The Ugliness Of Sin

Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me

Judge me, God, and discern my cause from an unholy nation, from the man of blood and violence deliver me. 

When I used to lead men and women in evangelizing on the streets, in the back of my mind I always wondered 'Is this really worth it? Are we really doing any good, changing any hearts, winning people for the Gospel?" I realized, after a while, that I was directing my focus on the wrong spot. Because I found that it was the Catholics who would join me on the streets who were undergoing a conversion.

What do I mean? Well, doing anything in public is often uncomfortable. For Catholics especially, since we are used to clocking-in and clocking-out without much interaction or challenge. We don't talk about the faith much, and regard it as "personal." Our comfort zones are pretty defined and comprised of limited boundaries. 

So when I would ask Catholics to consider stepping outside of their personal safe spaces to follow the Holy Spirit and "make disciples of all nations," the ones who took me up on it were like, "Wow, this is really uncomfortable. I've never done anything like this before." And then after a few hours and several interactions sharing rosaries, Miraculous Medals, and the gospel message, they are charged up. Doing something uncomfortable (and even objectionable) took them to a place in their faith they had never been before. Like peeling back a layer of an onion. What else might be inside this mystery we call faith?

I was thankful a lot of the guys in our men's group decided to back up our Right to Life group here this morning in giving a counter-witness to Planned Parenthood, who had organized a "woman's march for reproductive rights" downtown at the courthouse. We were outnumbered about 4:1 in terms of size and presence. It can feel ineffectual at times, standing there with your signs and rosaries, when you know that the vast majority of hearts are hardened and blinded by the demonic lies of this sanctioned and wholesale slaughter of innocents.  

For a number of the men, this was the first time doing anything like this. As one guy told me, "this is really uncomfortable." It is. As opposed to the on-line world, where you can hide behind your keyboard and define your boundaries, on the ground it's often messy and chaotic at times. One guy was rabidly hurling curses and vitriol at us, belittling our presence and accusing us of being anti-Semites. One woman approached us and spitefully asked us how many children we had adopted or fostered as a way of shaming those who hadn't done so. The Planned Parenthood escorts formed a human fence to block our signs and blot out our presence. 

In the midst of it all, though, was a living meditation on the raucous and spiteful nature of the mob that must have jeered at Christ during his trial and on the road to Golgotha. The sneering, the insults, the ridicule. The denigration of the good and the true. The thirst for blood that will not be satiated. The blindness--"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." As I held my ABORTION IS NOT HEALTH CARE sign over my head to make it visible, my arms ached after a few minutes. Our Lord stretched out his arms for hours upon hours in agony, shifting his weight with no relief on the cross, struggling to breath, in unspeakable pain from the nails in his hands and feet. He sought comfort and no comfort was to be found. He sought consolation, and no consolation was given. "Oh God! Oh God! Why have you abandoned me?"

One thing was very clear from the deck, though, of being on the "right side of history" on abortion. And that is apart from the obscurification of truth, the false solidarity, the coercion, the motivation of profit, and degradation of human dignity that abortion-rights advocates promote, there is a crass ugliness to their party. They speak in utilitarian terms of rights and outcomes and choice and empowerment because there is no love, no truth, no spirit in their message. It is like staring at a Communist-era apartment complex: there is nothing beautiful there, just cold and gray functionality. Abortionists paint themselves as providing the utilitarian "solution" to the "problem" of children being born. They are not in the comfort business, or the business of telling the truth, or having anything to do with love or concern. Their's is a ruthlessly profit-motivated business of emptying wombs for money. 

As uncomfortable and seemingly futile such encounters with this ugliness are, it did our men good to train at ground zero, to enter in more deeply (and maybe for the first time for some) into the "uncomfortable" reality of the crucified Christ, the ugly reality of sin, and the lies of the enemy working through the powers and principalities we are at war with.