Frederick Buechner on Abortion

SPEAKING AGAINST abortion, someone has said, “No one should be denied access to the great feast of life,” to which the rebuttal, obviously enough, is that life isn’t much of a feast for the child born to people who don’t want it or can’t afford it or are one way or another incapable of taking care of it and will one way or another probably end up abusing or abandoning it.

And yet, and yet. Who knows what treasure life may hold for even such a child as that, or what a treasure even such a child as that may grow up to become? To bear a child even under the best of circumstances, or to abort a child even under the worst—the risks are hair-raising either way and the results incalculable.

How would Jesus himself decide, he who is hailed as Lord of Life and yet who says that it is not the ones who, like an abortionist, can kill the body we should fear but the ones who can kill body and soul together the way only the world into which it is born can kill the unloved, unwanted child (Matthew 10:28)?

There is perhaps no better illustration of the truth that in an imperfect world there are no perfect solutions. All we can do, as Luther said, is sin bravely, which is to say (a) know that neither to have the child nor not to have the child is without the possibility of tragic consequences for everybody yet (b) be brave in knowing also that not even that can put us beyond the forgiving love of God.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Motherhood, a Caravan of Complications

The life I have chosen as wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications. … It involves food and shelter; meals, planning, marketing, bills, and making the ends meet in a thousand ways. … It involved health; doctors, dentists, appointments, medicine, cod-liver oil, vitamins, trips to the drugstore.

It involves education, spiritual, intellectual, physical; schools, school conferences, car-pools, extra trips for basketball or orchestra practice. … It involves clothes, shopping, laundry, cleaning, mending, letting skirts down and sewing buttons on.

It involves friends, my husband’s, my children’s, my own, and endless arrangements to get together; letters, invitations, telephone calls and transportation hither and yon. …

My mind reels with it. What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. …

This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. …

The problem of the multiplicity of life not only confronts the American woman, but also the American man. And it is not merely the concern of the American as such, but of our whole modern civilization.

– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Wife of Charles Lindbergh

Gift from the Sea

What a Child Knows

 

A child has not made up his mind yet about what is and what is not possible. He has no fixed preconceptions about what reality is; and if someone tells him that the mossy place under the lilac bush is a magic place, he may wait until he thinks that no one is watching him, but then he will very probably crawl in under the lilac bush to see for himself.

A child also knows how to accept a gift. He does not worry about losing his dignity or becoming indebted if he accepts it. His conscience does not bother him because the gift is free and he has not earned it and therefore really has no right to it. He just takes it, with joy. In fact, if it is something that he wants very much he may even ask for it. 

And lastly, a child knows how to trust. It is late at night and very dark and there is the sound of sirens as his father wakes him. He does not explain anything but just takes him by the hand and gets him up, and the child is scared out of his wits and has no idea what is going on, but he takes his father’s hand anyway and lets his father lead him wherever he chooses into the darkness. 

Frederick Buechner

The Magnificent Defeat