Mercy

Step off the curb in any major US city and think about where you walk as you cross the street. Chances are good that you are walking across sewers that flow with the blood of children. After all, abortion clinics typically dispose of the corpses they produce by sending those corpses down ordinary drains. They use garbage disposals that can be bought at any home improvement store to slice and dice the bodies. Very late-term abortionists, men like George Tiller, employ their own crematoriums, of course, but that is rather rare. The Insinkerator is much more popular.

Those who are Christian are often fond of the short prayer, "Lord, have mercy!" It is a good prayer: short, concise and it asks for that which we definitely need. But sometimes we seem to forget what God’s mercy entails.

There was a man named Joseph who had many brothers. They were jealous of him and plotted to kill him. God had mercy on Joseph – instead of being killed, Joseph was merely thrown into a well to die.
But he didn’t die. God had mercy on Joseph. Instead, he was rescued from the well – and sold into slavery.
But he didn’t remain a slave. God had mercy on Joseph. Instead, he was accused of rape by his owner's wife and thrown into the dungeons.

But he didn’t die in the dungeons. God had mercy on Joseph. Instead of dying in prison, he merely languished for years as the man he had helped forgot about him.

That is God’s mercy: saved from immediate death only to die a slow death, saved from slow death only to be enslaved, saved from slavery only through false accusations and dungeons, saved from dungeons only after years of being ignored and forgotten. We could write this off as an aberration, except it isn’t. It’s fairly typical of divine mercy: we are typically saved from the fire so as to better contemplate the frying pan that awaits us.

"The Lord chastises the son whom He loves" says St. Paul in the letter to the Hebrews, and there are endless examples that this is true. Considered in this light, God loved the Pharisees and the Sadducees more than anyone in Jerusalem, for he chastised them more severely than anyone else. We look down our noses at them today, but we shouldn’t. They were beloved of God, even if they didn’t want to recognize it. The trials Christ put them to demonstrated that.

To this very day, we have ineradicable proof that the Jews are beloved of God. Witness the Holocaust. Gypsies (the poor), Catholics, Slavs - these are all beloved of God as well, for the open maw of the Holocaust devoured them all. That purification, those trials, help us understand what life would be like if we had only our sins for company.

Christ gave the Pharisees and Sadducees exactly this purification. He allowed them to remove Him from their midst. As a result, they lost the presence of God, the Temple, and fell into the aimless, mindless theological incoherencies which are modern Judaism. The theological holocaust preceded and accompanied Hitler's work. Today, as the worldwide Jewish population slowly contracepts and aborts itself out of existence, the Holocaust continues for them: trials, purifications, constant reminders of what life is like without God's intimate presence. But they aren't the only ones who receive these trials.

After so many years, it is difficult to bring a new perspective to the pro-life movement’s quest. It started with the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther declared that marriage was no sacrament, rather, God permitted us this institution only in order to salve our human lusts. This irrational concept accompanied the Reformation’s rejection of reason and insistence on faith. That insistence on faith alone and reason be damned led, in turn, to Voltaire’s backlash, the insistence that reason alone was sufficient and faith should be crushed.

As the two heresies fought each other, they brought forth Malthus, the idea that human beings are essentially a blight on the planet. He, in turn, led to Darwin and the movement for social eugenics – more children from the strong, less from the weak. But eugenics could only be accomplished through contraception and sterilization, so the American judiciary destroyed the Comstock laws, legalized contraceptives, and imposed mandatory sterilization on anyone the state ruled to be unfit.

Eugenics became the order of the day, and contraception/sterlization became the sacrament that replaced marriage. Following the Anglo-American example, Germany taught us that we could eliminate the unfit, but German methods were crude. America took those German methods and refined them in every sense. Judicially, chemically, socially, we implemented German policy – forcing ourselves to forget that German policy was itself really just crudely applied American policy – and we showed the Germans how to do it right.

By the late sixties, we had done most of the work. We invented and exported the culture of fornication, divorce, abortion, and rampant child abuse abroad. The culture of fornication and divorce in turn legitimized homosexuality while the culture of contraception and abortion allowed the medical community to begin experiments on human embryos that would have been considered horrific just forty years ago.

Looking back, we see that World War II was simply a hiccup in what would otherwise have been a solidly developed American policy of destroying human dignity in every way possible. America has ever been a Protestant country, and Luther’s work – begun five hundred years ago – grasps nearly at completion today. All that is missing from the total destruction of marriage is legalized pedophilia and polygamy. We have the contraception, the fornication, the divorce, the abortion, the homosexuality already. Protestant courts and Protestant theology has given it to us.

Americans, or at least some Americans, like to think of ourselves as Christians, and in many ways, we are among the most Christian countries in the world. But we can’t fool ourselves on this point. The Lutherans of northern Europe breathed in the ashes of the dead every day as they walked to church. We stroll over the blood of children as we walk to work. We pray for God’s mercy, but when it comes, we ask why God punishes us. Why are we thrown into the well, into chains, into dungeons? Why do we face suicidal terrorists, a world that hates us, constant war?

Joseph, as far as we know, committed no sin, yet received endless purifications. Consider your daily life - is it anything like Joseph's? Or is it really more like Potiphar's? To be honest, it is hard to find an American who does not live in infinitely more comfort than Potiphar ever did. Thus, when we consider Joseph’s trials and then consider our own, there is only one real question. Why aren’t we suffering more?