Tag Archives: Defending Life

You Are My Hiding Place

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The Anchoress reminded me of a verse from the Evening Prayer of the Divine Office for Thursday Week I.

So let every good man pray to You

in the time of need.

The floods of water may reach high

they shall not reach him.

You are my hiding place, O Lord;

you save me from distress.

You surround me with cries of deliverance.   (Psalm 32: 6-7)

When I read the words, “You are my hiding place,” Corrie ten Boom’s story,”The Hiding Place” came to mind.  I was also reading Immaculee Ilibagiza’s book, “Left To Tell, Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.”  Both Corrie’s story and Immaculee’s book leave vivid images of the faithfulness of God not only in the mind, but in the heart, .  Neither tells the story of the proverbial rose garden that we all want.  Corrie and Immaculee lose the people they love.  Their homelands become unrecognizable.

Corrie introduces us to her sister,  Betsie, who dies in the concentration camp.  What I loved about Betsie was how she made a home in the midst of  the horrific circumstances of the camp; cheery dish towels hung at the window.  Betsie’s actual home was the hiding place she made in the heart of God.  Betsie was prepared to die.

Immaculee’s book describes an actual hiding place, a bathroom that became a haven for her and seven other women for ninety-one days.  It was here they hid, and silently prayed, while hundreds of crazed, “machete-wielding” neighbors sought to butcher them.  Again, God proved to be the real hiding place.

The triumph of  their stories is told by the transformed hearts of these women of faith.  Their books are a witness to God’s faithfulness in times of desperation.

Living in the Womb

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I should be in bed.  It’s too early for this, but if I don’t share it, I won’t be able to get back to bed as I still imagine I will do.  I was listening to a rosary reflection on the Visitation.  Here in essence is what was said:

Our Lady, now expecting,  goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth.  We can be sure that during the journey and the months she was caring for Elizabeth, Mary never forgot the baby growing within her.  Jesus, being fashioned, in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit; that’s an image of what happens to us in our life of grace. That intimate fashioning is what my whole life as a christian is to be.

When we are in the state of grace, we have the Holy Trinity living in us.  We, however, can be so caught up in daily life and its demands,  that we don’t think of that at all.  If we did, we’d be aware of the movements of grace within, and so be motivated more by grace than by nature.  Jesus being fashioned by God in the womb of His Mother Mary; to be in touch with this mystery is not to leave Jesus alone, as it were, but to be with Him as Mary was.  The reality of our life of grace is that,  like Jesus, we are very dependent on Mary.  It is our Father’s plan: to be fashioned by God in intimate dependence on Mary into a perfect likeness of Jesus.  This is the essence of our whole life of  in the Spirit.  Our entire life is now wrapped up in loving God.  In Mary,  for the first time, God is adequately loved by a creature.

Shine

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Here a bright ray of  hope from the up and coming generation.

From The Raving Theist and Happy Catholic

The Problem of Evil

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These verses from Chapter 51 of Imitation of Christ speak to my prayer vs world experiences and fluctuations:

“My Son, thou art not always able to continue in very fervent desire after virtues, nor to stand fast in the loftier region of contemplation; but thou must of necessity sometimes descend to lower things because of thine original corruption, and bear about the burden of corruptible life, though unwillingly and with weariness. So long as thou wear a mortal body, thou shalt feel weariness and heaviness of heart. Therefore thou ought to groan often in the flesh because of the burden of the flesh, inasmuch as thou canst not give thyself to spiritual studies and divine contemplation unceasingly.”

“At such a time it is expedient for thee to flee to humble and external works, and to renew thyself with good actions; to wait for My coming and heavenly visitation with sure confidence; to bear thy exile and drought of mind with patience, until thou be visited by Me again, and be freed from all anxieties. For I will cause thee to forget thy labors, and altogether to enjoy eternal peace. I will spread open before thee the pleasant pastures of the Scriptures, that with enlarged heart thou may begin to run in the way of My commandments. And thou shalt say, ‘The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.‘”

Down to Earth

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It’s a bit of a jolt leaving morning mass to engage life on planet earth again.  The car radio was on; Dr. Meg Meeker, a pediatrician, and Teresa Tomeo of Catholic Connections on Immaculate Heart Radio,  brought the secular world sharply into focus.    Both ladies are terrific.   Each is taking on the the culture of death and perversion as their professions allow.  Dr. Meeker spoke of how she has encountered the effects of  even soft porn in her practice.  Looking at the aftermath of pornography through a pediatrician’s eyes can bring tears to mine.

Dr. Meeker spoke of pornography as being “straight from the pit of hell” and striking at the heart of the home.  It feeds a bent in the human person for evil, especially in someone who has a propensity for sexual evil. “It’s going to breed a whole generation of young men, and even older men, who are going to play it out and the victims are going to be younger and younger and younger children.”  She goes on to say, “Some of the most disturbing, horrific, days I have had as a pediatrician have been when I have had to confront people… deal with young children who have been sexually abused by a perpetrator.  It’s just devastating, absolutely devastating…  It does start with a perverse soft porn, a song, pictures on a page, pictures on a video  screen, and it gets worse and worse and worse.”

There definitely is a reason we been asked to “pray without ceasing.”  Add to prayer, vigilance, in our homes and over our hearts.  “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:8

Choice’s Little Murders

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“And because the homicides involved in abortion are ”little murders” – the kind of private, legally protected murders that kill conveniently unseen lives – it’s easy to look the other way.”

“Cardinal Francis George said recently, too many Americans have ”no recognition of the fact that children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can’t be something you start playing off pragmatically against other issues.”

Archbishop Charles Chaput

From the Lioness:

12-week-fetus1

What choice actually means.

I reached into my pocket and found the small plastic fetus I use to interject reality into the conversation on Life vs. abortion in a time in which we have to show people the cost of abstracted arguments hiding behind “privacy” and “choice”.

 I believe that if we realized the person in-utero is not hanging in some ethereal place while we decide whether or not we can accomodate our lives to their presence in the here and now, realizing that they are a reality and not a choice, and that their one life is all they have on earth and they want it just as much as we want, defend and protect our own, for they precious to us, then the abortion debate would be over.

Here I Am

Here I am, beneath your heart,
My heart beating in happy harmony,
As my frame perceives
The gentle throbbing within your breast,
Serene.

I began in secret and in darkness,
A mystery, even to myself.
Day by day, nature shapes my clay,
As you await the blessed dawn of my birth day.

What I know, I know by existence.
I am now all trust,
Simply growing,
Simply becoming who I am.

Comfort, you give comfort.
Love, you are all I know of love.
As you wait for me, my mother,
The eyes of my soul are wide open.
I behold you, smiling upon me.

Expectant, vigilant and gleeful,
Mother of my moments,
You cradle me.
You are my home of sweet delight.

© 2011  Joann Nelander

Read here what “choice” actually means.

“We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue, and it’s never an end in itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of evil.” Archbishop Charles Chaput

Facts versing fantasy:


Abortion StatisticsHelp CBR and win a pro-life book. Click here.

The following is a list of useful abortion statistics as well as some facts on abortifacients. All abortion numbers are derived from pro-abortion sources courtesy of The Alan Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood’s Family Planning Perspectives.Click here for the Guttmacher Institute’s latest fact sheet on abortion.WORLDWIDENumber of abortions per year: Approximately 42 Million 

Number of abortions per day: Approximately 115,000

Where abortions occur:
83% of all abortions are obtained in developing countries and 17% occur in developed countries.

© Copyright 1996-2008, The Alan Guttmacher Institute. (www.agi-usa.org)

UNITED STATES

Number of abortions per year: 1.37 Million (1996)

Number of abortions per day: Approximately 3,700

Who’s having abortions (age)?
52% of women obtaining abortions in the U.S. are younger than 25: Women aged 20-24 obtain 32% of all abortions; Teenagers obtain 20% and girls under 15 account for 1.2%.

Who’s having abortions (race)?
While white women obtain 60% of all abortions, their abortion rate is well below that of minority women. Black women are more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are roughly 2 times as likely.

Who’s having abortions (marital status)?
64.4% of all abortions are performed on never-married women; Married women account for 18.4% of all abortions and divorced women obtain 9.4%.

Who’s having abortions (religion)?
Women identifying themselves as Protestants obtain 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women account for 31.3%, Jewish women account for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation obtain 23.7% of all abortions. 18% of all abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as “Born-again/Evangelical”.

Who’s having abortions (income)?
Women with family incomes less than $15,000 obtain 28.7% of all abortions; Women with family incomes between $15,000 and $29,999 obtain 19.5%; Women with family incomes between $30,000 and $59,999 obtain 38.0%; Women with family incomes over $60,000 obtain 13.8%.

Why women have abortions
1% of all abortions occur because of rape or incest; 6% of abortions occur because of potential health problems regarding either the mother or child, and 93% of all abortions occur for social reasons (i.e. the child is unwanted or inconvenient).

At what gestational ages are abortions performed:
52% of all abortions occur before the 9th week of pregnancy, 25% happen between the 9th & 10th week, 12% happen between the 11th and 12th week, 6% happen between the 13th & 15th week, 4% happen between the 16th & 20th week, and 1% of all abortions (16,450/yr.) happen after the 20th week of pregnancy.

Likelihood of abortion:
An estimated 43% of all women will have at least 1 abortion by the time they are 45 years old. 47% of all abortions are performed on women who have had at least one previous abortion.

Abortion coverage:
48% of all abortion facilities provide services after the 12th week of pregnancy. 9 in 10 managed care plans routinely cover abortion or provide limited coverage. About 14% of all abortions in the United States are paid for with public funds, virtually all of which are state funds. 16 states (CA, CT, HI, ED, IL, MA , MD, MD, MN, MT, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA and WV) pay for abortions for some poor women.

© Copyright 1998, The Alan Guttmacher Institute. (www.agi-usa.org)

© Copyright 1997, The Alan Guttmacher Institute. (www.agi-usa.org)

© Copyright 1995, Family Planning Perspectives

© Copyright 1988, Family Planning Perspectives
As Presidents’ Day bids us remember our nation’s presidents and the legacy they left to our country, we would do well to pray for President Barack Obama.  The legacy of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” rests first and foremost on the God-given gift of Life.  No life:  no liberty and no pursuit of happiness!

If President Obama’s promises to Planned Parenthood to sign FOCA  (in whatever form it finally emerges) are realized in law, this president’s legacy will be written in the deaths of countless more unborn Americans.

AMDG