At times we all find ourselves compelled to vigorously defend it, while at other times showing complete and willful ambivalence toward it. There is for each of us an alarm that goes off in our hearts during those occasions when we feel urgency about protecting the living or passion about grieving the dead—but we’re also fairly inconsistent in our burdens.
Lately I’ve come to believe that we are all pro-life, only selectively so.
Some people expend their energies fighting for the dignity of the unborn in the womb, viewing them as inherently God-designed, yet they will show complete disdain for that life if it later manifests itself as a gay teenager whose simple existence they now see as a sinful abomination. The “sanctity of life” then seems far less a concern.
Others will find their hearts terribly ravaged by the shooting death of a single lion in Africa and driven to craft moving social media eulogies, yet be relatively unmoved by a seemingly endless wave of deadly violence toward unarmed black men and women in the care of police just a few states away. They respond to the former with outrage, and to the latter with silence.
Some will openly lament the government-sanctioned killing of incarcerated criminals and endlessly petition for mercy, while showing far less regard for such humanity before it makes its way fully through the birth canal.
People will be willing to go to war to avenge a handful of lives lost in America to domestic terrorism, gambling with billions of dollars and more innocent lives, yet lift not a finger to try and stem the massive flood of carnage wrought by handguns here at home.
We’ll smash open a stranger’s car windows to rescue a distressed dog, while purposefully looking the other way as we drive past a homeless beggar on the corner as we leave the mall.
We’ll travel thousands of miles to care for an orphaned child half a world away for a week, and never intentionally step foot into the lives of the scores of forgotten, hungry kids in the neighborhoods where we live and drive by every single day of our lives.
So we’re all absolutely for life, we’re just not all for all of it in equal measure.
We either subconsciously see people within our national borders and social circles as more inherently valuable than those beyond them, or we make moral judgments on the kinds of life worth treasuring, or we get used to rationalizing away some death while finding no justification for it elsewhere.
We all have blind spots in our understanding of Life; ways we try to convince ourselves that some of it merits championing and some of it is rather inconsequential. Perhaps this is our way of coping with the overwhelming volume of destruction and suffering that crosses our path each day. Maybe we don’t have the emotional bandwidth to allow our hearts to be moved by everything equally, lest we become hopeless. Maybe this selective outrage protects us from sinking too deeply into despair at all that seems wrong in the world. Maybe we just flat-out burn out on empathy.
Or perhaps all of our biases and preferences and experiences form a distorted lens by which we view the world, and through this flawed filter we simply see some life as less important. We feel an affinity toward some and apathy, even contempt toward others.
Yet I wonder how different the world might look were we each able to be similarly moved by all loss of life, or at the very least to seek to understand the fight of others for what they believe to be life worth defending. I wonder what would happen if we really embraced our complete interdependence here on this planet and grieved fully over the countless ways in which we inflict damage on each other and the way this damage denigrates the whole; the way it compromises everything.
What death always does is stop potential. Whatever a life might do or become or offer now ceases to be. That stolen future is at the heart of all loss of life and it should give each of us pause, because all of it truly does matter to the whole of our humanity.
We need to be brutally honest with our questions:
Does America’s inherited, institutionalized racism encourage white people to minimize the murder of people of color?
Is abortion subtly but surely conditioning young people to be more cavalier with regard to the unborn and to their reverence for life at its fundamental level?
Is there a sliding scale in each of our minds that weighs the moral worth of people based on the behavior we view from a distance or from our personal prejudices?
Does Christianity often generate a hypocrisy that causes people to cherish life in the womb or once it reaches Heaven, but in so many ways disregard it in between?
Can we in our subjective, self-centered, flawed existence ever really consistently affirm and protect all life?
I don’t have any clear answers, but more and more I am examining my own heart and seeking to find what makes me see humanity and creation, sometimes with passion and other times with ambivalence. How do I determine what life is worth defending and what death is worth despairing over?
As I continue to walk this road, I am trying to be a person who rejoices greatly whenever life is honored, nurtured, and cherished, and who mourns deeply whenever it is wasted, damaged, or squandered.
I want to be a lover of all life.
