THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR HOLINESS AND GOODNESS

Yes, I know, there is wickedness all around us and it seems everyone has either rejected Christ or fallen away from worshipping him. Depravity is celebrated and government supported -- unwanted children killed before birth, the defeated sick and disabled euthanized. Yes, I know, that is true. But I also know there are still countless people proclaiming Christ's light and love for a broken world. There is still hope for holiness and goodness. Clink below.

SHE SPOKE ABOUT LIFE'S AGONIES AND LOVE'S TRIUMPHS

LaRee

A number of years ago, my wife, LaRee, and I gave a keynote speech to over 800 people at a U.S. National Right to Life Prayer Breakfast in Pittsburgh. We told our story about living with incurable and aggressive multiple sclerosis for three decades: I spoke from the perspective of a sufferer. She spoke from the perspective of a spouse watching the sufferer 

It was extraordinarily rare for LaRee because, by nature, she's shy and prefers to stay in the background. If memory serves me correctly, it was only one of three times LaRee agreed to publicly speak from a family member's perspective.

What I said was inconsequential compared to her testimony. I'm forced to live with disease and disability. LaRee chose to stay. She has so much life experience, from abortion to end-of-life issues. LaRee's heart has often been broken yet remains tender and open to love for love's sake.

She spoke about the pain of watching a number of loved ones suffer and die. Her mother spent her last years in a substandard nursing home. Without LaRee's constant advocacy on her mother's behalf, who knows how poor her care would have been? LaRee helplessly watched the infirmities of extreme old age and deaths with her beloved grandparents. For more than 30 years she has lived with my degeneration with aggressive multiple sclerosis (MS).

It was at my urging that LaRee agreed to walk on the stage to address people from all across America. She sat with me at the table provided and looked down at the tablecloth. When it was her turn to address the audience, she slowly began to speak. Her voice trembled as she began to speak. 

"There is a special torment experienced by those who watch a loved one suffer. To see disease rack their bodies, and souls, increases the sum total of suffering ... because I suffer too."

The room became quiet as a tomb. Even the sound of air vents stopped. Still too timid to look up, LaRee continued, "I believe it is harder to watch degenerative disease torture and break my loved ones than to actually suffer the disease."

Something profound was about to unfold. LaRee slowly raised her head and looked at the expectant audience.

Her gentle brown eyes revealed a grief of unspoken sadness ... finally about to be revealed. And yet in those same beautiful eyes, there was also a hint and a glint of hard-won victory of love. Her voice grew stronger with conviction that resonated to the back of the banquet hall. LaRee was coming into her stride:

"Despite countless trials, love has prevailed. Love is like the two sides of a precious coin. The two sides of love are this: It is life’s greatest ecstasy but also the cause of life’s greatest agonies and anguish. The 19th Century writer, Victor Hugo said, 'To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. To love is a consummation.' -- And so it is."

She paused, sighed, then continued: 

"And yet as a wife, mother, and grandmother, I want more, and I ask further. I want to protect those I love from pain, emotional hurts, disappointments, and even life as it ends—but I cannot. So often I sat at the bedside of a suffering loved one and begged God to give me their pain – as though there is some quota of suffering to be filled which I can bargain about with God. There is not."

Thunderous silence!

LaRee went on to speak of life's agonies and love's triumphs, of broken-hearted victories that ultimately prove that blessings can appear as burdens, and that every life is precious and worth living, even when circumstances indicate otherwise. She spoke of a spiritual beauty only to be found in human brokenness and poverty of spirit.

It is in those shattered and tattered times of sorrow -- after convulsive weeping has reached its apex and then subsides -- that the individual collapses emotionally and spiritually defeated and at the end of their human resources. Their heart lies on the floor raw and open like a deep wound. But it is open. Stillness descends. A small voice whispers "Weary and heavy-heart, come to Me and I will give you rest." The Divine lover and the loved can finally enter a communion of hearts. The loved understands everything happens for a reason and all things really do work together for the good of those who love God; human suffering today will give way to immeasurable glory tomorrow.

And although she did not say it, the inference was clear: the point of life is to love God with our whole being and one another with complete abandon. The joy is part of the pain and the pain is part of the joy. That's how love works.

"For now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see things with perfect clarity. For all I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely." Three things will last forever -- faith, hope and love -- and the greatest of these is love." (1 Corinthians 13.12-13)

THE ESSENCE OF GIGANTIC AND NOBLE LOVE

Mount Edith Cavell

If you go into Canada's Jasper National Park, you may see the beautiful and majestic Mount Edith Cavell.  The mountain’s namesake was the daughter of an Anglican vicar. Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a British nurse and patriot during the 1st World War. Although she tended wounded soldiers on both sides at the Berkendael Medical Institute in Brussels, she helped nearly 200 allied soldiers get false documents and flee into neutral Holland and escape to England.

Edith Cavell

Edith Cavell was caught by the German military, arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to be executed by firing squad on October 12^th 1915.  On the night before her execution she wrote to a friend: “My dear girl, how shall I write to you this last day? Nothing matters when one comes to the last hour but a clear conscience.” That same evening Cavell told a prison chaplain, “I have no fear or shrinking. I have seen death so often that it is not fearful or strange to me. And this I would say, standing in view of God and eternity: I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness against anyone.”

In life, Edith Cavell’s Christian faith motivated her brave and

selfless actions of human service. Facing death, her faith gave her strength to look toward heaven with expectation, courage and love for others ― even forgiving those who were about to shoot her. It was with these sentiments and her towering faith that Edith Cavell drew her last breath and crossed the threshold from this world to the next. She was 49 years old.

Edith Cavell is an example to all Christians to live larger than life, even today more than a 100 years after her death.  She took seriously Jesus’ commandment that we should love one another as He first loved us. He said that all people would know that we are his disciples by the way we love each other. (John 13.34-35) Love is our greatest witness for Christ.

How did Christ love us? He loved us with a self-sacrificing love

that included dying for our sake even when we are his enemies. Gigantic and noble love that is rooted in Christ can raise the best of human ideals to the height of mountain peaks and the realm of angels. Christian love seeks the welfare of all and never seeks to wrong any. Christian love looks for opportunities to do good not only to fellow-believers but to everyone. When society’s love waxes cold Christian love excels.

Never underestimate the power of divine love expressed through human action.  I can personally attest to it.  Even at my lowest points I have been the recipient of Christ-like love.  It was Christian love that brought me into the Catholic Church.

Monsignor
Bill Irwin

Watching vivid applications of Christian love through people like my friend Monsignor Bill Irwin brought Christianity alive for me and multitudes of other people.  His witness was Christian love in action that spoke to me more than eloquently than words, clever apologetics or powerful homilies.  His spiritual legacy lives on in communities through Catholic Social Services which he founded in 1961.

I visited Father Bill as he was dying in 2004. Although he could not speak I had the privilege of sitting beside his bed to say goodbye to my old friend, until we meet again in eternity.

Like Edith Cavell, Monsignor Bill Irwin was another example of living larger than life for the sake of Christ’s work on earth. There may not be a mountain named after him but his witness was just as large.  He taught me that “impossible” is often just a state of mind. With Christ all things are possible.

The Church teaches that charity is a theological virtue “by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God. Jesus makes charity the new commandment.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1822 and 1823.)

Christian love expressed can change individual lives and even entire societies. It was Christian love and its charitable ethic that motivated the establishment of many of the earliest hospitals, orphanages and schools. When considering Christian charity names immediately come to mind like Vincent de Paul and the Daughters of Charity, Mother Teresa and the Sisters of Charity. Millions of ordinary Christian charity workers and volunteers have also chosen to live above life and elevate human service to a love offering to God. We commonly see it in pro-Life pregnancy care centres for women in crisis pregnancies and their babies. We see it in Christian end-of-life care that always affirms life and never denies it. We see it in Christian outreach ministries throughout inner cities across North America. These examples are the essence of gigantic and noble love that soars to the height of mountain peaks and the realm of angels.

IS PLANNED PARENTHOOD OUT OF STEP WITH AMERICA'S MORAL CONSENSUS?

The bill to repeal Obamacare included defunding Planned Parenthood -- America's largest chain of abortion mills. It was defeated in the U.S. Senate. We must not underestimate the gravity of such an event. America had an opportunity to cut links with a vile organization that kills over 300,000 unborn children every year. Planned Parenthood is dependent upon government funding of more than $500,000,000 annually. This makes the American Congress complicit the systematic slaughter of innocent human life before they took their first breath! A few pro-abortion Republicans swayed the outcome and gave the deciding votes. This included formerly pro-Life Senator John McCain. Perhaps his brain cancer is affecting his thinking; if that is the case then you must reserve judgment. If not, then he has a great deal to answer, despite being sick, by supporting such a despicable organization as Planned Parenthood.

Continuation of this government sponsored holocaust is a horrible betrayal of America's original vision:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 

In the parlance of that time, men meant everyone. That vision was a

Thomas Jefferson

daring and beautiful dream of how things could be, should be, and must be -- unless absolute truths are nothing but empty lies.  Those blazing words penned by Thomas Jefferson gave a moral benchmark to guide a nation committed to justice, and what eventually come to be known by future generations as universal human rights. These rights were (and remain) universal because they belong to everyone beginning when they began. 

Thomas Jefferson rightfully put the right to life first because all other rights depend upon this first right in order to exist. To deny this original right to any group or segment of humanity is prejudice, bigotry, or sophistry.  

GOVERNMENT FUNDING OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD 

Congress can present a new stand-alone bill for vote in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to stop funding Planned Parenthood. It will be in their hands to finally severe Planned Parenthood's parasitical dependency on government funding which is so offensive to millions of taxpayers. An organization so contentious should not be receiving government assistance. 

[Although my perspective is Canadian, there was a time -- many years ago -- when I worked for the federal government's largest granting agency. We took particular care to avoid funding of any organization offensive a wide swath of the public.]  

It is time for the American Congress to be presented for vote a bill that deals exclusively with defunding Planned Parenthood. The bill must not have any added amendments. The vote must not deal with levels of Planned Parenthood funding -- but whether they should receive any government funding at all. 

Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate must be asked to vote (Yes or No) to defund Planned Parenthood. Include in the bill's preamble the biological established science (not politically established positions) about when human life begins. Let the preamble to the bill establish for the Members and Senators the percentage of total abortions that actually involve rape or incest. or risk to a mother's life. Give other information about average age, racial percentages and economic status of women seeking abortions. Then call for the vote.

This will bring into clear focus who in the Senate and House of Representatives actually supports the abhorrent work of Planned Parenthood and who does not. If the bill passes, and Planned Parenthood is defunded then voters can judge politicians' actions either way. (But imagine the non-contentious life-affirming programs and measures that can be funded with the $500,000,000 annually that would free up!) 

But if the bill fails to pass and Planned Parenthood -- America's largest abortion provider and marketer of baby parts -- continues to receive half a billion dollars a year in government funding, let voters decide next election. Everyone from from the politicians in Washington to main street voters across America will decide whether they support the right of every child to be alive, or whether they support the barbarity of Planned Parenthood's death alternative to unwanted and unplanned children.

It is time America to vote. Present a bill dealing exclusively with government funding for Planned Parenthood. Do not let the vote be complicated with arguments about how much funding. The question simple: should Planned Parenthood be propped up by government support. 

Here is why: I believe that Planned Parenthood is out of step with the with most of America. They insult the Founders' towering vision to which most Americans still embrace and hold dear. That is why Planned Parenthood would resist such a bill.

MDP

GROUP-THINK AND THOUGHT POLICE OF TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CANADA

John Diefenbaker was Canada's 13th Prime Minister (1957-63). Among other things, he said that as a Canadian he was free to speak without fear ... He said it was part of his Canadian heritage of freedom. Not any more. Government bodies, liberal secular media, powerful special interests groups seek out people who believe contrary to acceptable group-think then publicly vilify them. They destroy dissenters' reputations and hauling them before quasi-judicial human rights commissions or courts to be punished with fines or jailed. 

MDP