Here's what I said tonight:
Akeldama -- Meditation at the Beginning of the 40 Days for Life, 2012
· We are at the beginning of the end of what our Jewish older brothers and sisters call the Days of Awe - Yamim Nora'im. When the sun sets, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins.In the days of the Temple a holocaust would be offered, and blood would be poured out to make the temple and the people clean, fit for the company of the God of their Hope.
The shedding of blood: From Cain and Abel long ago to the streets of our cities this very evening, our history bears witness to our deep-rooted impulse to get what we want, what we think we need, by shedding blood. From domestic violence through street fights to wars we have tried again and again to slake our thirst with the blood of others.
It's not working. It has never worked.
The building before which we stand is a bricks and mortar testimony to the failure of shedding blood in pursuit of our desires. And yet it continues! Yet it continues.
How many millions of babies in this country alone? Fifty million? More? Somewhere between two and four per minute since Roe v. Wade?
And does ANYBODY have what he or she wants yet? Clearly not. The bloodshed continues. Yet we do not have what we want, what we think we need.
...
We are in the Days of Awe and on the brink of a day of profound repentance. And it is harvest time. "And I tell you: Lift up your eyes and see how the fields are already white for the harvest!"
Do not mistake! There are those who claim to agree with us, and will then commit murder that murder may cease! They blindly and disastrously seek to do good.
Likewise, in this building lonely, abused, and abandoned mothers blindly and desperately seek the only good they can see. In this building at least some of the staff, by a dreadful error, think they are doing the right thing. On both sides there is a nightmare of error and blindness -- perhaps self-inflicted blindness, but blindness nonetheless.
For we know -- who cannot know? -- that when the killing of a baby is held to be an answer to ANYTHING, something has gone dreadfully wrong, and vision has been lost. (Where there is no vision, the people perish.)
Do not let the scarlet blood blind you to the whiteness of the fields God makes ready for harvest! THESE are the people God sends us to serve. We prayed the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into his harvest. We prayed, and He looked at us and said, "Why not YOU? Why don't YOU go into my fields?"
So, we find that the field of blood is the field of the harvest. "For the Blood is the Life." Sprinkled in "the blood which speaks more eloquently than the blood of Abel", in the blood without the shedding of which "there is no remission", "washed in the blood of the Lamb," we find ourselves to be the laborers sent to harvest the lost and sorrowing, to end the killing, to gather home both victim and killer into the loving arms of the Lord of the harvest.
I will tell you a mystery: The Blood which flows from our Lord's wounds is like the water flowing from the east side of the temple. It starts as a trickle but becomes a mighty river bringing life and sweetness to all around.
You are washed in that blood.
You have bathed in that river.
YOU are called to walk into this scarlet field of blood.Through your love and your prayers God will make it glisten with life and glow with light. We may not see it in our time, but we will see it in HIS time.
The harvest is life, the sickle and the laborers are love. Then give yourself to Love, and put in the sickle, and reap the harvest of Life.