By DONALD DeMARCO
Before Roe v. Wade, but when the abortion issue was being hotly contested, certain pro-life leaders in Canada, as well as in the United States, told me that once people realized what abortion entails, the controversy would be settled solidly in favor of life.
The plausible assumption in the minds of these leaders was that people based their moral decisions purely on the basis of information. Abortion, however, involving, as it does, life, parenthood, responsibility, and personal liberty, is far too profound an issue to be settled on the basis of information alone.
And although all the information pertinent to abortion is on the side of life, the will can be a formidable opponent when it comes to changing people’s minds. Abortion is not simply an intellectual issue — it involves the will, a human faculty that can be intensely recalcitrant.
C.S. Lewis makes it clear to his readers that his conversion was anything but a simple matter. In Surprised by Joy (chapter 14), he offers the following vivid personal account.
“You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.
“In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
Conversion to God parallels converting to life since God is pre-eminently Life. The will can be more stubborn than a mule. Nonetheless, the will always retains its natural inclination toward the good. Where there is will there is hope.
In his exceptionally insightful treatise, The Conversion of Augustine, Romano Guardini makes the comment that “conversion can only be something that seizes a man with a life-or-death grip.”
We are all victims, to varying extents, of sleepwalking through life. We need something extraordinary to jar us out of our slumber. Those who remain unconverted are headed for a terrible fate, as Shakespeare warns in Macbeth: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”
The realism of Guardini’s remark came home to me with great force one night after I had given a pro-life presentation. As I walked to my car, I heard a voice calling out to me. The rapid pace of the caller’s footsteps communicated to me a sense of urgency.
I stopped and greeted a rather serious looking young man who was most eager to tell me something. He introduced himself quickly and gracelessly. It was his story he wanted to impress upon me. And so, we stood in the parking lot under a slight drizzle of rain while he unraveled his extraordinary tale.
It was to be a far more important revelation than the meager message I had delivered minutes earlier.
My friend had been in Uganda for several years doing peace work as an emissary of the Canadian government. Because of political unrest in Uganda, the Canadian government advised him to leave that country as soon as possible. His life was at stake. He boarded a train that would transport him out of a country where foreigners were suddenly in imminent danger.
Little did he realize that his train ride would be fraught with a different and more terrifying kind of danger. A soldier approached him, pointed his machine gun at him, and told him that he could blow him away and no one on the train would care. He could then toss his dead body out the window and into the jungle where no one would ever find him.
My friend was in the grip of terror, accompanied by an experience of complete isolation and alienation. He was utterly alone and completely at the mercy of another person’s arbitrary will. Whether his life continued or ended had nothing to do with human rights but teetered on the whim of a total stranger.
He was guilty of nothing other than the fact that he existed. Yet this seemed to be a crime large enough to sentence him to his premature demise. There was nothing he could do to lobby for his life. It was power versus helplessness. The cat and mouse game went on for approximately a half-hour. As time went on, as my friend explained to me, he felt more and more confident that he would not be shot.
After what must have been the longest 30 minutes of my friend’s life, the soldier moved away. My friend would continue to live.
He had been reborn. But he had also been transformed. During the ordeal in which he was helpless, unable to plead his case, and completely at the mercy of another, he identified with the unborn. He had survived his living nightmare in the damp, womb-like environment of a moving train. He underwent a conversion and was reborn pro-life. He emerged from his “life-or-death grip” with an enlightened appreciation for life.
His conversion occurred at a moment when life was not safely separated from death but was brought into close proximity with it. It was in this tangle of life and death that he knew, with uncommon clarity, how much life is preferable to death
For Christians, the cross unites life with death and conveys the timeless message that life is not to be taken for granted but to be lived with gratitude, gladness, and generosity.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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