A reflection on life in light of the Resurrection

This is normally a politics/ current events column, though I have occasionally delved into theological matters here, and I’d like to do so again, this time by backing up from single issues and politics and speaking to one of the most central tenants of my personal belief system: the innate and inalienable worth and equality of all human life.

I want to do this for three primary reasons, touching on the political, the theological and the personal. Politically, we’ve seen life in the news a lot recently, from the March For Our Lives. Theologically, as we Christians celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. And personally, as I very recently laid to rest both my father and his mother, my last living grandparent.

Colloquially I could be, and often am, called “pro-life,” though I feel that label is found wanting in its attempt to encapsulate my beliefs. More properly, I would describe myself as “whole life,” a term taken up by myself and many others in recent history who espouse a more comprehensive ideology on the value of life. The Whole Life Movement advocates for the worth and dignity of all life from conception to natural death and everything in-between. I could provide a laundry list of specific policies that could be included under this umbrella, but suffice it to say that the guiding principle is that all life is of infinite worth, and that wherever lives are found needy and vulnerable, they should be cared for and protected.

This concept is for me no better solidified than in the Gospel, in two different ways. One by means of the incarnation: the act of God, who without leaving all that he is, took upon himself all that we are, that we may partake of through grace what he is by nature. As an Orthodox Christian, this is a central theme in our theology summed up no better than by the fourth century St. Athanasius of Alexandria, “God became man that man might become god.” Far from being some kind of pantheistic notion, this is the ancient Christian teaching that through the Incarnation, and subsequently the Crucifixion and Resurrection, God took on all that it means to be human and filled it with himself, so that there was nowhere in human experience that God is not present, even in death, which He has made a gateway into life through his Resurrection, and through our own pain, struggles and death we are, if guided by the grace of God and illumined by his radiance, made one with him unto eternal life. This holy struggling is also central to our faith and spiritual practice, and this constant struggling and death to our own self, our own desires, and our own faults is what salvation is all about, a refining of our souls like gold by fire.

Secondly in the Gospel this is shown by the commandments and beatitudes of Christ. He constantly tells us blessed are the poor, the meek, the hungry and thirsty. He commands us to love our neighbors and sacrifice for them, up the point of in his parable of the Last Judgment, which we read in the Orthodox Church just before Lent where we are judged based on how we have treated the hungry, the naked, the prisoner, the sick and the stranger. It is not about how much we prayed or how strictly we fasted or how often we were in church or how often we read the Scriptures. For Christians these are all invaluable and indispensable things, for sure, but all is a means to an end: to become by grace what God is by nature. That same God who emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and giving to us all that he is, even enduring the death of the cross for our sake, out of humility and selfless love for the other.

We must know, something that is often forgotten by modern Christianity, that God does not save us from the cross, but it is through the cross that we are saved, and unless we drink of the same cup as him, and are baptized with the same baptism as him, then we have no part in him. We are not saved from the cross, but through it, and that is the joyful and martyric path of the Christian. It is the way set before us, steep and narrow, that leads to life.

And so, those are my thoughts for this month. A reminder of the selfless love of Christ and an exhortation to give and sacrifice for those around us. To honor their lives, to honor their struggles, and to sacrifice our own selves for our neighbors until it hurts, and then a little more. This is the way of the cross, which Christ commands us to take up and follow him. BEN AMIS