Fourth Sunday of Advent 2019
The Plan of the Parent
I have to admit that even though I have been writing and donating and praying for the conversion of all involved in the abortion industry ever since that black birthday in 1973 when this unspeakable act was made legal by the Supreme Court, the film Unplanned shook me to the core. I had barely ten dry-eye minutes in the whole movie. I joined in the applause at the end and also the dead silence that marked our exit from the theater. You see, I felt a deep solidarity with the victims, children, mothers, and even those who like Abby Johnson were “complicit” in the evil acts of racist Margaret Sanger’s organization.
It was sometime in the late summer of 1946 that Miss Rooney stepped onto the Missouri Pacific platform here in San Antonio, and was picked up by a worker from the Texas Cradle Society. She was frightened after spending the better part of two days on her ride from Chicago, but hopeful that the balance of her pregnancy and childbirth would be better than the first part. Her family had exploded when news of her affair and pregnancy had leaked out, and they had quickly made arrangements compatible with their Catholic faith. But what a scandal to send her twelve hundred miles away to keep the matter private! Only a handful knew about her condition, and her months-long visit to her “sick aunt in another state.”
I was born on January 22 of the following year, and adopted just a few days later by a childless Catholic couple who had me baptized on Candlemas, 1947. They were both in their forty-second year of life and knew this was their only opportunity to become parents. They were the only ones I ever knew, and my dad was so delighted to be a father he proudly introduced me as their “adopted boy.” I thought the two words just naturally joined together.
If I had been conceived after that day in 1973, I’m quite certain I would have never seen the light of day alive, for Chicago is one of the regional centers of the abortion industry. Every time I hear the word, I feel personally insulted and grieve for the millions of my siblings who will never know the breath of life.
So what does all this have to do with today’s Scripture, with today’s celebration of Laetare Sunday–“rejoice Sunday”? Abby Johnson, and all the thousands of American adults who kid themselves that they are “helping women” by engineering the death of their preborn children, are the younger son in today’s parable of Divine Mercy. We’ve all known teenagers who have been or now are at odds with their folks. Maybe we’ve even been those teenagers who have been or now are at odds with their folks? This immature and ungrateful kid has a stupid idea to get what he thinks he deserves–half his father’s property–and go off and do what he wants. He is shocked when dad says “OK.” The reader, I think, is usually shocked at this, too. And the idiot goes off and publicly humiliates his whole family by, in his older brother’s words, “devouring [father’s] living with prostitutes.” Soon it’s gone and the kid is reduced to the lowest job possible–feeding pigs. The food he can afford isn’t even as good as the slop he gives to the swine.
So the next phase of his plan is obvious. Even the slaves on his dad’s farm live better than he is living now. He rehearses a repentance speech, concluding with a plea to be made a slave, walks home and then his plan totally falls apart. No more than his words of repentance are heard. The father has his own plan, probably thought out from the first day of his prodigal son’s absence. The calf is fatted. It will be slaughtered and cooked and everyone will keep festival, for the lost has returned, the son is restored to the family.
Woody Allen, who is like the broken clock that is still right twice a day, famously wrote, “if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” The prodigal son, like our prodigal culture, has a plan for human happiness. It’s like most adolescent plans, crafted in barely functional cerebral cortices. It goes like this: “I’ll determine what I like to do–what my passions drive me to crave–and then figure out a way to do them all the time. Then I’ll live happily ever after.” The child and the culture then find out that there are short-term thrills in fast cars, loose morals, drugs and alcohol. The “safe sex” fails and STD’s and pregnancy follows and then–ever faithful to the short-term fix–comes antibiotics and abortion. The plan of the prodigal son, the plan of the prodigal culture, ends, as St. Paul predicted, in sin and death.
None of this can work because all of it confuses ends and means. We are made, Genesis affirms, in the image and likeness of God. We have sinned and fallen short and one of the sequellae shows up as a hobbled reason and a weakened will. Our passions take control of our will, and the sinful things we do literally rewire our brains to think that good acts are bad and bad acts are good. It’s the only explanation for the degradation our culture has permitted all over. Those who mutilate their bodies in the search for a new identity as a gender God did not plan for them, those who kill babies before they are born, those who finance this actually fool themselves into thinking they are heroes. Maybe even we have bought into some of it and convince ourselves we are taking humanity into a better existence.
Not at all. All the abortuaries in our nation will eventually close. It is inevitable. Why do I say that? Because Americans are contracepting and aborting the next generations into political nothingness, while Muslim immigrants are filling in the void and having children. Ultimately it seems the Islamic creed will be the law of the land and they don’t tolerate abortion. Their plan is to make all humanity into slaves of the one God who is decidedly not a Father, our merciful Father. Ultimately they will make our great grandchildren not into sons and daughters of the triune God, but rather tributaries of their solo deity.
That’s if we do nothing. The plan of the Father is much better. He wants all humans to be His children, to be one with His Firstborn, Jesus Christ, worshiping in spirit and truth, in the Holy Spirit of Truth. So teach your children and grandchildren well, and help them to learn the Gospel of Life. All of us have failed that Gospel in one way or another. We at least have not done enough to promote it in God’s world. But Jesus Christ is God’s plan, His means to eternal mercy and forgiveness. “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” This we must share if our families and our nation are to survive in peace, love and freedom.
