When this journey is embraced, the path leads us directly to the foot of the Cross, where the redemptive blood of Christ was spilled forth to redeem the sins of the world and to promise everlasting life. By Sunday everyone in Rachel’s Vineyard experiences the mystery and joy of resurrection. Healing happens through the voice of forgiveness from God, self, and one’s aborted child. We find meaning by reenacting the Scriptures with our own history and pain. Once the grief has been emptied, there is room for grace.
On this anniversary of 9/11, we pray for all those in our country and throughout the world at war, whose lives have been shattered by violence. And we also pray today for all those who have lost a child to abortion, for those who have lost a grandchild, and for those who lost a brother or sister to an abortion. We lift up the abortion providers in our communities, that they might use their gifts and talents to support non-violent solutions to unplanned pregnancy, and surrender their crusade for death. And we pray for all of those who work in post-abortion ministries, that they may persevere, in the slums of the soul, to offer comfort, compassion, and reconciliation for those who live in shame, fear, despair and guilt, that they may experience the restoration of human dignity and authentic forgiveness that comes only from God.
Let us not become overwhelmed or discouraged by the politics, the institutions, and the laws that perpetrate this damage. For love reveals truth. Let us show God’s mercy, let us reflect His forgiveness, and let us reach out to those who mourn. Let us expend our energy with courage over the next two months to elect candidates and judges who will affirm the dignity and the protection of human life.
Theresa Burke is the founder of Rachel's Vineyard Ministries.
Never before has America struggled so deeply to understand its wound and find a way to transform its pain through genuine grieving, sympathy and support for all those who lost loved ones in the tragedy of September 11th. My friend Kathy sent me an e-mail shortly after the disaster struck. She wrote: “As I was watching the prayer service telecast from Washington’s National Cathedral, one pastor spoke and quoted the Bible verse from Jeremiah: Rachel mourns for her children, and she refuses to be consoled — because her children are no more.”
Kathy found that chillingly appropriate, since that quote is so often used by the pro-life movement and post-abortion ministries regarding the unspeakable sorrow and trauma of countless mothers and fathers who have fallen victim to the lie and deception of abortion.
Television memorials and documentaries replay the events and the sad personal stories of September 11th. On this anniversary, the memory is still etched deeply into our collective consciousness. Although grass and empty, barren space now replaces the powdery smoke-clouded rubble of the Twin Towers, we can reflect on the many women and men whose own lives have been struck by an even more personal and intimate terror, and whose structure of self collapsed swiftly in the aftershock.
Our nation knows, beyond all doubt, that the horror of September 11th was indeed the height of evil. Completely unaware and innocent people were literally thrown from exploding buildings that only moments before held them safely inside. We must work in this political season of upcoming elections to make our nation’s leaders aware of another very insidious terror, which is still occurring every day under the guise of “freedom.” Thousands and thousands of innocent children are literally being thrown from the safety of their mother’s womb — and those mothers and fathers are absolutely crumbling in the aftermath of the destruction. “I know,” Kathy writes, reflecting on the pain of her own abortion, “because I’ve been there.”
As our country engages in the final months of the upcoming election, we must be mindful and vigilant to help government officials become aware of the destruction that has been embraced by our own culture. Abortion has fostered the oppression of women and has targeted the child in the womb for destruction — a sudden, unspeakable loss of life and love.
We understand all too well the threat to the safety of families at a time of unplanned pregnancy. Many of our readers know from firsthand experience what it feels like. They had no one to offer a candle of hope to reconcile fears into an alternative plan for life instead of death. In the brief seconds before a woman goes in to abort her child, there is no security checkpoint to ensure that she does not board the jetting flight to disaster and heartache.
Yet the “business” of abortion is given free reign to flourish undisturbed by truth. There are no security watchmen. There are no questions asked as you check in.
I have learned that this truth has a vile way of reappearing in the lives of many women who were denied the truth by their community, by the mental health professionals who promote abortion as a simple solution to unplanned pregnancy.
Can you imagine for a moment if after the attack on America, there was no one that the grieving victims of the World Trade Center attack could turn to? My friend Pat, who is very active with Rachel’s Vineyard in the New York area, was on the 78th floor of Building One. She escaped. But she had to step over dead bodies and body parts on her path to safety. She lost her shoes and walked through broken glass on the streets of NYC. She was one of the people who had to answer the phone calls in her office from desperate family members looking for their loved ones who never came home. In the loss of precious friends and family we are still grieving. You see, the pain of death lingers with us, and traumatic deaths are even harder to integrate into our sense of self, our personal and social histories.
We’ve all heard those traumatized tell their stories. We’ve read of the extraordinary stories of human compassion from NYC and the surrounding area. We are comforted to know the folks who faced such horror might be healed of their suffering.
To be a witness to death and the form of traumatic and purposeful violence is a shocking experience. Post-abortive women and men know all too well this trauma. They know what its like to have their hearts ripped out of their chests, suddenly. They know what it’s like to spend years trying to block out the pain and forget. Yet we must never forget, for that’s how we stop history from repeating itself. There is always a path of destruction when a choice is made for death.
After 9/11 there was a multi-billion-dollar effort to locate the bodies of those who perished beneath the concrete and iron rubble of the World Trade Towers. Why all this effort and expense? As a society we recognize the need to draw closure to traumatic situations. We recognize that apart from the clues about how all this could have happened, the families need a body to bury, a corpse to honor, a figure to emphasize the finality of the loss, a means to focus their grief.
Women and men who have aborted have the same need. The decision to abort is often made in fear and crisis, or it is forced by circumstances as a casualty of the situation. Like a bomb, it explodes abruptly — and there are few who want to help them sift through the wreckage. The mother who carried a baby beneath her heart, a heart that broke when she suffered the loss of her child through abortion, needs our love and compassion. The rebuilding of the emotional, physical and spiritual destruction caused by abortion will go on for many years, however, in the midst of this passion lies hope.
Rachel’s Vineyard offers a profound process of grief work, with rituals and exercises which allow the soul to speak its pain, to experience Christ in an intimate and undeniable way as we enter the paschal mystery of our own lives. By uniting our suffering with the passion of Christ, we travel the very path of Calvary. We reveal the buried feelings of grief and loss and experience the pain, the agony, the passion, and journey with Christ into the agony of our own gardens. We remember Good Friday when we lost children to abortion after betrayals and abandonment, left to suffer a crucifixion experience — the tragic and violent death of a child, and in this process we recognize the loss and grieve fully, struggling to find meaning.
