Cleansing

A commenter known as Normal_Guy (now CamoCoyote) offers up pregnancy due to rape as a justification for aborting the child.  He writes:

Being raped is offensive enough. Carrying the consequence to term is extending the offense. A woman cleans herself physically, symbolically and emotionally after she is raped. Aborting a pregnancy as a consequence of rape is more of the same. I find it difficult to believe there are people that would insist their daughter, sister, mother or wife should give birth to a baby resulting from being raped???

I believe the count is at 54 million unborn lives snuffed out legally since Rowe v Wade. How many were the comprehensive "cleansings" prescribed by the Normal_Guy? Pregnancy from rape is quite rare, let's over-estimate and say 50,000. Under Normal_Guy thinking, we justify an industry that performs at least 999 killings for every 1 rationalized cleansing. Put in other words, each of these rape victims are "cleansed" with the blood of 1000 children -- including the blood of her own child. And somehow we assume that post-19th century rape victims with-child fare better with their abortion option than enduring women in the same situation for the many centuries before. Because the society of this age has no concept of sharing pain and carrying the burden of victims communally, it multiplies the horror onto others. People think this cycle of violence is only found in war and terror; think again.  For the sake of approximately 50 thousand pregnancies from sexual assault, Americans have snuffed out 54 million innocent lives so far.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Comment to Evolution and Original Sin by Nathan O'Halloran, SJ

Nathan's summary of Teilhard's ponderings on original sin is very informative. It should be mentioned that in Teilhard's time (the early 20th century), his writings on theology were extensively muzzled by Church authorities. Pope Benedict is recognizing Teilhard's insights nearly a century late (better late than never). The Augustinian/Pauline notion of how Adam's single "gotcha" disobedience taints us all has never resonated with me -- it simplifies human creation with rigidly logical dualism. I do not reject the standard original sin doctrine, I sense it to be thoroughly incomplete.


Why not embrace Teilhard's notion that humanity was created with a profound potential for sin and separation from its Creator. "In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss . . . ." The building material for man, earthen clay, seems imbued with a great potential for darkness, although it certainly need not develop in a dark way.

Adam and Eve, the prototype original humans, were persuaded to indulge a yearning to be like gods themselves and so they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and bad, their eyes were opened, and suddenly they became so self-conscious and self-absorbed that they perceived a shame in their nakedness. An ego-centered, comparing mind that sees everything as good or bad, better or worse, worthy of envy or worthy of disdain, takes root in mankind. Life is no longer perceived as a unified harmony, and becomes something commenced in pain, lived in toil and surrendered in death and bodily decay. Adam and Eve's legacy is that each succeeding generation embraces life in this fallen way -- it is taught and reinforced by example, again and again and again. We quickly forget and abandon the unified harmony that enveloped us in utero and in infancy.

Part of the Good News is that this fallen way can be unlearned, and part of the notion of being born again is learning to perceive God's unified harmony and learning to keep the judging ego in check. Our Lord provides a great gift with his Parable of the Prodigal Son. It seems that until we descend and humbly surrender like the prodigal son, we tend to live like the prodigal's brother, in a hard-hearted delusion of virtue.

Teilhard led a life filled with great triumphs and great difficulties. It is interesting that the importance of his observations of conditions from a century ago have great relevance and recognition now.