Advent III

Advent III / The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Zephaniah 3:14-18a; Isaiah 12; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:10-18

This is the first in a series of homilies.

Advent is a season of human conceptions, pregnancies and births: Mary, John, Jesus, and the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem. This Third Sunday of Advent is also the Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe. A unique image of a woman of mixed race: Aztec and Spanish, indigenous and colonizer; bronze and olive skinned who is pregnant and poor. She embodies so many of the critical issues and paradoxes of our present day society.

With the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case centering on a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks except “in medical emergencies or for severe fetal abnormality” and provides no exceptions in cases of rape and incest,the issues of abortion and the status of Roe v. Wade again fill the print media with articles, editorials and opinions.

It is apparent that though Roe v. Wade may be considered judicially settled law it is far from resolved in society. Can a society as vast as ours come to an agreement on such a sacred, complex, philosophical, intimate, theological, personal and human issue? In our hyper–politicized culture in which the Supreme Court itself has been and is seen as politicized, my fear is that the prime victims of this controversy will be truth and justice.

I realize that I am walking on very unstable and volatile ground because I speak from the position of being a male, a celibate male, a person who has not or ever will be pregnant, and representing a religious community that is seen by society and even members of the Church as becoming an ever more irrelevant voice in the public sphere. Our moral teaching, nuanced after centuries of reflection on the human condition, and our episcopal teaching authority have been shackled by the clerical sexual scandal and its cover up. Whatever truth we may have to offer is irrelevant. Our society is about optics and perceptions.

Hampered as I am, my role as a priest is to  reflect and proclaim the Gospel, in season and out of season, whether anyone listens or not, whether I stumble, misunderstand or are misunderstood, or am blinded by my own biases.

Abortion is a very complex experience, the ending of a human life. I would dare to say, most people on all sides of the argument would agree that the decision to have an abortion is not easy nor desired.

A striking aspect about the debate over abortion is how little abortion itself is actually debated. The subject of abortion, as with so many issues today, has been weaponized and politicized: women v. men, blue v. red, liberal v. conservative, pro v. anti. And the assumption that the opposing side is always acting with hidden motives and in bad faith close off any prospect for authentic dialogue. In this construct there is no middle ground. It is, in a mean spirited way, winner take all.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, does that mean we win? Is it about winning? And what will we have won?

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, does that mean there will be no more abortions? Or as Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has suggested rape will disappear?

If Roe v. Wade is overturned… What will it mean? Fifty separate legislative proceedings in State Houses and a patchwork of law that will continue to pit us against each other?

Pope John XXIII and today, Pope Francis advocate for persuasion. The art of persuasion begins with respect for the other person. There must be on our part the presumption of a willingness to understand the experience of the other person grounded in active listening. Active listening is giving full attention to the other person without creating our rebuttal. It is not about convincing the opposing side that they are wrong and we have the whole truth but engaging them in the search for truth together. It is a difficult, spiritual, compassionate work.

This engagement must include the voices of women’s experiences who bear the disproportionate burden of pregnancy, so often alone, filled with fear and under the contemptuous eye of judgement and shame. Add to that, race and poverty and you have a very complex mixture. And like the passage in John’s Gospel concerning the woman caught in the very act of adultery, the man is often absent from the story.

How often is sex simply using another person for self–gratification or power over another and then discarding them as an object? I know this personally from the stories of young men, good men, who treat sex as a game and thus women as objects but not realizing they themselves are often being used as objects too. So before we accuse women of discarding a human life, we had better acknowledge how many women have first been discarded by men and society.

The art of persuasion begins with active listening.

It was early morning on her 10th birthday when Michele’s father, a respected member of the community, a successful businessman and adored by family and friends raped her. It would not be the last time.

Merritt wrote, “I got pregnant with [my son] when I was 19, a month before I graduated from college. Yes, it can be easy to love a child, if you’re ready, and you want to, and you have a lot of help and resources. But to imagine that the innocence of the baby is enough, on its own…to always overcome all challenging circumstances is taking a mighty risk with two people’s entire lives.”

Without listening to stories which are difficult to hear, might resonant with unspoken thoughts we have had and not admitted to or trigger memories of our own experiences there can be no movement forward,  truth will not be discovered and justice will not be experienced.

And though I’ve seemingly dismissed men earlier as absent and irresponsible, we need to listen to their stories as well; stories of fear, cultural pressures over identity and sex, rape, loneliness, poverty, racism and lack of direction. Abortion is not solely a women’s issue. It is a human issue.

As to Michele and Merritt, you can read their full stories in articles on our website.

As to the Church, without first listening to the very human experiences of women and men, do we have “good news” to offer people of our time? How can we Catholic Christians express ourselves persuasively to a secular world? What vocabulary do we need to use that will be heard by believer and non-believer?

The language of condemnation is not of Jesus as he helped up from the ground the woman caught in adultery. The language of condemnation, shame and guilt was reserved by Jesus and the Hebrew prophets only for the self–righteous.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is a series of paradoxes. She is both Virgin and Mother. She is a particular woman and yet every woman. She is mixed race of the opposed and oppressor. She is a vulnerable human being imbued with the dynamic power of the divine. Guadalupe is Advent enfleshed because she is pregnant like so many women before and after her.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pregnant, discarded, and poor, pray for us as we search in the dark for a lighted path together.