is what i do

Many good people hold that abortion is an act that is filled with sin. It may be so. Any act may be filled with sin. And abortion is, at best, a sad necessity.

Sin separates—one person from another, humankind from all that is divine. Sadness need not separate; indeed, sadness shared may lift somewhat, and one who shares another’s sadness, with sorrow and care, elevates humanity with the sacrifice.

So we may begin to agree. Abortion is sad, and we may share, with sorrow and care, the sadness of anyone who must endeavor such an act.

Many of those actors are, otherwise than this, good people. If their sad act is filled with sin and stains their souls in some way, then you must pray for those souls and grieve with the good people on their loss.

But must you cry “Murder!” and call in the state to punish and deny? Murder is not of the human realm where sin and grace reside, but of the Law, which numbers murder by degrees and considers circumstance in which degrees are blurred extenuating only, not vital to the case.

Please do not. Do not deliver sad humanity so carelessly to the blunt decree of law. Do not make a criminal of this good woman if at some sad time she must, for reasons that I may not know and must not question, abort a life that quickens within her.

If you do condemn her so, as well as those who helped her with compassion and with skillful care; if you make of her a criminal, who was not one before, deny her liberty, and bring more harm into her life to devil her—if you do so challenge her, you must also challenge those of us who love her, and we are many, and many among us whom you hold dear, or would hold dear if you but knew us.

I know this good woman and know that, challenged, she will respond as her humanity commands, respond with courage and mighty determination. If you would force her to bear a life to term against her chosen course—a course informed by all that is divine in this one woman’s life, all that inspires her goodness and her friends to love her—then you must crush her spirit, brutally. You must destroy her.

That would be a sin indeed. Pray for her rather, and for me, and for your own humanity, that we may all grow in goodness to the best of our powers and care for one another.

My friend Paul points out that the term “believing in God� represents an unusual idiom. In most other situations in which it is used, the phrase “believe in� means something slightly but importantly different from what it means when someone says that she “believes in� God.

If Emily’s husband is accused of philandering, Emily might say that she believes in her husband, and everyone would understand her meaning. Just so, when Colin Powell says that he believes in his President, or when a businessman states his belief in the free market, or a comrade at the barricades says that he believes in Communism, or even when a fan believes in the Yankees or the Mets. In each of those cases, “believing inâ€? is an assertion that the believed-in entity is trustworthy. In no case is it an assertion that the entity actually exists, as it is when someone asserts a “belief in” God. There is never any doubt that Emily’s husband exists, as does the POTUS, Communism, free market capitalism, and the Yankees.

I have no doubt that God exists, in exactly the same way that Communism exists, and the Yankees, and the Office of the President of the United States. God’s existence is validated by the same process that validates the existence of those other entities: people “believe in” Him, in the same way that people believe in Communism and the Yankees. That is, they believe that those entities are what their promotional literature and their apologists claim them to be; they have those particular powers and virtues; they’ve won those victories, defeated those enemies, rewarded, in just those ways, their particular friends and supporters. Indeed, it is more than simple validation at work here. The belief is what makes the existence real. Without believers, similar entities—the Easter Bunny, Almighty Jove, the Gold Standard, the Divine Right of Kings, the Mudville Nine—enter the realm of fairy tale and legend.

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Over at Faith Commons, Bill, in a discussion of Brian McLaren’s book A Generous Orthodoxy, quotes John R. Franke, quoting Yale theologian Hans Frei, “‘”Generosity without orthodoxy is nothing, but orthodoxy without generosity is worse than nothing.”‘” (I hope I got the nested quote levels right.) I think that’s a lot of hooey. I don’t believe that orthodoxy can ever be truly generous. Generosity requires at least the implicit admission that those who disagree with you might have a point. But orthodoxy requires that any deviation from the straight lines it draws must be corrected. The whole point of orthodoxy is that it defines what’s right, and what’s not right is just wrong.

Frei’s condescending dismissal of “generosity without orthodoxy” is typical orthodox thinking. My experience leads me to believe that generosity of any sort is always something. Really something! And some of the most heterodox people I’ve met have demonstrated the most unflinching and consistent generosity. Not only material generosity, but a generous acceptance of lifestyles different from theirs, and of opinions they could never reconcile with their own vision of things.

I thought it might be appropriate, in considering generosity and orthodoxy, to re-cycle my own distinctly heterodox appreciation of generosity as a god worth worshipping in her own right: