Nuala O’Loan
Photo: EY 
The View
I have always found the New Year to be a very poignant time. The old year always seems very precious, as I remember wonderful moments and recall again those who have left us to go home to the Father who loves us all. The New Year seems but a moment yet to come, with all its hopes and challenges.
To me, rather than being a moment for New Year resolutions, laudable though those undoubtedly are, it is a moment to recollect and ponder upon those whom we hold dear and what it is that motivates us as we look into the coming year. What are our values at this moment?
What are the things for which we are prepared to fight? What is it that will cause us to lay aside our own interests in the cause of others and of the Christ who died to save us? What really matters to us?
It is not easy as we contemplate a world which seems to be leaving us behind. A world in which even that most precious of gifts, human life is no longer sacred. A world in which, contrary to the values of centuries, the life of the unborn child has become dispensable, if the existence of that child is a cause of some perceived distress or is unwelcome or unwanted, regardless of his or her innate humanity- of the fact that he or she was created by God with infinite love, for a purpose which may now never be known.
Challenge
Those who would challenge the view that a woman’s right to choose trumps absolutely the right to life of her unborn child, are perceived as lacking compassion, as being uncaring and judgemental.
Few are those now who care for that little baby nestling snuggly in its mother’s womb, and who now believe that it has a right to life like every other human being, despite the obligations willingly assumed by the signatories to the International Convention on the Rights of a Child which proclaims that a child should be protected even in the womb. Both Ireland and the UK are signatories to that convention.
The inevitable next step is the move to euthanasia or assisted suicide. Again, the language of compassion and love will be used by those who seek to assure us that we can be God: that as we have the right to decide who should be born, so we also have a right to decide when we should die, and indeed, sometimes, when others should die.
There are countries in which the parents of a terminally sick child, or the children of an old, possibly demented, person can decide that they have had their day, that it is time now for them to die, that it is unkind and wrong to allow them to live out their lives as peacefully and with such dignity as is possible.
Those decisions, once made, cannot be unmade. Just as there are many women, and indeed men, who now who grieve for their children, aborted but much missed, so there will, inevitably, be those who make the choice for the death of others, or even their own death which they can never undo, and which they may always regret.
In the Netherlands recently a woman with amnesia who had decided that she wanted her life to be terminated in given circumstances resisted when those circumstances materialised. Despite that, she was held down as an injection was administered to kill her.
This is a world in which the rich are becoming richer and the poor, poorer. Ireland has over 4,000 homeless children”
Her killing was held not to be unlawful since she had previously made the decision to allow others to kill her. This is the brave new world which is encroaching on us. We could choose to fight it. The indicators are that our people will not do so.
There is a new concept abroad. There are those who describe themselves as being ‘woke’ and, they say are alert to and condemnatory of injustice and inequality. However, the ‘woke’ seem to accept only their definition of what is to be accepted as comprising justice and equality.
We live in very dangerous times, when there is evolving an accepted articulation of what is justice and equality, and a perceived right to condemn those who do not accept that rhetoric. It appears that our world is losing the capacity to ponder things in its heart, as Mary pondered the wondrous things that happened to her. Rather than pondering, than seeking to identify and consider all the arguments in depth, and then analysing those arguments in the light of all that is known, there seems to be a growing acceptance that that which is argued as being compassionate and caring, such as abortion and euthanasia or assisted suicide, and which appears to be immediately appealing and easier for society as a whole, is what is right.
Displaced people
This is a world in which the rich are becoming richer and the poor, poorer. Ireland has over 4,000 homeless children. Like the baby Jesus whose parents had to flee as displaced people, babies are being born into homelessness. The governments, north and south, are not concentrating their energies on this injustice, this inequality. These children are voiceless. So many of their parents are unable, despite their best attempts, to provide a home for their little ones.
It is as though we are being led, unresisting, into darkness.
The time has surely come to pause and reflect, to ponder on what is happening, and for all those who celebrate the gift of life in all its manifestations, who believe that life is God-given and to be cherished, to make their voices heard in the cause of life.
What can I do, what can you do to be a voice for the voiceless, so that each of those children is not just “an infant crying in the night, an infant crying for the light, and with no language but a cry”?
Humanity
Our humanity and our faith surely demand that we become, each of us, a force for good in a world dominated by expediency and pragmatism, rather than justice, equality and love.
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” (St Teresa of Avila)
