A Ritual Dis honoured

Dear friends in my last issue of newsletter (issue 132) I spoke about a service that some abortion facilities offer the aborting women, that is, the services of a Doula.  A doula is meant to be a pregnancy and delivery support, one could say, companion for this last part of the journey.

Abortion facilities have taken this noble task and now use it to stand by the woman as she has her abortion.

then her job is to calm her down and allay her fears.  Etc. It seems that abortion facilities (never use the word clinics because clinic implies medical care, healing not killing) are able to take some beautiful life element and turn it into something grotesque.

A new “service” came to my attention in early September.  Service whereby a late term abortionist in USA (Dr? Leroy Carhart) offers to the aborting woman/parents the opportunity of viewing, holding, cuddling, taking photos, having a footprint of the baby, funeral services.  This after the baby has been killed by abortion and delivered dead.
I must admit to sitting down and shedding many tears of anger and frustration.  After twenty three years I keep thinking that I cannot hear anything more that will distress me but yes this story broke my heart.
I’ve held a dead baby (not abortion) in my arms over thirty years ago and then followed with the mum behind the tiny white coffin and to this day I cannot forget the look of the dead infant or the unnatural stillness of her mother.  Her mother was in shock and distant. Away. During the burial she did not look at the tiny coffin, or little doll like infant.   Holding her hand it was like holding the hand of a person dying. Cold. No tears, just not there.
I’ve seen my week old baby sister in her little white coffin and remember the look on her face. Her gently closed eyes and beautiful lashes. I can still see them. This over 45 years ago. I remember the coffin sitting on our laps in Dad’s car and his stoic face as we drove to the cemetery (mum still ill in hospital) to bury her.  I still have her certificate and her plot number.  I remember the awful grey, different, unusual weird colour on her face and her gently closed eyes.
Like they would open any minute and she would smile.  Like a little baby doll in a beautiful white lacy dress and such tiny hands.  I remember Carmelina and the image of her and the image of my friend’s baby and I remember the image of our family friends whose 7 month old little boy died of SIDS and the parents so still. Not crying. Just still.
These images of death of infants never go away because the death of a baby is so unnatural.  It’s not meant to happen that way. Babies are born and they grow and become older and so forth. And when they die through miscarriage or stillbirth (unintentional death) are never forgotten. The day, time, moment remembered. 
So how can this abortionist invite parents who have ASKED that their baby be killed by him in some gruesome method then offer them what he considers consolation?

How can he offer spiritual recommendations?  How can he offer or place in their minds an image of the infant that they asked to have killed and then this image, in the dark of night returns to memory to haunt them. ?
 How can he suggest that they hold the baby that he killed at their request?
How can he suggest a viewing, just like any “normal” death?
How can he suggest that once the process of healing begins they might want a memory of their child?
If the abortion and death requires a “process of healing” then surely the murder of their child must mean something to them because there is a “process of healing” which will happen.
How can he convince himself and others that he and his practice offer the parents “kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect for over 45 years?”
Who’s the courtesy, kindness etc. for?  The Parents? what about the baby?  Big enough to be viable, what does he offer the child? A Potassium injection to the heart, Partial birth abortion or some other more gruesome death? 
Has he killed so many babies that he has lost all sense of right and wrong? All sense of humanity? All sense of being himself human being. Of simply feeling.   This surely must be it.
What kind of wickedness has overcome this society that these things can happen?
Are these deaths sacrifices to atone for the sins of parents, women eating of the fruit again, and men being absent, society, and humanity? 
He has much information on his website which one can read with horror and shudders.
He does not shy away from the term “baby” he knows what he is doing. Indeed his response in an interview when asked if he has a problem with killing a baby, he said “I have no problem if it’s in the mother’s uterus”
Is this where the theory about a child not being human being until it is outside of the mother’s body?  So what is it immediately after the birth if not the same baby before birth or is this law cop out?

 We gave to Caesar something that he should never have had and I suppose Caesar plays god with it.

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Conjugal Honour (Casti Connubii Pius XI).

 Love of husband and wife joined together in pure intimacy.

 Contemporary society seems to have lost the understanding and the meaning of conjugal honour (Casti Connubii, citing the Angelic Doctor) or even the will or knowledge of how to protect conjugal honour.

 Why?

Perhaps many reasons can be cited for this loss of knowledge but first what might we call conjugal honour? My understanding of conjugal honour is that union between husband and wife in which no other can share or enter in.  Only a trothed couple may share that conjugal honour. That intimate community which resembles that of the divine community. A community where life abides.  No other community can say that they contain that mystery which is in married state with all its secrecy, laws, language and love. No other community demands such honour as does the conjugal community.

it’s in this community which both (husband and wife) enter and vow to remain united until the time comes for one or the other or both to go.  Sometimes leaving the community individually at other times together, hand in hand, they move to that greater community of which their own conjugal community was a forerunner and foretaste of. We have in our contemporary time, in our day lost the sense of conjugal honour and its meaning because of the slow changes in sexual understanding and morality which has entered this time.
“It was because you were unteachable” he said “that Moses allowed you o divorce your wives, but it was not so from the beginning” (Mt 19:8).

 It’s because in the past two generations we have been found to be unteachable and a pseudo type of relationship became confused with conjugal intimacy and conjugal honour.  A forced and artificial application of the conjugal state has been forced upon society. A societal invention.  A pseudo conjugal state which cannot even contemplate but only simulate the intimate community where conjugal honour resides and its where “life” can abide.

Beginning with  “living together”  which can be said to be a trial run or even a probation marriage where if difficulties appear the intimate community of the couple can be disbanded  or even when desires wane and something new is sought then that community which can envelope and protect life is abandoned. 

The couple entering pseudo marriage cannot establish the intimate community which lasts the term of life, the same life that they hide from view because of the agreed temporariness of their pledge based only on physical responses.  Otherwise the union would be sought to be made whole and total.  The Conjugal union would be so honoured that it would seem to be right that that union be protected from intrusion into that intimate community so that life residing there would know that honour.

Probation intimacy, divorce, make to fade that intimate community (where love abides) because both are a rejection or refusal of that knowledge about conjugal honour. Conjugal honour has slowly been withdrawn from the intimacy of the couple.

Rejection of conjugal honour cannot see that in every woman is written the code word   “mother.” In that conjugal community “mother” has a special meaning. And male has the code word “father” with its own special meaning. These two words are the result of honour given to both who’ve entered that special intimate community which constitutes married state or marriage. Conjugal honour is deeply written into the sexual act and may not to be violated because “it was not so in the beginning” (Mt 19:8.)
Loss of conjugal reverence has led to abortion to exponential growth.  Loss of knowledge about conjugal reverence has meant that there are several generations who have not known or been taught about holiness of the body and how the body has been designed to be honoured because it has been created to be a part of an intimate community in the image of divine, because like the divine it was designed to perpetuate life.   Not a group or community of people gathering with the same beliefs and ideals but an intimate community so holy and where  only two may enter and be held together there to continue the work of furthering creation.  The template community designed by God “in our own image” (Gn1:27). This new intimate community is to imitate that love and life.  We have abortion to horrendous degrees. We have purposely sterile relationships.  We have death demanding calls, because first there was a loss of honour. Loss of conjugal honour. Loss of conjugal awe. Loss of conjugal reverence and unholy intrusion into that space of intimacy where only honour, respect, reverence, and awe should have abided because this sacred place is the office of the nature of love.  The understanding what intimate love is and be manifested.  
Modern sexual couplings (experimental/life choices/refusal of conjugal intimacy) cannot declare conjugal honour because of the pseudo nature of  that intimacy fails part of its mandate, donation from him to her and her to him and their individual donation gives a gift of wholly and completely of themselves to the other. No other can ever replicate the original donation.
Within every marriage there abide three persons, the husband, wife and Holy Spirit (lord and giver of life) who enters the union and remains.  The spirit does not know how to be party to fourth or fifth, sixth, intrusion. The holiness of that union is so because the Spirit has accepted the vow of fidelity and the spirit does not know how to be unfaithful.Understanding of the language of the body not in prudishness but with respect, reverence and awe because it’s the way God deemed the mystery of life
A return to the understanding of how God desired life must needs be the new overtures spoken to humankind which must speak again to man and woman and speak to them of their precious spousal nature which is not to be used and abused, discarded,  because reverence for their bodies has been rejected and the community of intimacy invaded and the gift  designed in that community, the infant discarded, but they are to hear their true story which is that they have been created for life and great honour.
The new language must the speak truth within these times, the truth which has been lost or even forgotten or a distant memory, as the echo of something which happened long ago.   It must speak of the conjugal mystery an honour due to it which tabernacles life. It must do this because due to the loss of such knowledge the language spoken in this day serves death. The new language for recovery of treasures of the Garden (conjugal intimacy) must speak of Holiness and speak the word life.

 Dear friends I hope you like the above I began thinking about this and its meaning when I came across the words “conjugal honour”. I have pondered much about this as I scan our society and its trajectory.

 

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