Right-to-Conscience Recission Propososal

Greetings All,

Please take the time to educate yourself and respond to a very serious issue that has come up regarding health care providers' right to conscience:

http://www.usccb.org/conscienceprotection/index.shtml

Here is a copy of the letter that I emailed to my Senator and Representatives:

Dear Senator/Representative,

President Obama has frequently stated that a cornerstone value of the public square in America is the value of tolerance. Mr. Obama has frequently acknowledged that both sides of a debate ought be given due hearing and respect, and when the issue of human life is at stake, a particular level of respect for the conservative view is called for. If the conservative view is incorrect, then the cost of the error is another human life developed out of the womb, possibly with a life of some hardship arising out of a difficult early life. If the liberal view is incorrect, then a silent holocaust is being conducted in this country on the order of millions. Whatever prevailing view of the times, the age and civilization-transcending maxim, "thou shalt not kill" will be our judge.

I recognize that the latter view does not now enjoy popular affirmation, nor sanctity in the systems of U.S. jurisprudence, but I beg you to recognize that many intelligent, well-reasoned individuals hold this view. I myself graduated from the University of California, Irvine, Summa Cum Laude, was a U.S. Fulbright Fellow in Vienna, Austria (2005/6), am currently completing my M.A. in philosophy from Boston College, and am headed to Loyola Law School in August. During my tenure as a Fulbright fellow, I had the privilege of studying the works of holocaust survivor and great psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. During the reign of the Nazi regime, Viktor and Tilly Frankl were forced to have an abortion. Eventually Dr. Frankl lost most of his family (including his wife) in the death camps, and was himself a prisoner for four years.

I am convinced that the current rescission proposal would be an ethical disaster for this country on an order of the magnitude of a government forcing a married couple to abort their own child. Forcing hospitals and doctors and their staff to participate in a practice that they believe is murder would forever compromise their ability to practice ethically. Alternatively, many hospitals would shut their doors to avoid such action, and some of our brightest and most ethical talent would abrogate the medical profession in a time when America is already experiencing a crisis of talent in the sciences. Removing the right to exercise one's conscience is like removing the portion of the brain that makes us most human. Only humans have the capacity to act responsibly, and when the government attempts to supersede or hijack this capacity, we are in grave danger of building a sub-human society.

Please retain the conscience regulation, and enforce current laws protecting the right of health care providers to serve patients without violating their moral and religious convictions. The right of conscience protected by existing federal laws is inviolable. Weakening protection for this right will harm the ethical integrity of our healing professions, drive caring people out of these professions, and reduce patients' access to much-needed basic health care.

Our time is a time of tremendous gravity unaware. When historians investigate the early events that eventually lead to cultural disintegration, it is often these types of subtle but crucial decisions that prevent or initiate a culture's embarking on an unfortunate path. As a legislator in a representative democracy, you have the power and responsibility to govern with your fiat and veto. I earnestly beseech you not to change your own views, but to retain the right for health care providers to live by theirs, particularly in such an ethically contentious arena as the ethics of early human life.

Sincerely,

David Hallowell

Fear on St. Patrick's Day

3 August 1956

"... it is so seldom the present and the actual that is intolerable. Remember one is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen. And don't say God has proved that He can make you fear poverty, illness, et cetera. I am sure God never teaches us the fear of anything but Himself. As the only two good lines in one of our bad hymns says, 'Fear Him ye saints and you will then have nothing else to fear.' ...Not all the things you fear can happen to you: the one (if any) that does will perhaps turn out very different from what you think. Of course I know this is easier to say to another than to realise oneself. And always remember that poverty and every other ill, lovingly accepted, has all the spiritual value of voluntary poverty or penance. God bless you; you are always in my prayers." CS Lewis to Mary Willis Shelburne; from Paul Ford's Yours, Jack, 295-296.

This March 17th, 2009 is St. Patrick's Day. It is a day for much merrymaking, a day for the vernal color green, for Guinness and cabbage and corned beef, for obscured ethnic origins (I've heard it said that everyone is Irish on St. Patty's Day). Many youth in Boston mark the celebration with a debilitating pub-crawl, others attend parades wherever the truly Irish have civic clout. Thousands of school children who neglected to wear green will return home with painful welts from multiple pinchings-- a reminder to celebrate next year. Some folks even attend mass, thanking God for his servant Patrick, who brought Christianity to the pagan shores of Ireland.

St. Patrick celebrated his own life by returning it to God. He had much to fear: his Roman parents were killed during a raid, whereby the young lad was taken away to Ireland for slave labor as a shepherd. The world around him was harsh and unforgiving, but he chose to spend his time in prayer, turning to his Creator for solace and direction. He ignored the fearsome social elements around him, and chose to fear God instead, a fear whose unique flavor is more akin to respect than terror. He paid attention to his dreams and returned to Britain when he could have listened to the fear of the unknown instead. He entered the priesthood, only to again follow direction, trumping fear's nagging, and set sail for Ireland once more. He encountered grave dangers on the sea and on the land, but his faithfulness was rewarded and Ireland received Christianity.

Today presents each of us with an opportunity to choose our fears, and there is no shortage of choices: an economy in the dumpster; prophecies of utter destruction from a prominent Evangelical; fears of terrorism and even domestic-based, society-wide violence (try to buy a gun anywhere right now, you can't. It is nearly impossible to purchase bullets at this time as well); as well as individual fears of loneliness and ruin in an individualistic culture. The fear is in the promise, the promise of money or safety or affection, etc. But where does the true treasure lie? Where should my fear be properly aligned?

On the March 9th entry of George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul, he tells us:

Where should the unknown treasures of the truth
Lie, but there whence the truth comes out the most-
In the Son of Man, folded in love and ruth?
Fair shore we see, fair ocean; but behind
Lie infinite reaches bathing many a coast-
The human thought of the eternal mind,
Pulsed by a living tide, blown by a living wind.

What or whom will you choose to fear on St. Patrick's Day?

The White Stone Amongst the Ruins

The following powerful meditation was sent to me by scholar extraordinaire and warrior of the Lion, Taylor Black:

A Meditation by Cardinal Newman
God has created me
to do him some definite service;
He has committed some work to me
which He has not committed to another.
I have my mission -
I may never know it in this life,
but I shall be told of it in the next.

I am a link in a chain,
a bond of connection between persons.
He has not created me for naught,
I shall do good,
I shall do his work.
I shall be an angel of peace,
a preacher of truth
in my own place
while not intending it -
if I do but keep
His Commandments.

Therefore, I will trust Him.
Whatever, wherever I am,
I can never be thrown away.
If I am in sickness,
my sickness may serve Him;
in perplexity,
my perplexity may serve Him;
if I am in sorrow,
my sorrow may serve Him.
He does nothing in vain.
He knows what He is about.
He may take away my friends.
He may throw me among strangers.
He may make me feel desolate,
make my spirits sink,
hide my future from me -
still He knows
what He is about.

Spidered Kings and Toppled Towers

As I watched the President of the United States on national television tonight, freshly back from meeting another unemployed friend at a phantom job fair, I was struck by my detached, understanding-what's-going-on-but-still-centered-on-a-bedrock-of-peace state. I am nearing the 11th hour with the job hunt: bills keep coming and the student loan money is nearly gone. Madeyln goes through diapers like Wall Street grubbers consume bailout funds. Mandy needs to eat so she can feed Madelyn. I need to eat so I can still not fit into my clothes. And then there is the car payment, and the student loan payments, and the... You get the point, and statistically you can probably relate at some serious level. Times are tough, and no one knows if we are at the bottom or the top of a precipitous cliff. The one thing everyone can agree on is that the world seems qualitatively different than it was before the economic plates shifted and the tsunami washed away our confidence.

The world is not qualitatively different. The world was always a bad bet, and riches have always evaporated at a storm upon a ship or a crop under a freeze. I have never been hungry, never stood in line for seven hours for a bowl of soup, never counted each minute until the coldest part of the evening was finally overcome by a rising sun. I don't know that my circumstance won't get that bad, and I probably would be distracted from experiencing peace if my stomach was aching in the cold of a tent city, but I know that the good in the world is still the same Good that it has always been and that evil has always lurked in the shadows of the substantial. Carved kings lose their faces under veils of cobwebs, and fortress towers lose their strength and topple over. Viktor Frankl taught us that people don't have to be like those inanimate things that we fashion. We can still choose our attitude toward our unchangeable circumstances even if all other freedom has been assailed, and no one, not even the confines of a death camp can extinguish that fact. Christ made the way for us, and that transcendent character in us is what communes with the Eternal through the pathway that Christ provided by his reparation for our sins. We have a reason to hope, and God bless it, it is not in Obama's stimulus plan, or any other state leader's ability. All will fade one day, and even if the current efforts at restoring the economy are a smashing success, the United States' sun will set one day (let the day be as long as it is fruitful).

I am hopeful in what Dr. Paul Vitz calls Transmodern Identity: a call to put aside hatred and to affirm love in one's actions toward others. We are all going to need each other in the coming year, and beyond, and this is a time to reinvent what it means to be a citizen of the world. Beyond the stimulus plans and the credit markets and the (insert money machine here), my prayer is that we can live in an economic system where lived human realities come first, and the need for more is a distant second. Transmodern Identity is putting on the mantle of Christ and ministering to a soul in need. It does not require a hefty bank account or thriving balance sheet. It requires sensitivity to what is important and eternal amidst the crumbling temporal realities of a fallen world. I ask you, dear reader, What will you do today to enrich another person's reality?

Further Up and Further In

Returning home to Southern California has been a strange experience indeed. The warm air is conspicuous in comparison to the demanding, biting cold of Boston's winter. Lonely cold concrete canyons have been traded for rugged mountain backs that remind me of wilderness, tumbling down, and still further down, ever towards rich cobalt blue of the sea, until the delightful meeting we call "beach." The ocean bears my soul. Her majesty is the only thing not obliterated by the evening light pollution (the un-obfuscated night sky is also a sea) that can adequately buoy my being. It reminds me of God's greatness, His nature that transcends all of the phony baloney of Ponzi schemes and runaway debts and unanswered job applications. Its power is virtually endless, and when I run out of steam to work on my thesis, the waves inspire me. They build and come and wash, to make room for another building and coming and washing. Her beauty and intrigue is like God's: Aslan is no tame lion, and neither is the Being whose aim our souls point towards when properly aligned.

There is much to be done as our little family plays musical chairs in a time of few seats. I still search for work and church and a workable rhythm of work, wellness, and play. Mandy seeks to start her business (www.amandasinclairphotography.com) and her space as mom, and Madelyn looks for ways of coping with emerging banana pulverizers. The smiles are profuse, even as the generous flow of drool begins its journey back to the sea. I am reminded of Lewis' observation in the Great Divorce that for those who choose Heaven, it will seem as if we have always lived in Heaven. This world is a strange amalgamation of beauty and ugliness, ecstasy and heartbreaking disapointment. The universe pulsates as the fourth dimension chugs along the contours of the other three, and there is movement despite decay. I am at peace today, dreaming of the palace at Archenland and the seas on Perelandra and the care woven in ever fiber of the Great Dance.