Pro-life is (clearly) about affirming life… we celebrate when it is affirmed… whether that means that a mom and dad have their first kid, a bicycle ride captures elements of physical challenge and friendship, a scene of parents taking their kid to their first day of school…
How, though, do we capture that same pro-life spirit of courage and hope and love and commitment when death inevitably reaches those close to us and ultimately ourselves?
I think there’s something quite poignant and introspective about personal loss particularly at the end of their long, good life… it makes me examine and reflect with renewed passion, hastened search, at those significant events of life which make all of our lives in their general sameness, simultaneously all unique, simultaneously telling a different story, and simultaneously each worth living.
The best stories are what each of us does in the face of life’s Unanswerable questions… it’s where man’s artistic grasp for the Infinite emerges I think… how that grasping penetrates into all corners of our life in some way–how we raise our family, how we treat our mom or our dad or our siblings, how we pray, how we die…
Nearing personal loss, I find comfort in this song by Annie Lennox, “Into the West”, from Lord of the Rings.
I’m no LOTR expert, but I know that Tolkien wrote with the intention to illuminate something about life and about God and about faith.
Ms. Lennox captures that in this song. When you listen, I encourage you to quietly remember someone you love whom you may have lost.
For me, “pro-life” is also about why I like to look west at home… in perpetual hope that there is More beyond the setting sun.