Death that Gives Life

Today is fake Epiphany which puts me in mind that one day or other the week before last marked the Feast of the Holy Innocents. It, like everything else on the calendar, passed me by and I only noticed it when it is too late. Somehow celebrating everything 97 hours after everyone else seems too lame.

But I want to say something about the Holy Innocents  anyway, even if it is too late, because I came across a heartbreaking foolishness–this time by Lena Dunham.

When I consider the account of Herod and his paranoia, I am usually thinking about the children and the horror. But the thing that most stands out to me this year is not the death of the babies–as heinous as that is–but the grief of the mothers. Matthew quotes Jeremiah,
“A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

I’ve given birth a handful of times. Its not something I thought a lot or fretted about before hand. I didn’t grow up planning to have a certain number of children or thinking that by becoming a mother I would have filled up all the hollow places in my psyche. And honestly, I’m not a particularly affectionate mother. I love my children to the outermost, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the way I yell at them. Still, every so often I look into the abyss of death and wonder what it would be like if one of them died before I did. It wouldn’t just be that they died, it would be the death of my own self also.

And that’s what makes the idea of abortion, for me, so sickening. The life of the mother is bound up in the life of the child, even if we want to lie and say that its not. When you give life to someone else, when you let that person come into the world to have a personhood and being beyond and hopefully greater than your own, it feels like a million tiny deaths that are added up into a great, strong, unimaginable life beyond your own.

This is why, I think, child birth is sometimes likened to salvation in the Bible. Paul makes that horrid comment about women being saved through childbearing, and Isaiah talks about the parousia as if it is the same as childbirth. And, of course, the pinnacle of the christian story is Jesus whose very body and life and blood give life to all of us. It is death that gives life, which is the essence of motherhood. Its not just that Mary gave birth to Jesus who dealt the deathblow to death itself, its that, in nurturing and being delivered of and then nurturing another you get a true and piercing look at the cross, something a man, I think, only experiences when he goes to war to defend another.

All the more heartbreaking, then, is Miss Lena Dunham thinking that somehow she has missed out because she hasn’t had a chance to produce a life and then destroy that same life. Before you read the article you have to look at her face. Examine the look of expectant hope, the charm she is looking forward to. She describes being at a planned parenthood event and being asked about her own experience with abortion. She then realizes that she hasn’t had one. She says of herself,

“I sort of jumped. ‘I haven’t had an abortion,’ I told her. I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an abortion.”
“And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue,”

Strangely, in the back cupboards of Ms. Dunham’s conscience, she has the idea that Not having an abortion is a good thing. But then, upon examination, she decides this latent moral sense is very bad, is a “stigma” and that she looks forward to the day when she can rid herself of it.

Besides being tragically foolish, this kind of reasoning is no less paranoid than Herod deciding to kill all the children in the hopes of destroying the one. It is a disordered and idolatrous redefinition of what is good to include what is terribly evil. The only way to remain preeminent, unrivaled, un-usurped is to destroy the one who hasn’t had time to make any choices for good or evil.

The trouble is, we can’t just say that something is good when God has said that it isn’t. We can’t kill and expect to go free. We can’t lie and expect the lightness of mind and heart that comes with speaking the truth. I pray for Ms. Dunham that God continues to spare her the grief of the death of another, and bless her with the life giving death of herself.