bell·weth·erI was talking to my mother on the phone last night and realized just how far I'd come in not thinking like the rest of our society. I can't remember why this came up but she suddenly was laughing and saying, "Why won't the pope just quit? That stubborn old guy ... what is his problem?" I was shocked into silence.
Pronunciation: 'bel-'we-[th]&r, -"we-
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, leading sheep of a flock, leader, from belle bell + wether; from the practice of belling the leader of a flock
: one that takes the lead or initiative : LEADER; also : an indicator of trends
I stammered, "But we love our Papa," thinking to myself, "can I sound any lamer or more sentimental or more Catholic?" Because I knew that wasn't going to get me anywhere with my mom. "He can't even talk." was her reply. I pulled myself together and pointed out that he was showing our society a wonderful example of how old age or sickness didn't mean you had to be shoved into a corner ... and then dropped the big bomb, "like Terri Schiavo down in Florida. Her husband's trying to kill her and no one's stopping him."
Her tone grew cold. "She's been in a coma for twelve years."
"She isn't in a coma, Mom."
"Well, she's in a vegetative state."
"No, she's not. I've seen videos of her responding to her mother and people around her."
"Well," my mother said dismissively, "I don't agree with you."
"But it's a video. You don't agree or disagree with it. It shows you what it shows you."
And then, because we love each other and didn't want to go past the point of no return, we changed the subject.
So, you probably can understand why, when my mother brought up how curious she was to see Million Dollar Baby, I just told her about how all the movie critics liked it too. There wasn't any point in bringing up the whole euthanasia issue ... we were already running on pure luck in that conversation.
My mother is a wonderful person, kind and good to anyone she meets, and would never knowingly harm anyone. She also is an atheist and, consequently, much of the time has no reason to question what modern culture holds to be "good." She truly believes that we are simply very intelligent animals and when we die ... poof ... we disappear. That's it.
I can't be upset with what she thinks. A few years ago I would have agreed with my mother on every point except the atheism. She gets her news from television and The New York Times. She is only saying what a lot of people think, a bellwether in essence for which way the wind is blowing on current issues. However, it makes two things perfectly clear to me.
The first is that we truly are those bits of yeast Jesus spoke of, the light that can change the world. If my mother doesn't hear a different viewpoint from me, where will she hear it? She may not agree but at least someone has mentioned a few facts from the opposite point of view. Without Christians who hold the line against the culture of death, there is no one to say anything or stop anyone.
The second realization was connected to Million Dollar Baby. I have watched with great interest as Barbara Nicolosi at Church of the Masses and Jeffrey Overstreet at Looking Closer Journal have traded viewpoints about this movie. Nicolosi maintains that the overwhelmingly negative presentation of Christians and support for euthanasia make the movie dangerous; that it validates euthanasia as an option of love. Overstreet holds that the movie presents both sides in an issue that we must examine and that to suppress the other point of view is dangerous censorship.
I haven't seen the movie so couldn't really come down on one side or the other until that conversation with my mother. I realized that even if Million Dollar Baby was very fair presenting euthanasia pros and cons, Barbara Nicolosi was right. My mother has no reason to think that there is such a thing as a soul or believe in the sanctity of life itself as a gift from God. She would take that movie as affirmation of her viewpoint. She doesn't care about the cons of the argument because she thinks they are based on stupidity, not compassion or love. It would take a truly passionate and intelligent presentation of the opposite side to make her begin to rethink it. She has not had any reason to go through the process that I have of reexamining all my beliefs against what the Catholic Church teaches; an examination was often painful and forced me to abandon long-held "truths" for a much brighter light that called "black black and white white" as Fulton Sheen says in Life of Christ.
What this says about society as a whole, if my mother is truly the bellwether I believe her to be, is a very scary proposition. If a 70 year old grandmother holds these views and thinks them perfectly reasonable we are much closer to the sort of situation that exists in Holland today than I realized. I do not know what the answer is and, truth be told, there is undoubtedly not merely one answer at all. Again, we are back to Jesus' analogy of the yeast. Each of us holds a bit of the key, even if it is only a daughter forcing herself to talk about the tough stuff with her mother on the phone and both of them tolerating, in love, hearing what the other side thinks. It's a start anyway.
Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.C.S. Lewis
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