Blessed are They Who Mourn!

“Zion was saying, ‘The Lord has abandoned me,

the Lord has forgotten me.’

Does a woman forget her baby at the breast,

or fail to cherish the son of her womb?

Yet even if these forget,

I will never forget you.” (Isaiah 49:14-15)

I am already positively haunted by tomorrow morning’s First reading for the 8^th Sunday throughout the Year (A). Haunted simply wondering about all those people in the congregations of so called “developed” countries who will fumble with those words knowing that an older or younger brother or sister was aborted…

The poignant words, “Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you”, take on a different meaning for the brother or sister of a child aborted, a complex one (how’s that for understatement?). The mixed feelings of these listeners, if they happen to be in the pews, the thoughts of these children who escaped the morning after pill, or the vacuum or the knife (really by chance) cannot be hardened against the siblings they never knew, cannot not be troubled by the decision which limited their family either before or after them.

Who are those who cannot see the horror of it all? Has our society really become so gray, so dull as not to shudder at the violence which cannot be explained?

Blessed are all those who mourn! Blessed are all those who hunger and thirst for justice and for the rights of the unborn!