A Moral Quandary, a Logical Impasse

I don't know what else to say.

I come back from the March for Life each time I attend with this same though beating down doors in my mind: this same struggle in my heart and my soul.

I March, I make a stand, I speak out... and then I go home, and it seems business as usual.

The Civil Rights marchers didn't rest. They didn't stop sitting in, riding the buses in defiance, marching in another city when they'd finished with one.

But here I am, having marched in what I believe is a fundamental and vitally important civil rights issue - indeed the most fundamental we have ever faced - here I am, in my living room, in my recliner.

And the stone in my stomach rolls over, and that pervasive question that haunts me every year returns. And I'm still not satisfied I have anything like an answer.

It is something weird, Orwellian. I feel like I must skip into double-think. I try to convince myself instead that it is perhaps Augustinian really. Is this the reality of the spiritual warfare? Does this question bring me really to an unseen a plane of division that makes all the difference...? Is the answer somehow a dual "yes-in-different-ways"?

I find it hard to believe so.

But then, I can't even properly articulate the concern as a question. Instead it is felt in the weight of a logical contradiction. Two statements seem to be equally true and yet seem logically opposed such that both cannot be true.

And here are those statements, those dual realities I must confront every time I return from having Marched for Life and go on with my own life...

Statement one: "If I knew there was a building down the street in which children were brutally being murdered every day, there'd be nothing for it: I literally could not rest, and I'd abandon everything until it was ended."

Statement two: "I do know there is a building down the street in which precisely that is happening. Yet I do rest. I don't abandon everything."

Can both be true? Or must it be that I am a liar with respect to the first, since the second is not conditional but fact?

This is an odd blog post for me because this is where it ends... well, almost.

I don't know the answer. And I want to. And I think many more might feel the same way.

But maybe it isn't a question with an answer. Maybe it is a problem with a solution.

Would we - could we - face that problem and give that solution? I won't even say what it is because I think you, dear reader, can easily enough imagine it. Is this the upshot? Is not another rationale needed, but rather a choice? I ask it humbly, and trembling, because I truly don't know if I have the strength to make that choice.