Prisoners of Love

I wonder if the reason that some who seek comfort or confirmation in the Catholic blogosphere are outraged when they find blogs like this one, is the commonly-held myth that everyone is exactly like oneself.

Sometimes I fear that I have little in common with many of my most admired colleagues and co-authors on these pages (though of course I could be wrong about that, too).  I still mull over the accusation of the erstwhile suitor who denounced me in an email after reading a post here that he found insufficiently anathematizing of Obama back in 2008 -- an accusation that alluded to the "unspeakable crime" I'd committed against my own unborn child.  I do not deny the crime aspect of it, and I say this not to defend myself: but not everyone, even cradle Catholics, grows up knowing that abortion is a crime, much less an unspeakable one, and I was one such.

Not everyone's parents marched in pro-life rallies; some marched in the opposite direction, to a place where the bumper sticker that reads "You can't be Catholic and pro-abortion" would have been met with real incomprehension.  My father, for instance, was not only glibly and openly pro-abortion, as well as pro-pornography, while my mother suffered silently by; he was also a drinker and a philanderer, and during fights on these topics my mother would sometimes, in a dramatic gesture whose symbolism could not be lost even upon young children, throw her wedding nightgown out the window (I think she would collect it later, after things had cooled down somewhat).  And there is many a church in which abortion is never mentioned at all (I can't recall a single bus going down to Washington in January from my own childhood parish, for example, though it was very much involved in the Sanctuary movement).

Suffice it to say that if you grew up in a family in which all its members loved God and each other, and if you had the added benefit of receiving good catechesis, you should really consider yourself extremely fortunate.  You might also consider that those you see embracing positions of apparent evil often scarcely have any idea that they are doing so.  It's easy to forget that evil rarely displays itself in all its ugliness.  On the contrary, evil almost always appears as if it were good, and had good ends in mind; if it did not, a scant few people would ever consciously choose it. 

It would be so much easier to love one another if everyone really were like oneself.  But I suppose if it were that easy to love, it would not be such a dreadfully painful struggle to try to be a Christian.

As for me, I thought that if I got pregnant M. would love me.  Then, when he offered it as the only possible solution to our predicament, I thought that if I had the abortion he would love me.  I had no idea at the time that (as it later emerged in marriage counseling) seeing me in that state of abjection and woundedness had in fact, or so he said, inspired him to love me.  It was too late; I never trusted him again, though I did marry him; but I suppose a love whose building blocks were desperation, need, misguided passion, and the sacrifice of an unborn child must have been doomed to failure from the start.