For Samuel and Josiah

Joe Carter has asked for posts reflecting on "Judeo-Christian morality in an ethically pluralistic society." You know better than to come to me for a discussion of public policy or politics; nevertheless, I have something to say about Joe's topic.

Twice we have had friends who faced devastating news. One couple came to church in tears, reporting that their unborn child had no brain. Another couple called to tell us their unborn child had no hands, and a hernia in his diaphragm that was allowing his stomach to move into his chest, inhibiting lung development.

I remember asking the husband of the first child, "Could the tests be wrong? How certain is this?"

"The tests aren't wrong," he said, his face grim. "There's no doubt. My son has no brain."

In both situations the fetal defects were certain, and untreatable. In both situations the parents were told that their child would survive the remaining months until birth, but die shortly thereafter.

Should they abort?

Neither did. Though there was no hope of reprieve, none, each woman carried her baby more than four months, to term.

I was younger then, though no younger than those two women were, and although I opposed abortion on principle, I couldn't fathom how they survived those pregnancies.

How do you carry a child in your womb, nurturing it, feeling it grow and move inside of you, simultaneously experiencing the miracle of life and the despair of death? How do you live through pregnancy's season of joy and hope, when there is no hope? How do you explain to your daughter--and each couple had a toddler daughter--how do you explain that Mommy is having a baby and the baby is going to die?

Somehow, they did it. Somehow they carried those babies to term, went through the pain of labor, held their sons in their arms, and said goodbye with their breasts dripping milk, their wombs aching.

The anencephalic child had part of his brain stem, and lived two or three months, longer than expected. He wore a little cap to hide his exposed brain tissues, and his parents changed his dressings regularly, but eventually an infection set in and he died. His name was Samuel.

The other child was born with a host of defects, and lived only an hour or two--not long, but long enough to be held, and his unblemished face photographed, for which his parents are unspeakably grateful. His name was Josiah.

Such griefs are beyond description, beyond my fathoming.

But amazingly, the young parents weren't destroyed by their experiences. They weren't cheated by "putting their lives on hold" while they waited for someone else's death. They were living their lives, for life includes waiting for death, and--I don't know how else to describe this--in doing so, they were glorified. They trusted God, and he shone through their suffering, illuminating them, illuminating us with our fears, our lines drawn in the sand, the places beyond which most of us would not go and still call Him good.

They drew no lines in the sand. And they found that His goodness is everywhere.

But their actions were, according to most of our country, insane. Carry an irrevocably damaged baby to term? Whatever for? Why not abort the thing, clear your womb, make room for another pregnancy, a healthy baby.

Fortunately for them, abortion was only suggested, not forced. But the days when it will be required are, I suspect, coming. Already we read about HMOs paying to abort babies with cystic fibrosis, while refusing to cover medical care for them after birth; we read about civilized countries killing disabled infants after birth, even babies whose defects are not terminal or even painful, but simply inconvenient. Already doctors talk about "futile care," stopping therapy, removing feeding tubes, "euthanizing" the aged, the disabled, the ill, the injured, the senile; expanding the categories of uselessness wherever difficulties, suffering, or complications encroach upon our simple "right" to unencumbered happiness.

Soon, if we follow the path the western world--and our own country--is taking, we will not be allowed to suffer. For "our own good" we will be put out of our misery, and our loved ones will be put out of their misery, and everyone's lives will be sanitized and anesthetized and no one will hurt, no one will hold the hand of someone who is hurting, no one will be transformed, no one will glimpse the heart-wrenching glory of the cross or know the joy, the fearlessness, the triumph of the empty tomb.

It's understandable, this sea change. Fewer and fewer of our countrymen are Christians, and people who don't believe in the resurrection have no reason to embrace the cross. As philosophers from Dorothy Sayers to Francis Schaeffer have pointed out, of all the ethical systems in the world, only Christianity says that good comes, not despite suffering, but through it.

But today many Christians aren't waiting to be forced to take the easy road that our country's competing ethical systems urge. We're choosing it ourselves. We're choosing to assimilate, anesthetize, secularize, sanitize, rationalize. We're choosing to sedate ourselves, lest we feel pain.

Instead of choosing to face death, we're choosing to live it.

So when we think about the place of Judeo-Christian morality in an ethically pluralistic society, we must not only think about the things that other ethical systems agree are good--fewer teenage pregnancies, fewer divorces, fewer abortions, fewer homeless people; we must not only think about the goals and successes we want to achieve.

We also must think about what we want to suffer. This is not easy, for not one of us likes pain. But if we don't guard our right to suffer and our willingness to suffer--if we treat Christianity only as an effective social system, something bright and shiny, good public policy--then we're missing the point of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, and we deserve to have our emasculated, secularized system challenged, undermined, and finally replaced.

For Judeo-Christian ethics are good for society, yes. But in their truest form--the form we should be most concerned about conserving--they're good for the soul.