace was stronger than death, not a dishonest pretense that death no have power.

I heard him and I clung to him and he saved me from despair. I know he lives, and I know he is Lord, because I saw his power over death. I know I cannot explain that adequately; but I know what I saw. I saw the power of death, and I saw the power of his love beyond death.

Because he was broken as the dumpster babies were broken, and because he was killed as they were killed, he and he alone has credibility when he talks about sweetness and light, about a resurrection. If he says he will renew you and dance over you, it is credible. He bought the right to speak to people in agony. He paid for the ability to comfort the brokenhearted.

Perhaps that was what Fr. Junipero was saying when he held up that cross in California.

Pain or no, we were collecting more and more bodies. By early 1987, eight of us were engaged in the task of retrieving bodies from five abortion clinics in the Washington area. At the Hillcrest abortion clinics, we found bodies that would fill your hand, bodies of children around 20 weeks old. The task of retrieving the bodies was draining, physically and emotionally—and I opted out as often as I could. With hundreds of bodies accumulating, we had to think through the proper way to bury them. How should the remains of the bodies from a holocaust be buried? A few prolifers launched a project—the Tobit Project—to find churches and organizations who would help with proper burials.

But in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington and elsewhere, pro-lifers who were retrieving bodies had to re-invent the wheel. Specifically, we had to insist that human bodies—arms, legs, eyeballs, and other body parts, whether attached or scattered—should be buried respectfully. That does not sound particularly complicated or controversial, but we do not live in normal times.

Should the children be buried in haste, secretly, as had happened in at least two cities? What is the point of the burial, anyway?

A funeral serves a variety of purposes. It is an expression of love for the deceased person. It offers support to the family. It heals the community. The ritual provides balance and continuity. Among Christians, a funeral is a proclamation of the resurrection.

For Catholics, a funeral is a time to pray for the dead. Some Christians hold the view that prayer for the dead is a waste; final exams have arrived, and you pass or fail, and then it is over. This argument aside, all people believe that remembering the dead and mourning them is good and necessary.

But after an abortion, this aspect of a funeral is altered, since we never met the preborn children whom we bury. In fact, pro-abortion philosophers deny the personhood of preborn children for precisely this reason; nobody has any fond memories of their foibles. Still, the outlines of a moving story are known: nameless and voiceless and powerless, they were rejected and killed.

Funerals are supposed to be a service to the families of the deceased. But for victims of abortion, that is a little complicated. You cannot invite the family of the deceased to the burial. They probably don’t want to hear that the “procedure” at the abortion clinic produced a body. They are likely to be enraged to learn that their names are available to prolifers, who have been portrayed (dishonestly, of course, but repeatedly) as vindictive terrorists.

Even when you can match individual bodies with the names of patients who had abortions on a particular day (easy in Chicago, where each body had the mother’s name attached, but very difficult in Washington, where the bodies were scrambled, and the lists of 30-50 mothers were separate), a phone call to the parents of the deceased could trigger a lawsuit for harassment, or even criminal charges.

Still, it is overwhelmingly obvious that abortion reveals a desperate need for prayer for the family of the deceased. The Church can’t ignore the family simply because they don’t show up for the funeral; their absence shows how much they need our prayers.

Funerals serve to repair the community. But with abortion, this aspect of a funeral is also controversial. Many people are very offended by the suggestion that they are affected by abortion.

The abortion holocaust has been with us for a generation, but very few pastors are prepared to deal with its complications. Some are beginning to learn how to deal with post-abortion syndrome (PAS), but the widespread devastation in a community is still generally unnoted. Abortion kills a child, defiles a mother—and destroys community. Everybody near an abortion clinic is offered a powerful lesson in apathy and despair. The entire surrounding community is taught to ignore bloodshed. Either we resist that lesson, or we learn it. Once we learn to mind our own business when children and women are attacked, will we still be able to resist anything?

The abortionist assumes that the community is too weak to protect children. He spits in the eyes of all local pro-lifers, confident that their brave words about the humanity of the preborn are devoid of force. He assumes that he can kill children and abuse women without any interference from pro-lifers. Too often, his assumption is correct.

The community that is afflicted with abortion is in desperate need of healing. What will it take to open our eyes, if corpses in our trash cans do not stir us to action?

The ritual of a funeral provides sanity and balance, restoring a sense of order and continuity. The fact that there is a ritual is an assertion that “we have been here before,” that this pain, as bad as it is, is still a familiar part of the human condition, something that previous generations have seen, something we can cope with. Ritual, by itself, even when every syllable of it is incomprehensible, has a powerful healing function.

But after an abortion, there is no funeral rite. The absence is devastating. If there is no ritual, then the question arises: Have we been here before?

Christian funerals proclaim that Jesus, by His death and resurrection, broke the power of sin and death. Presumably, that includes abortion. But if this proclamation is made in secret, and the message is hidden in a pauper’s grave, then the messengers have not fulfilled their responsibilities.

What should we have learned from the discovery of corpses in our trash? Sin abounds; does grace abound the more? What on earth does it look like?

In the end, hundreds of the bodies from Washington were buried next to Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, near the offices of the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life. One of the bodies we retrieved is in a tomb at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.

Elsewhere, people suffered for their respect for the bodies of the dead. In Milwaukee, Monica Migliorino Miller went to jail for months for her role removing babies from the trash and burying them.

The Transforming Power of Blood

The blood of those babies broke my heart. The blood of Jesus healed it. I saw in the crucifixion a revelation of God’s overwhelming love.

The blood of babies challenges us to act. The blood of Jesus enables us to act, and to act with love, the power that is stronger than death.

We are all familiar with the idea that to wear the crown of peace you must wear the crown of thorns. But Pope John Paul II says that St. Paul’s attitude toward the cross was not like that. Paul saw the glory of the resurrection, and then later saw more, saw the overwhelming love revealed on the cross.

The blood of Jesus is not about death, it is about life. When God offered a covenant to Abraham, Abraham was ready to seal the deal by giving God what he valued most, his own son and heir. God intervened and said that the other bloody deities of the world might demand such sacrifices, but he did not. But centuries later, when the covenant between God and Abraham was perfected, the deal was sealed with blood, with the blood of Jesus.

The solemnity of the agreement was clear from the value of the sacrifice: God’s own son. The determination of God to fulfill his side of the agreement was clear from the value of the sacrifice: God’s own son. The unimaginable love of the Father for us was revealed in that sacrifice: he gave his own son. Who can understand that? We will spend the rest of eternity plumbing the depths of that profound mystery.

But when we begin to grasp what God did in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, when we begin to see it, a new wonder is hidden behind that. God has invited us to be recipients of his colossal and eternal love—but also to be participants in that same love. He has invited us to share in creation, making new and eternal creatures: babies. And he has invited us to share in redemption, pouring out our blood for the sake of God’s children—babies who are threatened by death and mothers who are being deceived and exploited, and our opponents who are blind and living in darkness. Paul said, “I make up in my own body the sufferings lacking in Christ.” Nothing was lacking, of course, but Paul was right that we are invited to participate.

God does not need our help in the works of creation and redemption—but he chooses to allow us to participate. That is what a rescue is all about. That is why we can rejoice when we are beaten and humiliated and jailed.

Sometimes we can see clearly how God uses what we offer. In 1983, on Holy Saturday (at the rescue mentioned in chapter one), I was arrested with a group of folks at Sigma abortion clinic in Kensington, Maryland. That day, I was dropped on my face with my hands cuffed behind my back, and I bled all over the place. Head wounds are very dramatic. As it happened, my sister Kathie saw all that blood, and by God’s grace that event was one of several things that helped her to understand her abortion, and helped her to return to life, return from death to the Lord. My blood was a small part of her healing, but still a part. To help your sister return from despair to hope: wouldn’t you be willing to bleed all over and even die for that? By God’s gift to me, I was allowed to be a part of God’s work in her life. What a gift, for my sister but also for me.

When we are at risk, a variety of things happen. We feel fear, and try not to be mastered by it. We see various evils, like police brutality. But the most important reality is that we share in the sufferings of Jesus. We have made ourselves available for the service that is suffering.

When we act in solidarity with the threatened, we have the right and the power and the duty to forgive. Before we are threatened, we do not have the right to forgive: “Hey, Hitler, I forgive you for killing people I don’t know.” That’s meaningless: bystanders can’t forgive. But when we are assaulted with the babies and mothers, we have the power to forgive. We should be ready to exercise this colossal power, because we chose deliberately to be there, in response to an invitation to the Lord. We didn’t stumble blindly into this; we are not taken by surprise.

When you suffer with the children and their parents, you are given a stunning and world-changing power. The power to forgive is an immense power, an unbelievable gift from a loving God. When you see that, it is almost embarrassing to add the obvious, that forgiveness is also a duty, because our Lord has asked us to forgive even as he has forgiven us.

In Washington in 1987, rescue leaders announced plans to close all the abortion clinics during the March for Life, as they had the previous year. But the night before the march, when all the rescuers gathered to pray and make final plans, it was a pitifully small group. There were a dozen abortion clinics in DC, and there were not even two dozen rescuers. Still, they trusted the Lord and pushed ahead.

Last-minute calls revealed that one abortuary had closed, and several were delaying their abortions until the afternoon. Only one was opening in the morning. So 20 rescuers went there, and closed that one until late morning. By mid-morning, a blizzard took over our work, and shut down the whole city. Everything closed, killing centers included. Because of the snow, they were closed the next day, and the next and the next. Then it snowed again, and the city closed for two more days.

When the rescuers gathered on the night of January 21, they had little power to offer to the Lord. But they did what they could, and the Lord blessed the work, and there was almost no killing for a week.

Obviously, the rescuers had nothing to do with that blizzard. But if they had not tried, there would have been killing that morning. The small group of rescuers delayed the killing, and then God arranged more delays. Who knows how many hundreds of women had their appointments canceled not once but twice? How many of them thought to themselves: “Hm, I wonder if someone is trying to tell me something?”

God did most of the rescue work by himself, but the rescuers were a part of it, by his invitation, by his grace.

The cross of Jesus, breaking the power of sin and death, was the central event of human history. We are called to understand it, and to be recipients of that grace. But also, in the immensity of God’s love, we are invited to participate.