[Apologetics] Mark Shea on Terri Schiavo

[Dianne Dawson]

Sunday, March 27, 2005
Mark Shea

At the core of reality is Joy

I'm still on hiatus, but since it's Easter, I wanted to scribble some of my thinking about the momentous events of this past week.

George Weigel once remarked that it seemed to him Pope John Paul was the most fearless person he'd ever met. And it seemed to him that John Paul was fearless, not because he'd been through this or that experience, but because he had somehow managed to internalize the reality that the worst thing that could ever possibly happen... had already happened--and God had brought life for the cosmos out of it.

Most of us don't think in those terms. There's a tendency to think that some future war, catastrophe, holocaust, or apocalypse will be The Worst Thing that will ever be. But it's not true. The Apocalypse, when it comes, will only be an image of the Crucifixion. Nothing could be worse than the murder of God, the betrayal of all goodness, the Insanity triumphing over him who is Sanity itself, the defacing of him who is all beauty, our cruelty to him who is all mercy. Everything in us rightly expects that in response to such horrific and demonic evil, there's a butcher's bill to be paid. And there was. But it was paid by the victim. The other shoe has already dropped. And, to our shock and disbelief, it's called Easter.

All this past week we have been watching the relentless and demonic cruelty of the world doing pretty much what it always does: killing the innocent. And not just killing, but doing it with an exquisite sort of cruelty that somehow manages to combine terrible evil with the kind of detailed pettiness that we remember from our encounters with childhood cruelty. 

Of course it does. The world has not changed in 2000 years. It's the same sort of idiot cruelty that pointlessly pressed down a crown of thorns on our Lord's head out of sheer spite. All those moronic rubbery faces of sin out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting turn out to be just portraits of what we look like when we are exulting in raw bullying power. It's the same thing that made it possible for camp guards to laugh as they slaughtered. That's us. That's our Race. This is what we do.

And now we come to Easter. Terri is still dying. The world is still acting like the world. No trumpet split the heavens to fix this. There's been no miracle. And Hell gloats.

But Hell is also nervous, I fancy. It has seen Total Victory in the past. Killing Terri Schiavo is small beer compared to killing Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was not just dead, but stomped into the ground. You cannot be anymore annihilated than he was. And yet, something in the Grand Plan of Hell went terribly wrong. And I cannot help but think that, with Terri Schiavo, the Lowerarchy, in between the press releases about the Peaceful Painlessness of it All, the Dangers of the Rabid Religious Right, and so forth, is holding all night meetings where Screwtape, Slubgob, and the rest of the Hellish Politburo are freaking out about the catastrophic breach in security.

For years, stuff like this murder has been happening. But now, the hairless bipeds have a Face. It has been taken out of the realm of anonymity and theory and played out in excruciating detail in a way that brought it all straight into our living room. And not just any family confronted us, but a self-sacrificial family of devout Catholics who manifestly wanted *nothing* but their daughter to know love and care. They torment our conscience and all the attempts to paint them as somehow motivated by selfishness only make the critic look like dirt.

For three decades, Hell's Ministry for the Promotion of the Culture of Death has been issuing confident press releases that the prolife forces are in abeyance and We've Moved On, only to find that, in the last election, abortion was still a huge issue and Hillary Clinton was compelled to blink and start making pro-life bleats. Worse than that, the principal arm of Hell's work in attacking human life--the Judiciary of the United States--has been able to do that while keeping fairly low profile as far as the average American was concerned. This story widely exposed our Robed Masters more than ever as the ruthless enemies of democracy and common sense that they are. It began to occur to more ordinary people than ever that it is not necessary to simply let the Judiciary go on doing whatever insane thing it wanted. The thought, "Resist!" began to occur to a significant number of people. And not just the thought, the act.

That makes Hell nervous.

But most of all, and by far most frightening to Hell, was the broadening dawn of realization that what faces us is fundamentally a spiritual war, not a political or cultural one. Terri Schiavo has inspired prayer like nothing since 9/11. Indeed, I would argue that this is our *domestic* 9/11.

For we have been on a collision course with our cultural schizophrenia for sometime. On the one hand, we are the Liberator of the World, bringing our Higher Values to peoples living in darkness. On the other hand, we are murdering Terri Schiavo, arresting a kid for trying to give her a glass of water, and arresting a mother for trying to keep her 14 year old from having an abortion. When this momentary distraction with domestic politics ceases, it will be fascinating to see if the "America: The Light and Glory" types can suddenly revert back from the Assyrian spectacle and, with a straight face, declare once again that it our Manifest Destiny to enlighten mankind and remake it in the image and likeness of our culture.

I'm all for America using its power to do good in the world. That's what power is for. But the Mass starts with the Penitential Rite for a reason. Through Terri Schiavo, God has been shouting "Repent" at a nation that has been laboring to avoid looking at the ugly face in the mirror. There is some real hope that more people than ever are finally beginning to do that. And when that happens, real healing can begin. There is a chance that we might recognize that, at present, the war between the West and the Islamosphere is a war between Carthage and Rome, and that whoever wins will still be the enemy of the gospel--if our culture does not repent.

So I'm hopeful. And the oddity is that this too is offensive to some Christians. Just as the defenders of Terri are counter-cultural, so Easter is even more counter cultural. God seems to checkmate us at every turn. The world tells us to be buoyant with bubbly and perky pseudo-fun when we should be wearing sackcloth and ashes. It chatters on about how Terri is "full of peace and euphoria" when it knows that a damned dirty and protracted murder full of torture is being done. 

But there is another reality as well: God commands us to enter into the Joy when we are tempted to despair. Angry Conservative Catholicism is particularly prone to ignoring this command by labeling every command to be joyful as "kumbayah Catholicism". It's not. Joy is, as C.S. Lewis say, the serious business of Heaven. There is such a thing as the sinful will to resist Joy. It the sort of will that says, "How can you be joyful when Robert Lynch is bishop of St. Petersburg?" The answer is, "I can be joyful because Jesus Christ is the Risen Lord of Universe." We are called to be angry, yet sin not. It is perfectly right to be angry at this murder, at the abandonment of Terri by people who should have undertaken her care, at the cruelty, spite, and gloating of the enemies of Life.

But it is a sin to place anger at the core of our being, to relentlessly practice cynicism, to focus ever and always on what is wrong, to overlook what is white in favor of what is gray, and see gray as black as possible. Such adamant insistence on being angry, defeated, bitter, and hopeless when God is telling us, on the Highest Authority, that Joy is the deepest truth, is to allow Hell a completely needless victory. 

I'm not a prophet and I don't know what the immediate future holds. I hope that aging Baby Boomers will get a clue that They're Next. I hope that feminists will figure out that this was not a triumph for their cause. I hope that Americans will lead the world in repenting of this heartless utilitarian rejection of human dignity. I hope that Democrats will flee the Party of Death and Republicans will triumph over the Derbyshire/Sullivan "Religion is all very well in it's place" wing of Selfish Conservatism and offer, not just token gestures, but courageous acts of defiance of the Imperial Judiciary. I hope the rising generation will boldly follow John Paul in being truly counter-cultural and creating the Culture of Life. But I don't know any of that will happen. It's quite possible we will continue to get darker. It's quite possible that as the culture gets darker, God will use the darkness to drive chosen souls toward the light out of sheer repugnance. I don't know what future history
 holds. I only know what eternity holds: Jesus Christ has already defeated death. I have hope that because of this, Terri's blood will again be the seed of the Church. But whether or not I see that happen is irrelevant. The simple fact is, Jesus has conquered death and so, it remains permanently true that "Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian." Therefore, it is not self-delusion or Happy Face Christianity or Kumbaya Catholicism to be joyful. It is cold, sober realism.

Enter into the Joy! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed!



Like a deer that longs for running waters so my soul longs for you, O God.

Ps 42:1
 
 



		
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