The Life We Choose
An unplanned conversation outside Planned Parenthood
I’ve passed the dedicated protesters who stand in front of Planned Parenthood with anti-abortion signs. I pass them and pass judgment and keep driving.
But today I heard a voice telling me to stop. To accept a challenge. To resist looking for the easy pictures to take, the easy conversations to have, the affirmation of meeting people who confirm my culture and dominant views.
I drove past them as always, but then answered the voice by quickly making a u-turn, pulling up to the curb, and making my approach.
There was an unseen barrier between us that felt so insurmountable. So much so I felt the need to ask if they were willing to talk about what they were doing. Mary looked hesitant at first, but not uninviting. She looked to Ron as if to seek his assessment. He agreed with a hint of Mary’s hesitance, but with a dash of male confidence. As if he expected nothing good to come of it, but he could handle it either way.
If I pride myself on anything it’s the ability to talk to anyone effortlessly even when our differing views make me uncomfortable. But I’m realistic. It is absolutely possible for a discussion to go sideways and piss me off too.
In this case my goal was to communicate with human beings rather than rivals, to speak to another camp as if we were in the same one. I started by confirming my Catholic upbringing. My Baptist conversion. My final landing in Lutheranism. My walk with Christ and my falling short of Him constantly.
They were Catholic and convicted. We were on a level plane.
Ron believes so deeply what he believes that he’s willing to stand on a cold Minnesota street, snowy, rainy, or whatever, to let the world know about his view of a great evil.
When I ask him what motivates him to spend his time this way he livens, becomes more animated, and incredulously points to a genocide he’s called to block. His language is firm, on the nose, uncompromising, and there is no middle way for his cause. It is black and white. Life or death.
Mary, for her part, takes a longer route to sharing her philosophy. She tells me several deeply personal family stories, all based in trauma, all told without formality or pretense. The stories involve all the sins families hide and deny and bury, except when they are Mary, when they believe there is still good news in a world where evil is a given, where it isn’t a surprise that trauma happens, in a world where Jesus hasn’t returned and many are tired of waiting.
The impossible level of generosity in how I tell this story, how I relate to you about it, is equal to the crazy difficulty I had in conducting it without allowing my ego and intemperance grab the wheel and drive me headlong into a righteous ditch.
If I were to meet these two in a confrontational situation where argument and verbal battling were the game, I’d have a high capacity for torching them. But I was called to approach them with whatever grace my dirty soul maintains. I made a choice to obey the call and limp into peace. I infiltrated their space without invitation and they were open to letting me trespass.
So the test here is to listen without prejudice and to hear without resistance, to navigate the predictable triggers when they suggest Planned Parenthood is only motivated by money, when they relate stories of young women savaged by evil who carry the evidence of a crime to term, believing that bearing the fruit of bad men is a show of grace and nobility - a position I struggle to reconcile but recognize as deeply held.
I have complex ideas about the topic. I don’t allow myself any form of piety about what I believe because for me it exists within that box of human puzzles and mysteries we may or may not ever solve. I can have strong opinions, but what I can’t find is certainty. I am Christian and libertarian and skeptical and conservatively progressive. I live in complexity and have no right to hold a firm idea longer than it encounters another one.
I ask Ron and Mary what they hope for in the broader cultural debate about the issue that animates them. How do they think the argument will be won? What is the most productive we can all be about it?
The one challenge I issue them is that people on the other side of this debate from them often point to the idea that those who say they are warriors for life often find less zeal for it after the baby is born. Assistance for the poor, for mothers, for babies, toddlers, and youth who have too little seem to summon less outrage than the unborn.
They have an answer for that. They easily name in great detail all of the Catholic services offered to mothers in need. Rental assistance, clothes, food, job support, and support for childhood development through programs, charity, and advocacy.
I’m impressed by their catalogue of real services, that they care enough to know that it is about more than loving children before they’re born.
While I believe that there are life warriors who are performers, who make a moral ornament of the unborn while failing to bring the same energy to saving the born, I have to acknowledge there are the true believers, those who honestly believe they are stopping genocide, honestly believe they are called to also feed, house, clothe, and support those who need help even after birth.
The victory in this interaction isn’t that I changed their mind or they changed mine. It isn’t that I won any points or lost any. It isn’t that anything in the world moved in their favor or mine.
The victory is that we spoke as friends, not enemies, that we lived the word even when our language didn’t align.
Evil wants us divided. Cynicism wants us to give up on each other. The powers that profit from our hate want us to retreat into our camps and throw stones.
Every time I choose connection over comfort, conversation over contempt, I’m not being nice. I’m refusing to give them what they want.
My biggest reward isn’t overcoming others, it’s overcoming myself.
In that regard, this was a bigger challenge than usual and I’m better for it.
[Shot with Nikon Zf, St. Cloud, MN.]